BE:
-the divinely inspired Matthew and Luke did not repeat it is pretty
-good evidence that God had second thoughts about Mark 16.18.
 >Ah.  "Second thoughts".  Got it AFU the first time, eh?
>There is even good support for this from the Bible itself - where
>Paul writes "let every fact be established by two or three
>witnesses", being also found as part of the Law of Moses (and
>therefore fits the rule in itself); and implies that for every
Could you please provide citations when you quote?
When you omit the citation, the reader is entitled to interpret
your quote as your words, notwithstanding your quote marks.  The
standards of crossreferencing among us are much higher than those
used in the Bible.
>facet of the scripture - whether it is to be rendered more or
>less reliable, must be stated twice or three times to _establish_
>it as reliable or important, as each instance is considered a
>"witness" to it.
Well, I really wonder whether Paul thought mere instances were
witnesses.
The criterion of multiple attestation used by modern critical
scholars does not refer to multiple INSTANCES, but rather multiple
AUTHORS.  And the content expressed by the wording has to be
pretty closely the same.  Many critical scholars assume, in
addition, that the second attestation must not be merely a COPY of
the first.  There is already a huge critical literature on the New
Testament in which scholars have noted how Matthew and Luke, in
many passages, DIRECTLY COPIED text out of Mark, thus showing that
Matthew and Luke both had Mark's text in front of them when they
did their own writing.
A person who merely copies somebody else's text does not act as an
independent witness to the facts attested.  Rather he merely
commits plagiarism (unless he actually shows by his syntax that he
is quoting the first author).
But, where two different authors tell the same story without
copying from one another, there is a strong presumption that they
reflected independent sources of the same facts.  This is
especially important where there is collateral evidence that the
two authors in question did their writing independently of one
another, as did the authors of Matthew and Luke.  For this reason,
critical scholars tend to consider content agreement between
Matthew and Luke to be considerably more significant as multiple
attestation of facts about Jesus than multiple instances of text
between Mark and Matthew or between Mark and Luke separately.
Since the end of the last century, these Matthew/Luke multiple
attestations (without attestation by Mark) have come to be called
Quelle or Q for short.  They amount to evidence that Matthew and
Luke got some of their ideas from a lost source, possibly much
earlier than Mark.  Because the wording agreement in Quelle is
very far from being exact notwithstanding the high content
agreement, there is also the possible inference that this lost
source was NOT a written document, but rather a series of oral
traditions.  This fact increases the reliability of Quelle as
indicating that the stories and sayings which appear in it really
do reflect facts about Jesus.
Significantly, nothing of what is metaphysically controversial
about the Gospels (such as the resurrection, appearances,
ascension, etc) is found in Quelle.  On the other hand, much of
what is found in Quelle is also found in the Gospel of Thomas, a
recently discovered non-canonical gospel.  Thomas, therefore,
COULD be Q.
For example, in the Gospels there is one probable attestation of
the story of the Ascension, occurring right at the end of Luke.
The instance of this given in Acts 1.9 does not count as a
separate witness, since Acts and Luke were probably written by the
same person (most critical scholars refer to Acts as
'Luke-Acts').  The ascension story, of course, is not found in
Quelle, and is therefore probably a mere invention by the author
rather than a report of facts which he heard about or observed.
Bob
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