Faith done gone.

Courts of law have been busy recently deciding where plagiarism and piracy stop and creativity and originality begin in the literary world. In this country a sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was tied up in court earlier this year while judges decided if The Wind Done Gone violated copyright laws. And in France a sequel to Victor Hugo's Les Miserables caused commotion. Francois Ceresa's Cosette ou le temps des illusions (Cosette or the Time of Illusions) had the author's great-great-grandchildren agitating for suppression of this new novel.

What's all the excitement about?

Retelling or extending stories past their original incarnations is at the heart of storytelling. It has a long and noble history. Some of Geoffrey Chaucer's stories in his Canterbury Tales look surprisingly similar to Giovanni Boccaccio's stories in the Decameron. William Shakespeare himself freely borrowed from many works as he created some of the world's best literature.

What about the gospels? Are Mark and Luke knockoffs of Matthew? And how much did the Gospel of John, the last of the four to be written, rely on previous gospels? Were the gospel writers guilty of pirating and plagiarizing their material? Might they too have found themselves in the courts had Jesus arrived on the scene 2,000 years later than he did?

The traditional arrangement of the gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--was based on the now outdated theory that Mark was a shortened version of Matthew, a kind of Reader's Digest or Cliff Notes edition. Contemporary biblical scholars generally agree that the Gospel of Mark came first, probably sometime around 70 A.D. The Gospels of Luke and Matthew then followed, both written in the decade of 80 A.D., but in two different places. John's Gospel straggled in close to the year 100 A.D.

It gets even more complicated. Enter the Q source (from Quelle, German for source). According to biblical scholars, both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke relied on a source that the Gospels of Mark and John did not know about. No one has yet found a manuscript of the Q source, but scholars have done a probable reconstruction of this document based on careful studies of the gospels.

The Gospel of Mark sometimes gets credit for developing a unique literary genre imitated by Matthew and Luke. But some biblical scholars now think that the literary structure of the gospels imitated a form of ancient "novel" already present in the Greek world of their time. But this tag novel is problematic because the term developed in 18th-century England to name a work of fiction of extraordinary length. I would probably vote for short story to best describe the gospel genre, but this label has its problems as well.

So discovering both the varied sources of the four gospel books in the Bible and their literary genre is a lot more complicated than trying to figure out if The Wind Done Gone or Cosette ou le temps des illusions are poaching on the original novels. Courts of law would need the wisdom of Solomon to ferret out what today might be termed plagiarism and piracy within the Bible.

Me, I think I'll just go and read a novel.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.