Pete's Blog

The other day I was listening to an informal debate between a nonchristian and a Christian over alleged contradictions in the Bible. In it, the atheist said that if Matthew really was an eyewitness of Jesus, he wouldn't have needed Mark's account of Christ in order to write his own.

This assumes Markan priority, that is that Mark's was the first of the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) written, and that Matthew and Luke base their gospels on Mark.

Suppose it's true (and it might be, see below). Put yourself in Matthew's shoes. He has Mark's gospel, which was written for Gentiles in Rome, in his hands, and he wants to write something to tell the Jews in Palestine about Jesus. They probably haven't read Mark's gospel (otherwise he wouldn't have needed to write his own), so he starts with the first gospel and adds to it. Matthew was an eye witness of Jesus so he knew that the material in Mark was authentic. Why re-invent the wheel?

Indulge yourself in an illustration. Suppose you are a student in a campus ministry. You've been on a summer project before, and you think you'll go again. You know, though, that one of your friends already sends his supporters a somewhat regular update email.

Much to your excitement, you and he just saw someone come to faith and get baptized. In your excitement, you really want to tell everyone. And you see that your friend's already sent out and update email relating the story to his network. You ask his permission to share it with your network, and he has no problem with it. So you keep his part, and add how you felt throughout the entire event of explaining the Gospel to this new Christian, maybe leaving out of few of the personal details your friend put in his update email. You're more observant than your friend, so you actually add 70% percent more content to the email than what your friend had originally included. You then send it out.

This is pretty similar to what I think happened with Matthew and Mark.

A valid question the skeptic could have asked would be why God included so much redundant material by including three synoptic gospels instead of just one. Why did God inspire His Word this way? It's an interesting question, that's for sure, but it has zero impact on the credibility of either Matthew or Luke.

I don't have any hypotheses as to why God inspired the gospel accounts in this way. But I also don't know why He ordained history in the way it is currently unfolding, and I think He has just as much authorship over the history of the world as He does in the Bible. The point is that there is indeed mystery in the Christian faith, but mystery doesn't invalidate the authenticity of the faith.

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I hold to Markan priority as well. There was a time when I desired for Matthew to be the first synoptic gospel (i.e., Matthean priority), but that was when I was uncomfortable with the Q-hypothesis.

It's been a few years since I abandoned this view, so I don't completely remember how I came to be uncomfortable with the Q-hypothesis. I'll explain what I can remember soon enough, but I'll first explain the Q-hypothesis.

Once you start with Markan priority you need to explain why there is so much overlap in Matthew and Luke that is absent in Mark. You can't really explain this by saying Matthew used Luke or vice versa because they're too dissimilar and there's too much in Matthew that's not in Luke, and there's too much in Luke that's not in Matthew. So you introduce the possibility that there was another source that the two of them relied upon. Called it Q, short for Quelle, German for source. Q can contain more than the overlap in Matthew and Luke that's not in Mark, but it contains at least that much.

So, in summary, Mark wrote a gospel. And someone wrote a document that was a collection of sayings that today we call Q. Matthew and Luke, each writing independently of one another, used both Mark and Q to write their gospels.

I once found this unappealing because I thought that any reliance on an outside document weakened the authenticity of the gospels we have. I don't know where I came up with this thought. It was certainly unjustified.

So, rejecting the Q-hypothesis (again, irrationally), I thought that it was a nifty idea to say that Mark relied on Matthew, and then Luke had access to both. However (not to imply I know Greek), scholars say that Mark has the poorest Greek of the three (maybe of the New Testament) so it's not likely that he relied on either of the others.

Like I said, though, I don't know Greek. So I would need to hear that argument from a scholar.

A friend once told me that he thought it seemed implausible to hold to Matthean priority because you'd expect someone to add to an account, not reduce the account. That made me seriously begin to question whether I could legitimately hold to it.

Then I came across Dan Wallace's work. I'd already been reading his blog (he's an occasional contributor to Parchment and Pen), and I came to respect him because he took a strong stand on the unscriptural nature of John 7:53-8:11, where it seemed like some were giving stances, without defending them, and others weren't talking about it. Since then, he's been super helpful in me forming my views about what the Bible is and how it came into existence. Specifically, his article on the Synoptic Problem was what made me finally decide that I was okay with the existence of Q. I highly recommend the article.