Matthew's other omissions have been accounted for under the omissions common to him with Luke. The sum total of them is very small and in general they are easily accounted for. OMISSIONS MADE BY LUKE IN THE MARCAN NARRATIVE[14] Luke omits the circumstantial account of the death of the Baptist (Mk vi, 17-29); he has long ago inserted the account of his imprisonment (Lk iii, 19-20), wishing to finish with John before beginning with Jesus. "But the circumstantial account did not fit in that place."[15] The longest omission of continuous Marcan material is made by Luke in omitting the whole of Mk vi, 45 to viii, 26. This long omission immediately precedes the long insertion of special Lucan material, indicating a possible difficulty in combining the two sources at this point. Quite without this, however, there are more or less obvious reasons for Luke's omission of every section in this long passage. He avoids[16] the repetition of the same story, and may have regarded Mark's feeding of the four thousand (Mk viii, 1-10) as a repetition of the feeding of the five thousand which Luke has already copied from him. The demand for a sign is a doublet in Matthew; Luke has taken it once with Matthew from Q and therefore does not care to take it with him here again from Mark (Mk viii, 11-13). The dispute about things that defile (Mk vii, 1-23) had no significance for a gentile writer or his gentile readers. As early as his 4th chapter, Luke has represented Jesus as turning from the Jews, who had rejected him, to the gentiles; he cannot therefore use Mark's story of the Canaanitish woman, (Mk vii, 24-30), with its apparently narrow national outlook: "It is not meet to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."[17] The crossing of the lake to Gennesaret has in Mark (vi, 53-56) no particular incident connected with it, merely the statement that many people came to Jesus and were healed. It may have been omitted by Luke because he has a duplicate in viii, 22-25. The omission of this item was no particular loss to Luke's account; but with its omission the incident of the walking on the water also fell out. The latter may have been omitted also because of its implied aspersion upon the disciples. Luke may have been the more ready to drop this, as his interest in the miracles of Jesus is confined more largely to the healings, the miracles peculiar to Luke being entirely of this kind. Luke omitted the discussion of Jesus with the Pharisees about Elias (Mk ix, 9-13) because it had no interest for his gentile readers. The omission of the saying about offenses (Mk ix, 42-48) is accounted for by Luke's having a parallel for the first part of it in another connection; the last part, about cutting off the hand or the foot, may have seemed to him, with his Greek taste, too harsh a saying to be attributed to Jesus.