John's other source

I've been coming around to seeing the mostly-lost Gospel preserved in the Egerton Papyrus as culminating in a Jerusalem Passion Narrative - to use his anticipatory phrase, the "Hour of His Paradosis". It very probably started on "Palm Sunday" (I'll get to what that means) and went up to the Crucifixion. Most of its events link to other Gospels' events which they set in Jerusalem during Jesus' last visit there - where it's his last week there, leading to Passover.

I've put quite a bit of weight on the Egerton fragments. But there remain some lengths to which I cannot stretch it. For a start, although its Jesus does do miracle, I do not find the hypothesised Seven Signs - in fact, there may not have been the space for them. I don't find how long was its "holy week" although I expect it was, despite itself, a week or part of a week. It predicts (I think) a Crucifixion, but no empty tomb; I cannot rule out a straight docetic Ascension as in the hymn Paul quotes in Philippians. Or, er, surat al-ma'ida.

J-W note already pp. 264-6 that the Gospels which we have attest, in effect, to two Jeshuae: one born to the kingdom of David, and the other to a kingdom not of this world but of the Temple. The former confronts the Pharisees; the latter, fatally, the Sadducees. The former is Galilean; the latter preaches in Jerusalem. The former works well with John's Revelation; the latter, with the post-Pauline tractate to the Hebrews. Only the former could forgive temporal debts himself; the latter instead, like Isaiah, could but petition the king, and as Egerton notes, Jesus in the end would not even do that.

Egerton gives us the Jerushalmi Jesus. I could stretch its narrative to the man's raid on the Temple. Relevant to Jacobivici and Wilson - I cannot find the Magdalene in it. Relevant to Powell I cannot find Peter. But it is difficult to imagine a politically-minded Gospel that lacked space for Jesus' most-prominent disciples, of whom Cephas is known to Paul.

As for Jesus before Jerusalem: perhaps John and Mark made use of other material.