Markan priority

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According to the hypothesis of Markan priority, The Gospel of Mark was written first and then used as a source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Markan priority is the hypothesis that the Gospel of Mark was the first written of the three Synoptic Gospels, and that the two other synoptic evangelists, Matthew and Luke, used Mark's Gospel as one of their sources. The theory of Markan priority is today accepted by the majority of New Testament scholars, who also hold that Matthew and Luke used a lost source of Jesus's sayings called Q. Their conclusion is largely based upon an analysis of the language and content relationship between the various books. Some conservative scholars, however, say the Markan priority hypothesis is not consistent with internal evidence and with the testimony of the church fathers.

[edit] History

This subject is closely related to the topic of synoptic gospels, so it may be useful to review that article before reading the following text

Before the eighteenth century, the belief of many, including the Church Fathers Papias (c. 60-130), Irenaeus (c. 130-200), Origen (c. 185-254), Eusebius (c. 260-340) Jerome (c. 340-420), and Augustine of Hippo (c. 354-430), had been that Matthew was the first gospel to be written. Therefore, Matthew is the first gospel to appear in the chronological order of the four gospels in the Second, or New Testament. This traditional view of gospel origins, however, began to be challenged in the late 1700s, when Gottlob Christian Storr (1786) proposed that Mark was the first to be written.

Storr's idea met with little acceptance at the time, with most scholars favoring either Matthean priority, under the traditional Augustinian hypothesis, or the Griesbach hypothesis, or a fragmentary theory. In the fragmentary theory, it was believed that stories about Jesus were recorded in several smaller documents and notebooks and combined by the evangelists to create the synoptic gospels.

Working within the fragmentary theory, Karl Lachmann (1835) compared the synoptic gospels in pairs and noted that while Matthew frequently agreed with Mark against Luke in the order of passages and Luke agreed frequently with Mark against Matthew, Matthew and Luke rarely agreed with each other against Mark. Lachmann inferred from this that Mark best preserved a relatively fixed order of episodes in Jesus's ministry.

In 1838, two theologians, Christian Gottlob Wilke and Christian Hermann Weisse, independently extended Lachmann's reasoning to conclude that Mark not only best represented Matthew and Luke's source but also that Mark was Matthew and Luke's source. Their ideas were not immediately accepted, but Heinrich Julius Holtzmann's endorsement in 1863 of a qualified form of Markan priority won general favor and is still the dominant hypothesis today.

Contemporary scholars who argue for the priority of Mark often point out the following:

Chronologically, Matthew and Luke follow Mark most of the time. When Matthew disagrees with Mark's chronology, Luke often agrees with Mark. When Luke disagrees with Mark's chronology, Matthew will always agree with Mark. Matthew and Luke rarely ever disagree together against Mark. (W. R. Farmer uses this very information to argue for Matthean priority: "The only possible explanation [for this information] under the Markan hypothesis is that Matthew and/or Luke had knowledge of the other's work and consciously chose to support Mark when the other did not."[1]) Additionally, whenever Luke's chronology does not follow Mark's, there are good practical reasons for the deviation while Mark's chronology often represents the more disjointed storyline.
Whenever Mark and Matthew agree, Mark often has a more verbose version. It is argued that it is unlikely that Mark was inserting details into many Matthean quotes while leaving out huge events such as the birth of Jesus.
Mark's Greek is more primitive than the other Gospel writers. Often, Luke or Matthew will state a parallel Jesus quote much more eloquently than Mark.
Mark's Jesus often remarks on contentious issues for the early Christians. For example, Mark's Jesus chastises someone for calling him good stating, "No one is good but God." (Mark 10:18) Matthew, on the other hand, amends the statement to allow the possibility of Jesus' divinity.