Category: Synoptic Problem

God may have created man in his image, but there is a well-known tendency among biblical scholars to re-create Jesus in their own image.

The tendency is particularly notable among skeptical scholars, who feel more free than their conservative counterparts to dismiss or discount Gospel passages that don’t fit their theories.

In writing books on the life of Jesus, they can select, filter, and interpret evidence in a way that allows them to find the kind of Jesus they want—often one that is an idealized form of their own self-image.

Thus a Marxist scholar might read the Gospels and discover a Jesus who is a proto-Marxist revolutionary martyr that led a peasant uprising and fell afoul of the powerful and monied upper classes.

Big surprise.

 

“By their Lives of Jesus ye shall know them”

The tendency is so common that it led the British biblical scholar T. W. Manson to quip, “By their Lives of Jesus ye shall know them” (C. W. Dugmore, ed., The Interpretation of the Bible, 92).

This is a cutting insight about the foibles of biblical scholars, but it’s also something else: an unwitting reflection of what the Gospels might have been called if history had taken a different path.

Manson’s remark turns on the fact that modern scholars tend to write books with titles like The Life of Jesus or The Life of Christ. Search Amazon, and you’ll find multiple books with both titles, as well as variants on them.

And there’s a good reason for that. They are, after all, books about the life of Jesus.

They are, in fact, a specialized kind of biography—not the typical sort of biography that you’ll find in the biography section of a bookstore today. We don’t have the right kind and number of sources about the life of Jesus for that kind of biography to be written. But scholarly Lives of Jesus are nonetheless a form of “life writing” (Greek bios + graphē = “biography”).

The principal sources for modern Lives of Jesus are, of course, the Gospels. And that raises a question: Why aren’t the Gospels called Lives of Jesus?

They are, just like modern Lives of Jesus, about the life of Jesus. They are biographies. Specifically, they fall within the ancient Greek literary genre known as the bios (see Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography).

 

The Names of Ancient Biographies

Given that, we would expect them to have titles like Bios Iēsou (Greek, “Life of Jesus”) or Bios Christou (“Life of Christ”) or some similar variant.

Some ancient biographies were simply referred to by the name of the person who was their subject. Thus in Suetonius’s De Vitis Caesarum (Latin, “On the Lives of the Caesars”) the individual volumes are called “Tiberius,” “Caligula,” “Nero,” etc.

On that model, the Gospels might have been called simply Iēsous, Christos, Iēsous Christos, or a similar variant.

Whichever model would have been used, ancient biographies tended to have the word “life” (Greek, bios; Latin, vita), the name of the subject, or both in their titles.

So why don’t the Gospels?

 

Who Gave Books Their Titles?

Today, authors typically propose titles for their books, but publishers make the final decision. They may overrule the author’s proposal if they think that they have a title which will sell more copies.

In the ancient world, things were different. For one thing, there were no publishing houses. All books were self-published by their authors, which meant that the author could publish a book under any title he wished.

Yet many authors refrained from doing so. Surprising as it may seem, they sometimes released books without titles.

However, if the book proved popular, there needed to be some way to refer to it, and so it ended up getting a title, anyway.

This title was bestowed by those who used the book, such as by the booksellers who had copies made, the librarians who archived it, or the members of the public who read and promoted it.

Even if an author gave his book a title, this could be trumped by the users of the book.

Consequently, a book sometimes was given more than one title.

Yet the Gospels weren’t.

 

What We Don’t Find

It is often claimed that the Gospels circulated for a long time without any titles or authors—that the titles and authors were added at a much later date, perhaps in the second century.

If that is what happened then—as the German scholar Martin Hengel pointed out—we would expect to find copies of the Gospels or other early writings referring to them by multiple titles and authors, and we don’t (see Martin Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark, ch. 3).

Instead, we find them called things like Kata Maththaion, Kata Markon, Kata Loukan, and Kata Iōannēn (“According to Matthew,” “According to Mark,” “According to Luke,” and “According to John,” respectively).

Or we find them called things like Euangelion kata Maththaion (“Gospel According to Matthew”) and the expected variants.

On this model, neither the word “life” (bios) nor the name of the subject (Jesus) appears in the title.

Why not?

 

The Hebrew Scriptures

The books of the Hebrew Scriptures commonly go by different names than we use in English. For example, Genesis is known as Bereshit and Exodus is known as Shemot.

These names are taken from the opening verses of the books.

Bereshit means “in the beginning,” which is famous from the opening verse of Genesis:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1).

Shemot means “names,” which is also taken from the opening verse of Exodus:

These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household (Ex. 1:1).

This may provide the key to which biographies of Jesus are called “Gospels” rather than “Lives” (Greek, bioi) of Jesus.

 

“Gospel” in the New Testament

One of the surprising things about the Gospels is how small a role the word “gospel” actually plays in them.

The term “gospel” (Greek, euangelion) and its verb form “evangelize” (Greek, euangelizō) appear 130 times in the New Testament, and these are broken down as follows:

• Matthew: 5
• Mark: 8
• Luke: 19
• John: 0
• Acts: 17
• Paul’s Letters (Romans-Philemon): 81
• Hebrews: 2
• James’s Letter: 0
• Peter’s Letters (1-2 Peter): 4
• John’s Letters (1-3 John): 0
• Jude’s Letter: 0
• Revelation: 3

As you can see, the terms “gospel/evangelize” are overwhelmingly used by Paul. Though the Gospels are each longer than any of Paul’s letters, the terms are used less frequently in each of them.

 

Renormalizing the Numbers

The above raw occurrences of “gospel” and “evangelize” are instructive, but they are more so when we adjust (or “renormalize”) based on the length of the works in question. To do this, we need to know the number of words in the Greek texts of each of the above sources, which are approximately as follows:

• Matthew: 18,345 (Greek words)
• Mark: 11,304
• Luke: 19,482
• John: 15,635
• Acts: 18,451
• Paul’s Letters (Romans-Philemon): 32,407
• Hebrews: 4,953
• James’s Letter: 1,743
• Peter’s Letters (1-2 Peter): 2,783
• John’s Letters (1-3 John): 2,141
• Jude’s Letter: 461
• Revelation: 9,852

If we divide these word counts by the number of occurrences of the words “gospel” and “evangelize,” we obtain the following results:

• Matthew: 3,669 (Greek words per mention of “gospel/evangelize”)
• Mark: 1,413
• Luke: 1,025
• John: N/A
• Acts: 1,085
• Paul’s Letters (Romans-Philemon): 400
• Hebrews: 2,477
• James’s Letter: N/A
• Peter’s Letters (1-2 Peter): 696
• John’s Letters (1-3 John): N/A
• Jude’s Letter: N/A
• Revelation: 3,284

The entries listed as “N/A” indicate places where the overall word count would have to be divided by zero, because the word “gospel” never occurs in the works in question.

The others indicate how many words of a given text you would need to read in order to (on average) encounter one occurrence of “gospel” or “evangelize.” Thus in Matthew you would need to read around 3,669 words to encounter either of these words.

These averages make it clear that “gospel/evangelize” is one of Paul’s favored terms. You need only to read 400 words by Paul to encounter one of them. They are also favored words of Peter. You’d need to read 696 of his words to encounter one of them.

Among the Gospels and Acts, these terms are favored of Luke, who uses them for about one in a thousand words of his Gospel and Acts. They are slightly less common in Mark, who uses them for one in 1,400 of his words. Matthew uses them much less frequently (one in 3,700 words), and John does not use them at all.

From this we may draw the general lesson that “gospel/evangelize” was a favored term by Paul and Peter, and it was used to a similar but lesser extent by their associates Luke and Mark. Other New Testament authors used them less frequently or not at all.

 

Initial Mentions

For our purposes, the most important thing is not the average number of words per mention of “gospel/evangelize” but how soon the relevant term appears.

If the name “Gospel” was based on the first verse of the work in question, as in the books of the Hebrew Bible, what could be responsible?

Here are the first verses of each Gospel:

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God (Mark 1:1).

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham (Matt. 1:1).

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us (Luke 1:1).

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1).

From this it would seem that only Mark could have served as the origin of the term “Gospel” in the titles, for only he uses it in the first verse of his work.

Even if we expand our scope beyond the first verse, other Gospels would not have been the source. In Matthew, “gospel/evangelize” does not appear until the fourth chapter (Matt. 4:23), in Luke it does not appear until the nineteenth verse (Luke 1:19), and in John it does not appear at all.

The strong suggestion, then, is that the Gospels are called “Gospels” because Mark included this word in his very first verse.

 

The Key to the Name “Gospel”

Does Mark’s first verse hold the key to why we call the original biographies of Jesus “Gospels” rather than “Lives”?

The British scholar B. H. Streeter thought so. He wrote:

The world-wide circulation of Mark affords an easy and natural explanation of what, from the purely linguistic point of view, is the rather curious usage by which the word “Gospel” became the technical name for a biography of Christ. The Greek word euangelion means simply “good news,” and in the New Testament it is always used in its original sense of the good news of the Christian message. Commentators have tried elaborately to trace a gradual evolution in the meaning of the word until it acquired this new usage. No such gradual evolution is necessary, or even probable. Among the Jews it was a regular practice to refer to books, or sections of books, by a striking word which occurred in the opening sentence. That is how Genesis and Exodus derived the titles by which they are known in the Hebrew Bible, i.e. “In the Beginning” and “(these are the) Names.” As soon as portions of Mark were read in the services of the Church—and that would be at once—it would be necessary to have a name to distinguish this reading from that of an Old Testament book. Mark opens with the words archē tou euangeliou, “The beginning of the Gospel.” Archē [Greek, “beginning”] would be too like the Hebrew name for Genesis, so euangelion (nom.) would be an obvious title. When, fifteen or twenty years later, other Lives of Christ came into existence, this use of “Gospel” as a title would be an old-established custom and would be applied to them also. Then it would become necessary to distinguish these “Gospels” from one another-hence the usage to euangelion kata Markon, kata Loukan, the Gospel according to Mark, to Luke, etc. (The Four Gospels, 497-498).

Where Mark Got the Term

According to the above figures, “gospel/evangelize” appears to be Paul’s word. It occurs more frequently in his writings than in other books of the New Testament.

Since Mark was a companion of Paul (see Acts 12:25, 13:5-13), he could have gotten his use of the term from Paul.

However, Mark was only a companion of Paul for a short time, during the First Missionary Journey, and Paul refused to take him on the Second Missionary Journey (see Acts 15:37-39).

This leaves us with the question of whether Mark may have picked up his use of “gospel/evangelize” from Peter. We first learn of Mark when we read that Peter went to the house of Mark’s mother in Jerusalem (Acts 12:12), and later we learn that he was with Peter in Rome (1 Peter 5:13).

Multiple sources among the Church Fathers indicate that Mark served for a long time as Peter’s companion and interpreter, which may mean that he picked up his usage of “gospel/evangelize” from Peter.

Although Paul uses this term most frequently, in a footnote, Martin Hengel writes:

I wonder whether there could not be a Petrine understanding of the term (Studies in the Gospel of Mark, 72 fn. 50).

Based on our renormalization of the references to “gospel/evangelize” with the length of the New Testament sources, Hengel’s suggestion seems a plausible one. Peter/Mark uses the pair of terms almost as often as Paul/Luke, and both pairs uses it much more frequently than other New Testament sources.

This suggests that Mark’s use of the terms may be based on Peter’s. It also suggests, given Paul’s derivative status as an apostle (cf. Gal. 1:18, 2:1-2), that he may have picked up this usage from others—perhaps including Peter—and that he then made it his own in a special way and passed the usage on to Luke.

 

The Titles of the Gospels

However “gospel” found its way into the first verse of Mark, this is very probably the basis on which the other first century biographies of Jesus came to be called “gospels.”

This has implications for the order in which they were written.

As Streeter suggests, if Mark was the first Gospel written and read in the churches, it would have been necessary to give it some form of title to distinguish it from the various Old Testament readings that were already established.

Thus there would need to be an ancient equivalent of the modern liturgical statement:

A reading from the Gospel according to Mark . . .

Even if “according to Mark” had not yet been added due to the lack of other Gospels, a statement like “A reading from the Gospel . . . ” would need to have been used.

When Matthew, Luke, and John were written, the modifiers “according to Matthew/Mark/Luke/John” (kata Maththaion/Markon/Loukan/Iōannēn) then would have been introduced.

However, if one of the others had come first, the use of the term “Gospel” would be difficult to explain.

None of the others include the term “gospel” (euangelion) in their first verse or near it, and it would have been much more likely that the natural term bios (“life”) or the name of the subject, Iēsous, Christos, or Iēsous Christos (“Jesus,” “Christ,” or “Jesus Christ”) would have been used instead.

The best explanation of the data we have is thus that Mark was the first Gospel written and his initial verse, with its term “gospel,” supplied the name of the reading of this work in the liturgy. When Matthew, Luke, and John later wrote their similar works, they came to be called by this title and the author attribution (kata/“according to” so-and-so) was introduced.

 

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The question of how the costs producing the Gospels would have affected the choices that their authors made is almost totally ignored. We will seek to remedy this by looking at the cost that producing the Gospels would have had on the Synoptic problem.

Today, when there are ministries that give away Bibles for free, people completely take the idea of owning the Gospels for granted. But in the first century, books were fantastically expensive, including the Gospels.

How expensive?

Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

(NOTE: See here for other parts of my exploration of the Synoptic Problem.)

 

Paul’s Letters

A helpful resource for estimating the cost of the Gospels is E. Randolph Richard’s book Paul and First-Century Letter Writing. He has some helpful estimates of the cost of Paul’s letters, and he explains the estimates in a way that lets us extend them to other works.

First, he offers a word of caution:

[O]ur data from the time of Paul is too thin to draw any conclusions about the cost Paul incurred in writing and sending letters. All estimates are filled with guesswork. Some scholars will say that any attempts to estimate Paul’s cost should be avoided altogether. Nevertheless, many today could not even venture a guess as to the cost. We often have a vague impression that the cost to write Paul’s letters was insignificant, and such an impression is misleading. For this reason, an educated guess is helpful (p. 165).

Richards then breaks down the price Paul would have had to pay into the cost of supplies and the cost of the labor.

 

The Cost of Supplies

Concerning supplies, Richards writes:

The secretary usually took the initial notes and prepared the first draft on tablets or washable papyrus notebooks. We may assume these materials were not charged to Paul. The dispatched copy was written on papyrus, as was the copy Paul retained. Paul would have been charged for the papyrus for both copies (pp. 165-166).

How much papyrus would be used would depend on whether the scribe wrote in large or small letters:

Some secretaries wrote with large letters; some wrote in a small, cramped hand. We, of course, have no idea the penmanship used by Paul’s secretary. Judging from the papyri, a medium hand was the most common (p. 166).

And Richards judges that the ink and pens used by the scribes were likely included in the overall service charge:

Ink (and the pen), I assume, was not a separate expense but was included in the secretary’s basic charges (p. 167).

 

The Cost of Labor

Concerning labor, Richards writes:

Unlike merely preparing a new copy of an existing work, secretarial costs for preparing a letter needed to include the cost of writing out all the drafts and revisions. Since we have no idea how many times Paul had a letter rewritten, I cannot estimate this very well. . . .

After the preparation of an initial draft, there was probably at least one revision. To err again on the side of caution, I have said that for most of his letters Paul paid for a minimum of the initial draft and one revision, both done on tablets or washable notebooks, then paid for a copy to be dispatched (with nice script on good papyrus) and a copy to be retained (p. 168).

This results in at least four probable labor charges:

• The initial notes taken
• One revision
• A final version to keep
• A final version to send

These would be approximately the same length (unless Paul radically changed the length of a letter in the revision phase), and so would be of approximately equal cost.

 

The Exchange Rate

Richards estimates the cost of supplies and labor for Paul’s letters in terms of the denar, an ancient unit of currency. To make this meaningful to a modern audience, he also gives a conversion of this into modern (2004) dollars.

So what’s the exchange rate?

Richards writes:

Attempting to convert ancient denars to U.S. currency is a difficult matter. Some scholars choose to use commodities like grain prices or gold prices, yet ancients held such commodities in different esteem than we do. Once again, to gain the same “emotional” equivalent for currency, we shall return to the “workers conversion rate” used in chapter three. An unskilled laborer in the time of Paul earned a half-denar per day, or $60 in today’s currency. Since the drachma had devaluated some during Paul’s time and to err again on the side of caution, an additional 10 percent was removed from Paul’s rate, settling on a conversion rate of one denar = $110 (p. 168).

 

The Cost of Romans

Applying his estimates to a specific book—Romans—Richards comes up with the following figures.

He estimates, based on Romans’ length, that the papyrus for each copy would have cost 5.44 denars and that the secretarial cost per copy would be 2.45 denars.

Assuming Paul wasn’t charged for the reusable media for the initial notes pass and the revision pass, Paul would have had to pay for two batches of papyrus—one for his archival copy of the letter and one for the copy sent to Rome. That would be a total cost of 10.88 denars.

Paul would have had to pay for four scribal charges (notes, revision, and the two copies), for a total of 9.8 denars.

Adding the supplies and labor costs together, Romans would have cost 20.68 denars.

Assuming the $110 exchange rate, in modern currency, that would be $2,275 dollars.

Even once the initial copies of Romans had been written, a single, new copy would cost 7.89 denars (5.44 for papyrus and 2.45 for labor), or approximately $868.

This is a far larger sum than most people today would suspect, and the numbers get even bigger when we look at the Gospels.

 

The Single-Copy Cost of the Gospels

How much would it have cost, in the ancient world, just to have a single copy of one of the Gospels made?

To estimate this, we can use the numbers that Richards provided for Romans and scale them up based on the size of the Gospels.

Although the number of words in ancient manuscripts is slightly different due to textual variants, the Greek text of Romans may be said to have 7,111 words, while the four Gospels have these figures:

• Matthew: 18,345 words
• Mark: 11,304 words
• Luke: 19,482 words
• John: 15,635 words

These figures would be slightly smaller if the longer ending (Mark. 16:9-20) were omitted from Mark’s total and the pericope adulterae (John 7:53-8:11) were omitted from John, but they will do for purposes of making rough cost estimates.

Dividing these figures by the length of Romans, we can derive the following percentages:

• Matthew: 258%
• Mark: 159%
• Luke: 274%
• John: 220%

That is to say, Matthew is 258% as long as Romans, and so forth.

We can now scale up the cost of supplies and labor for making a single copy of each Gospel. If a single copy of Romans cost 5.44 denars for papyrus (equivalent to $598) then the following would be the approximate papyrus costs for the Gospels:

• Matthew: 14.03 denars ($1,543)
• Mark: 8.65 denars ($952)
• Luke: 14.90 denars ($1,639)
• John: 11.96 denars ($1,316)

If a single copy of Romans cost 2.45 denars ($270) in labor then the following would be the approximate scribal costs for the Gospels:

• Matthew: 6.32 denars ($695)
• Mark: 3.89 denars ($428)
• Luke: 6.71 denars ($738)
• John: 5.39 denars ($593)

Adding the costs of supplies and labor together, the costs for a single, new copy of each of the Gospels would be as follows:

• Matthew: 20.35 denars ($2,238)
• Mark: 12.54 denars ($1,379)
• Luke: 21.61 denars ($2,377)
• John: 17.35 denars ($1,909)

These are impressive figures! And they are only the beginning. We still have to consider the costs of producing and launching the Gospels.

 

The Cost of Q

Today the most popular theory among scholars holds is known as the “Two-Document hypothesis.” It holds that Matthew and Luke drew upon two sources: the Gospel of Mark and another hypothetical, lost source known as Q.

The Q source is thought to be behind approximately 235 verses of Matthew and Luke.

Because we do not have any surviving copies, we do not know what its word count in Greek (or any other language) would have been.

However, using 235 verses as an initial guide, that would make it 22% the length of Matthew (which has 1,071 verses) and 20% the length of Luke (which 1,151 verses).

Converting this into a word count, we would expect Q to have between 3,978 and 4,025 words in its Greek text. We may thus estimate Q’s minimum length as around 4,000 Greek words—at a minimum.

We must add “at a minimum,” because we do not know how much of Q Matthew and Luke would have used. Modern scholars frequently propose that they used virtually all of it, since it has not survived to the present day, but we do not know this.

However, if we assume that the Two-Document hypothesis is true then we may have another clue to Q’s length, because we can look at the way Matthew and Luke would have treated Mark.

On this view, Matthew would have used approximately 600 verses of Mark’s 661, which means that he would have used 91% of it. If Mathew treated Q the same way, he would have used 91% of it, making Q 258 verses long—or 4,419 words in Greek (given the length of verses in Matthew).

On the other hand, Luke would have used approximately 365 verses of Mark’s 661, meaning he used 55% of Mark. If Luke treated Q the same way, he would have used 55% of it, making Q 427 verses long—or 7,227 words in Greek (given the length of verses in Luke).

It is certain that, if Q existed, it would have been at least slightly longer than the 235 proposed verses would indicate, corresponding to the 4,419 Greek words our Matthew-based estimate provides.

However, it is quite possible that it was longer. The fact is, we do not know how Matthew and Luke would have treated this source, and so for estimating purposes, we will split the difference and assume that Q would have been halfway between the two estimates, or 5,823 words in Greek, making it 82% the length of Romans’ 7,111 words.

Using this as an estimate, we can calculate the costs of producing a single copy of Q as follows:

• Papyrus: 4.46 denars ($491)
• Scribal labor: 2.01 denars ($221)
• Total: 6.47 denars ($712)

Although Q is only a hypothetical source, these figures will play a role in our later reasoning.

 

Production Costs

Before one of the Gospels could be copied, it had to be written, and there were costs associated with doing that.

The starting point for estimating them is recognizing the stages with which production proceeded. In the broadest terms, these can be described as:

1. Research (before writing)
2. Drafting (first writing)
3. Revision (polishing before the final version)

At the end of the revision process there would be a final document ready for copying.

This leaves us to consider the three stages.

 

The Research Stage

Before an Evangelist began writing his Gospel, he needed to gather his source material.

For the material in his memory, there would have been no cost.

The same may have been true for material he learned from oral sources—if he committed it to memory. However, if it was substantial enough that he committed it to writing, he would have needed to pay for this.

Even estimating the latter cost at zero (based on re-usable materials he may have already had), the degree of word-for-word agreement between the Synoptic Gospels suggests that some Evangelists had written sources before them.

Given the cost of writings in the ancient world, that means that the Evangelists may have incurred significant costs in simply gathering their materials.

What might these be?

The answer will depend on which view of the Synoptic Problem one prefers:

• If one assumes Markan priority then Matthew and Luke would have had copies of Mark.
• If one assumes Matthean priority then Mark and Luke would have had copies of Matthew.
• On the Farrer hypothesis, Luke would have had Matthew
• On the Wilke hypothesis, Matthew would have had Luke.
• And on the Two-Document Hypothesis, Matthew and Luke would have had Q.

But would having these documents really have been research costs?

This depends on what the Evangelists did with them.

Even before the age of word processor cutting and pasting, it would be tempting for an author to purchase a copy of the sources he wanted to use, take a knife or scissors, cut out the passages he wished to copy, and then paste them into a notebook to provide an initial outline. But this would be based on the inexpensive copies that have only been available in the last few hundred years. An author in the ancient world could have been deterred from this course of action by cost alone.

What would an ancient author have chosen?

He might still have chosen the literal cut-and-paste option, though he might have chosen something else as well.

For example, he might have chosen to mark up his sources so that he could turn to the parts he wanted to copy. If he marked them up only lightly then the sources could have been fit for later use, but if he marked them up too much, this would not have been the case.

Alternately, he might have chosen not to mark his sources but to have specific passages from them copied—either to papyrus or to wax tablets or washable notebooks. In such cases, he might limit or avoid the supplies cost, but he could still have to pay the labor cost of the copying.

One might suppose that an Evangelist had copies of all of the sources he wanted to use in his personal library. However, only rich people could afford libraries, and it is also possible that, before the Evangelists decided to write, their knowledge of the other Gospels (and/or Q) were based on what they heard read in church.

This is likely since it is hardly plausible that the authors of the sources would have had free copies sent to all their likely successors. The Evangelists probably encountered the sources they later chose to use through their reading in church, and they probably obtained copies to use themselves.

The ultimate question is not whether the Evangelists paid for these copies themselves. They may or may not have. Patrons or the funds of a local congregation could have paid for them. But the had to be bought for the Evangelists to use them as sources, and that would have put a strain on the funds an Evangelist had available to him, whether they were his own funds or those of an associate or congregation.

Thus, even if an Evangelist did not intend to make copies of his sources unusable in the future, it is likely that a cost was incurred in obtaining them.

How much this would have been would depend on what scenario one proposes, but it is implausible to either estimate the cost as zero or as full price for all sources, since free and/or reusable copies may have been available.

We will split the difference and assume that the research costs for each Evangelist would have been 50% of the single copy cost for whatever sources he had in front of him, or the following:

• Matthew: 10.18 denars ($1,120)
• Mark: 6.27 denars ($690)
• Luke: 10.81 denars ($1,189)
• Q: 3.24 denars ($356)

We can then convert these to research costs for various Synoptic hypotheses as follows:

 

Matthean Priority Hypotheses

• Augustinian Hypothesis
  • Mark had Matthew: 10.18 denars ($1,120)
  • Luke had Matthew and Mark: 16.45 denars ($1,810)
• Griesbach and Orchard Hypotheses
  • Luke had Matthew: 10.18 denars ($1,120)
  • Mark had Matthew and Luke: 20.99 denars ($2,309)

 

Markan Priority Hypotheses

• Two-Document Hypothesis
  • Matthew had Mark and Q: 9.51 denars ($1,046)
  • Luke had Mark and Q: 9.51 denars ($1,046)
• Farrer Hypothesis
  • Matthew had Mark: 6.27 denars ($690)
  • Luke had Matthew and Mark: 16.45 denars ($1,180)
• Wilke Hypothesis
  • Luke had Mark: 6.27 denars ($690)
  • Matthew had Mark and Luke: 17.08 denars ($1,879)

 

The Drafting Stage

After the Evangelists had shouldered the research costs, they still needed to prepare an initial draft of their own Gospels. This also would have incurred costs.

In his book on Paul’s letters, Richards proposes that the initial drafts would have been written on reusable materials such as wax tablets or washable notebooks and that, because they were reusable, Paul would not have been charged for the materials on which his letters were drafted.

Such materials were used in the ancient world, and Richards was attempting to provide conservative cost estimates, but it is difficult to suppose that works the length of a Gospel would have been written on such materials, and that all of the Evangelists would have used them.

Still, to provide conservative estimates, we will assume that the Evangelists would have had to pay—on average—only half the supply costs of making an initial version of their works on papyrus. This would lead to the following costs:

• Matthew: 7.02 denars ($772)
• Mark: 4.32 denars ($475)
• Luke: 7.45 denars ($820)

Similarly, an Evangelist could have saved costs by doing all of the scribal work himself—if he was literate, which is likely (illiterates did not author entire books). However, even major literary figures used paid scribes to help them with their drafting, and it is likely that at least some of the Evangelists did. To allow for this possibility, we will assume that they paid half of the ordinarily expected scribal costs, resulting in the following figures:

• Matthew: 3.16 denars ($348)
• Mark: 1.95 denars ($215)
• Luke: 3.36 denars ($370)

Adding the halved supply and scribal costs together, we get the following as conservative estimates for drafting costs:

• Matthew: 10.18 denars ($1,120)
• Mark: 6.27 denars ($690)
• Luke: 10.81 denars ($1,189)

 

The Revision Stage

Even after the Evangelists had an initial draft of their Gospels in hand, they would have polished them before releasing them to the world.

What would this have cost?

It is very easy to suppose that at this stage a copy of the Gospels would have been prepared on papyrus, rather than reusable materials like wax tablets or washable notebooks. I know that if I were writing, I would have wanted a “dress rehearsal” copy made on materials worthy of public release.

However, given the high cost of such materials, ancient authors—particularly cash-poor ones like the Evangelists—may have been willing to make do with reusable materials.

Similarly, they may have been willing to make do with their own—or with freely donated—scribal efforts in making a revision copy.

We will therefore assume that the cost of making a single revision would be equal to the cost of an initial draft, as follows:

• Matthew: 10.18 denars ($1,120)
• Mark: 6.27 denars ($690)
• Luke: 10.81 denars ($1,189)

Of course, there is nothing to say that an Evangelist would have been happy with a single revision. He may have wanted two or more. On the other hand, even if he did want further changes after the initial revision, they may not have required the making of a whole new copy but merely periodic “spot edits” that did not substantially increase the overall revision costs.

While the revision costs could easily have been higher, in the interest of making conservative estimates, we will assume only the revision costs proposed above.

 

Drafting and Revision Costs

Between paying for an initial draft and a single revision—each of which we estimated at half the cost of a regular copy—we arrive at the following totals. Slight differences are due to rounding in the above numbers; the numbers that follow are the more precise:

• Matthew: 20.35 denars ($2,238)
• Mark: 12.54 denars ($1,379)
• Luke: 21.61 denars ($2,377)

 

Total Pre-Production Costs

We can now add the costs of all the pre-final stages (research, drafting, and revision) to estimate what each Evangelist would have paid under each theory of Synoptic origins:

Matthean Priority Hypotheses

• Augustinian Hypothesis
  • Matthew’s costs: 20.35 denars ($2,238)
  • Mark’s costs: 22.72 denars ($2,499)
  • Luke’s costs: 38.06 denars ($4,187)
• Griesbach and Orchard Hypotheses
  • Matthew’s costs: 20.35 denars ($2,238)
  • Mark’s costs: 33.53 denars ($3,688)
  • Luke’s costs: 31.79 denars ($3,497)

 

Markan Priority Hypotheses

• Two-Document Hypothesis
  • Matthew’s costs: 29.86 denars ($3,284)
  • Mark’s costs: 12.54 denars ($1,379)
  • Luke’s costs: 31.12 denars ($3,423)
• Farrer Hypothesis
  • Matthew’s costs: 26.62 denars ($2,928)
  • Mark’s costs: 12.54 denars ($1,379)
  • Luke’s costs: 38.06 denars ($4,187)
• Wilke Hypothesis
  • Matthew’s costs: 37.43 denars ($4,117)
  • Mark’s costs: 12.54 denars ($1,379)
  • Luke’s costs: 27.88 denars ($3,067)

 

The Launch Stage

The research, drafting, and revision phases would have brought an Evangelist to the point where he was ready to have final copies of his Gospel made, but how many would he need?

That would depend on his purposes.

According to the view that the Gospels circulated for a long time only in individual, widely-separated communities, the answer might be that he would need only one. Thus Matthew would need a single copy of his Gospel for his church, Mark would need one for his, and so on.

Despite its long acceptance in scholarly circles, this view is completely implausible. As Richard Bauckham and his co-authors demonstrate in their outstanding book The Gospels for All Christians, the first century churches were in constant communication, and the idea that the individual Gospels would have remained isolated in particular churches for any period is nonsense. Instead, their authors would have been writing for a general audience, not just one church.

Further, writing a Gospel was hard work and—as we’ve seen—it was very costly! Nobody would undertake this labor and expense just to have a single copy out there.

Authors are rewarded for their efforts by having their works circulated, and this was even more the case in the age before royalties, because seeing their works circulated was all the reward that they got! (Unless they were in the business of personally selling their works, which is unlikely in the case of the Evangelists.)

By investing the time and money to create a new book, an author was lighting a new literary lamp in the world, and as someone once said, men do not light a lamp and put it under a bushel but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Authors thus wanted their light to shine before men and—in the case of the Evangelists—they wanted it to do so that men might see their good work and give glory to their Father in heaven.

This leads to a further consideration, which is that the Evangelists knew they were writing Scripture. Consequently, they would have viewed it as their obligation to share these new holy books with the broader Christian community.

It is therefore a given that the Evangelists would have foreseen a launch stage as part of their overall project. For this stage, a number of copies would have been made to provide their Gospels their initial distribution.

How many copies would that be?

 

Personal Copies

Whatever else they were, the Evangelists were authors, and authors keep copies of their books. You are not going to spend the time, effort, and money to write one and then not have your own copy. Each of the Evangelists thus would have planned on keeping one of the initial copies for himself.

If there was an individual patron underwriting the production of the Gospel—as was likely the case with Luke’s Theophilus—then the patron would be certain to have at least one copy for his own.

 

Local Congregational Copies

It’s also certain that a copy would have been made for the local congregation where the Evangelist was ministering at the time.

If there were multiple congregations in his current city then he could well have planned on a copy for each one of them, particularly if the funds of each congregation were being tapped to underwrite the project.

Even if local congregations weren’t underwriting the project as a whole, it is plausible that each local congregation would have wanted and/or expected a copy, and somebody would have needed to pay for them.

As the lengthy process of Gospel composition was underway, word would have spread among the congregations about what was in the works, and they may have volunteered to pay for their own copy, even if they didn’t feel in a position to contribute further funds to the project.

They thus might have raised funds from within their congregation and given them to the Evangelist when he was ready to have scribes set to work doing the initial run. Whether they paid for their own copies or someone else did, it is very possible that they would have had their copies made in the initial batch.

Even if their copies weren’t part of the initial batch, the Evangelist could foresee that each local congregation would likely want a copy in the very near future. He also would want them to have a copy, for the reasons discussed above, and he would take this into account when planning the scope of the project, regardless of who was paying.

How many local congregational copies would have been needed? This would depend on the size of the church in which he was ministering. If he was ministering in a large city with a sizable Christian population, as would be likely given the funding needed to underwrite a Gospel project, it could have a sizable number of congregations.

Do we have any indication what the number would be?

Mark’s Gospel is associated with Rome by patristic testimony, and the end of Acts suggests that this book, and Luke’s Gospel, was written in Rome c. A.D. 60. Fortunately, we have an indicator of the number of Roman congregations in the mid-first century.

At the end of his letter to the Romans, St. Paul has an extensive set of greetings (Rom. 16:3-15). Given the sensitivity of the letter, it is likely that Paul made this list of greetings as complete as he could.

It is also likely, since Paul had not yet visited Rome (Rom. 1:10), that he composed this list with the assistance of Tertius, who was his scribe for this letter (Rom. 16:22), who was likely a Roman Christian visiting Paul since—unlike in any other letter—the scribe greets the recipients and does so without further introducing himself, suggesting that they already knew him.

Analyzing Paul’s set of greetings for what they reveal about the structure of the Christian community in Rome c. A.D. 54 (when Romans was written), we find that it likely consisted of at least five plausible congregations:

1. Prisca and Aquila and the church in their house (Rom. 16:3-5)
2. Those who belong to the family of Aristobulus (Rom. 16:10).
3. Those in the Lord who belong to the family of Narcissus (Rom. 16:11).
4. Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, “and the brethren who are with them” (Rom. 16:14).
5. Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, “and all the saints who are with them” (Rom. 16:15).

Paul also greets additional individuals who are not explicitly named as belonging to these groups. They may have been part of them or they may have belonged to additional congregations.

At this point, the clarity of our data fails us, but it is likely that at the time Mark and Luke were written, Rome contained at least five congregations, suggesting that each of these Gospel projects would have included at least five local congregational copies.

If a Gospel were penned in Jerusalem then the number of congregations could have been much higher, given the number of Christians that Luke suggests were living there; see Acts 2:41, 4:4. However, Luke also indicates that those numbers dwindled early on due to persecution (Acts 8:1), and even if they were rebuilt when the persecution ended, they would have taken another hit in the Jewish War of the A.D. 60s, when it is reported that the Christian community fled to Pella (Eusebius, Church History 3:5:3).

The only Gospel even possibly penned at Jerusalem would be Matthew, though the evidence for this is weak and conjectural, and the level of Gentile interest that Matthew displays may indicate an origin elsewhere.

However, given the early prominence of the Jerusalem church, it is one place that an Evangelist would be advised to have a copy of his new Gospel sent.

 

Strategic Copies

Any author wanting to give his Gospel a good launch would have wanted to send copies to the major Christian centers that would have been receptive to it, trusting that from there it would have been copied and distributed elsewhere.

This parallels the practice of modern authors and publishers sending review copies of a book to major reviewers and influencers in the literary community.

It is not to be expected that he would send a copy to each congregation in major Christian centers. That would have been too expensive. But it s likely that he would have sent at least one copy to such centers, and particularly to an influencer within that community who he knew about.

How many such communities were there?

Acts and the other books of the New Testament suggest at least the following:

• Jerusalem
• Antioch in Syria
• Corinth
• Ephesus
• Rome

If each Evangelist was writing from one of these cities, we may suppose that he sent copies to at least the other four in order to give his work a proper launch.

 

Total Copies

What do we find if we add together the likely number of personal copies, local congregational copies, and strategic copies?

• Personal copies would have totaled at least 1 or 2, depending on whether the Evangelist had a patron underwriting his project.
• Local congregational copies could have been as low as 1 but were more likely around 5, given the size of the communities that the Evangelists were likely writing from.
• Strategic copies would likely have been at least 4, excluding the major Christian center from which the Evangelist was writing.

Adding these figures together, we arrive at a total between 6 and 11 copies at a minimum.

For purposes of proceeding with a conservative number of copies, we will assume that each Evangelist envisioned at least 8 copies of his work ([6 + 11] / 2, rounding down) being made in its initial or near-initial run of copies.

 

Control Estimates

Do we have any other works that can provide us with controls on the estimated number of copies the Gospel authors would have wanted to make?

We do, and they are in the New Testament.

The Gospels—and, by extension, Acts—are what we are considering, but that still leaves us with other examples to consider.

They are not found in the letters of Paul. With the likely exception of Ephesians, Paul’s letters were not initially circulated to multiple communities.

Instead, for every letter except Ephesians, Paul likely had two final copies made—one of which he retained for his records and another that he had sent. One or the other of these then became the basis of his letter as it appeared in his collected letters in the New Testament.

Some of Paul’s letters are written to specific individuals (1 Tim. 1:2, 2 Tim. 1:2, Tit. 1:4, Philem. 1). Other New Testament letters are written to specific individuals (3 John 1) or specific congregations (2 John 1).

None of these likely had more than two initial copies made—one of which was the author’s archival copy and the other of which was sent.

Some New Testament letters are written to an unquantifiable audience (Heb. 1:1, cf. 13:23-24, Jas. 1:1, 2 Peter 1:1, 1 John 1:1, Jude 1).

If we exclude the above, that leaves us with two works that we can tell were initially sent to more than one community: 1 Peter and Revelation.

The introduction to 1 Peter reads:

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia (1 Peter 1:1).

The naming five destination locations suggests that this letter had at least six initial copies, counting one for Peter’s records.

Similarly, the book of Revelation is directed to be sent from John (Rev. 1:1, 4, 9, 22:8) to the Christian communities in seven Asian cities. We read that John heard:

Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea (Rev. 1:11; cf. 1:4).

One authorial copy plus one copy for each of the churches in these cities totals eight copies.

Both 1 Peter and Revelation were substantially shorter than a Gospel. 1 Peter is 1,684 Greek words long (15% the length of Mark), while Revelation is 9,852 Greek words long (87% the length of Mark).

The shorter length of these two works would have made it easier to have multiple copies of them made, but the fact that Mark was a Gospel would have made it more important for copies of it to be made.

Consequently the fact that there were likely at least 6-8 of these works made serves to confirm the idea that an average of at least 8 copies of the Gospels were made in their initial (or near-initial) run of copies.

 

Final Costs

That being the case, even after the research, drafting, and revision stages of the Gospels were completed, the Evangelists likely would have expected another 8 final copies to be made, totaling the following costs:

• Matthew: 162.80 denars ($17,904)
• Mark: 100.32 denars ($11,032)
• Luke: 172.88 denars ($19,016)

These figures represent the costs of the launch phase of the Gospels.

 

Total Gospel Project Costs

We are now in a position to determine what the overall project costs would have been to each Evangelist including all three pre-final phases (research, drafting, revision) and the launch phase. The numbers are as follows:

 

Matthean Priority Hypotheses

• Augustinian Hypothesis
  • Matthew’s costs: 183.15 denars ($20,147)
  • Mark’s costs: 123.04 denars ($13,534)
  • Luke’s costs: 210.94 denars ($23,203)
• Griesbach and Orchard Hypotheses
  • Matthew’s costs: 183.15 denars ($20,147)
  • Mark’s costs: 133.85 denars ($14,724)
  • Luke’s costs: 204.67 denars ($22,514)

 

Markan Priority Hypotheses

• Two-Document Hypothesis
  • Matthew’s costs: 192.66 denars ($21,193)
  • Mark’s costs: 112.86 denars ($12,415)
  • Luke’s costs: 204.00 denars ($22,440)
• Farrer Hypothesis
  • Matthew’s costs: 189.42 denars ($20,836)
  • Mark’s costs: 112.86 denars ($12,415)
  • Luke’s costs: 210.94 denars ($23,203)
• Wilke Hypothesis
  • Matthew’s costs: 200.23 denars ($22,025)
  • Mark’s costs: 112.86 denars ($12,415)
  • Luke’s costs: 200.76 denars ($22,084)

 

As discussed above, these numbers are conservative. In all likelihood, the costs were higher.

Also, these do not include postal costs for the strategic copies of the Gospels. Personal copies and local congregational copies would likely have no such costs, but sending the strategic copies across the Empire could. This is not necessarily the case, though, as the major Christian centers were in regular communication with each other, and the strategic copies might have been sent with trusted travellers already headed to the key destinations. In the interests of conservatism, therefore, we will assume that the strategic copies were mailed for free.

This leads us to another major question . . .

 

Would It Be Worth It?

Each Evangelist thought that his Gospel had something important to offer the Christian world; otherwise, he would not have bothered writing and publishing it.

The value he saw in his Gospel made him willing to undertake the time, effort, and cost of producing it. (Unless we assume he was an egomaniac who just wanted to have a Gospel attributed to his name. However, this is unlikely. If building his name was a major concern for an Evangelist, he would have put his name in his work, and none of the Evangelists did.)

This means that we have a new way of testing Synoptic hypotheses: We can examine the relationship between the value that an Evangelist would have seen his work as having and the costs he would have shouldered (personally or through fundraising) in producing it.

For the first Synoptic Evangelist to write, the value in producing a Gospel would be obvious: Reducing the basic story of Jesus’s life and teachings to writing. But for the subsequent Evangelists, this task had already been done. The value that the subsequent Evangelists would have seen in producing new Gospels thus would be something else.

The value they would have seen in their Gospels would have been in what they did that was new—i.e., what the first Evangelist (or the previous Evangelists) had not done. Each later Evangelist would have had certain goals he wanted his Gospel to achieve which previous ones had not achieved. Such goals might include:

• Rewriting existing material in a better style
• Organizing the material in a new way
• Including new material not previously written in a Gospel

It would be difficult to quantify the first two of these goals, but the third is easily quantifiable. Depending on which Synoptic hypothesis is being proposed, it is a straightforward matter to calculate the amount of material that would have been original in each Gospel.

A. N. Honoré provides the following breakdown of the number of Greek words in the Synoptic Gospels that belong to particular traditions:

Tradition	Matthew	Mark	Luke
Triple	8,336	8,630	7,884
Matthew & Mark	1,764	2,034	—
Matthew & Luke	4,461	—	4,476
Mark & Luke	—	357	274
Single	3,704	307	6,726
Total	18,265	11,328	19,360

(Source: “A Statistical Study of the Synoptic Problem,” Novum Testamentum, 10 [Apr.-Jul., 1968], 96.)

We can convert this information for our purposes as follows, listing the total number of words in a Gospel, the number that would have been derived from the Gospels the Evangelist purportedly drew upon (counting Q as a hypothetical Gospel), and the number of words that would have been original to his Gospel:

 

Matthean Priority Hypotheses

• Augustinian Hypothesis
  • Matthew:
    • Total words: 18,265
    • Derived words: 0
    • Original words: 18,265
  • Mark:
    • Total words: 11,328
    • Derived words: 10,664 (from Matthew)
    • Original words: 664
  • Luke:
    • Total words: 19,360
    • Derived words: 12,634 (7,884 from Matthew and/or Mark; 4,476 from Matthew; 274 from Mark)
    • Original words: 6,726
  • Griesbach and Orchard Hypotheses
    • Matthew:
      • Total words: 18,265
      • Derived words: 0
      • Original words: 18,265
    • Mark:
      • Total words: 11,328
      • Derived words: 11,021 (8,630 from Matthew and/or Luke; 2,034 from Matthew; 357 from Luke)
      • Original words: 307
    • Luke:
      • Total words: 19,360
      • Derived words: 12,360 (from Matthew)
      • Original words: 7,000

 

Markan Priority Hypotheses

• Two-Document Hypothesis
  • Matthew:
    • Total words: 18,265
    • Derived words: 14,561 (10,100 from Mark; 4,461 from Q)
    • Original words: 3,704
  • Mark:
    • Total words: 11,328
    • Derived words: 0
    • Original words: 11,328
  • Luke:
    • Total words: 19,360
    • Derived words: 12,634 (8,158 from Mark; 4,476 from Q)
    • Original words: 6,726
  • Farrer Hypothesis
    • Matthew:
      • Total words: 18,265
      • Derived words: 10,100 (from Mark)
      • Original words: 8,165
    • Mark:
      • Total words: 11,328
      • Derived words: 0
      • Original words: 11,328
    • Luke:
      • Total words: 19,360
      • Derived words: 12,634 (7,884 from Matthew and/or Mark; 4,476 from Matthew, 274 from Mark)
      • Original words: 6,726
    • Wilke Hypothesis
      • Matthew:
        • Total words: 18,265
        • Derived words: 14,561 (8,335 from Mark and/or Luke; 1,764 from Mark; 4,461 from Luke)
        • Original words: 3,704
      • Mark:
        • Total words: 11,328
        • Derived words: 0
        • Original words: 11,328
      • Luke:
        • Total words: 19,360
        • Derived words: 12,634 (from Mark)
        • Original words: 6,726

 

The Cost of Originality

Using these theories of Synoptic origins, we can now take the costs of producing the Gospels and divide them by the number of original words they contain. This will give us a measure of the costs that he would have been willing to bear to get that new material in Gospel form.

This measure is only useful to the extent that providing the new material was one of the Evangelist’s goals. It is to be immediately pointed out that getting new material into Gospel form was not the Evangelists’ only goal, but doing the calculation will shed useful light on the question of Synoptic origins, as we will see.

Taking the costs associated with each Gospel and dividing by the number of original words in it, we get the following results:

 

Matthean Priority Hypotheses

• Augustinian Hypothesis
  • Matthew:
    • Matthew’s costs: 183.15 denars ($20,147)
    • Original words: 18,265
    • Cost per word: 0.01 denars ($1.10)
  • Mark:
    • Mark’s costs: 123.04 denars ($13,534)
    • Original words: 664
    • Cost per word: 0.19 denars ($20.38)
  • Luke:
    • Luke’s costs: 210.94 denars ($23,203)
    • Original words: 6,726
    • Cost per word: 0.03 denars ($3.45)
  • Griesbach and Orchard Hypotheses
    • Matthew:
      • Matthew’s costs: 183.15 denars ($20,147)
      • Original words: 18,265
      • Cost per word: 0.01 denars ($1.10)
    • Mark:
      • Mark’s costs: 133.85 denars ($14,724)
      • Original words: 307
      • Cost per word: 0.44 denars ($47.96)
    • Luke:
      • Luke’s costs: 204.67 denars ($22,514)
      • Original words: 7,000
      • Cost per word: 0.03 denars ($3.22)

 

Markan Priority Hypotheses

• Two-Document Hypothesis
  • Matthew:
    • Matthew’s costs: 192.66 denars ($21,193)
    • Original words: 3,704
    • Cost per word: 0.05 denars ($5.72)
  • Mark:
    • Mark’s costs: 112.86 denars ($12,415)
    • Original words: 11,328
    • Cost per word: 0.01 denars ($1.10)
  • Luke:
    • Luke’s costs: 204.00 denars ($22,440)
    • Original words: 6,726
    • Cost per word: 0.03 denars ($3.34)
  • Farrer Hypothesis
    • Matthew:
      • Matthew’s costs: 189.42 denars ($20,836)
      • Original words: 8,165
      • Cost per word: 0.02 denars ($2.55)
    • Mark:
      • Mark’s costs: 112.86 denars ($12,415)
      • Original words: 11,328
      • Cost per word: 0.01 denars ($1.10)
    • Luke:
      • Luke’s costs: 210.94 denars ($23,203)
      • Original words: 6,726
      • Cost per word: 0.03 denars ($3.45)
    • Wilke Hypothesis
      • Matthew:
        • Matthew’s costs: 200.23 denars ($22,025)
        • Original words: 3,704
        • Cost per word: 0.06 denars ($5.95)
      • Mark:
        • Mark’s costs: 112.86 denars ($12,415)
        • Original words: 11,328
        • Cost per word: 0.01 denars ($1.10)
      • Luke:
        • Luke’s costs: 200.76 denars ($22,084)
        • Original words: 6,726
        • Cost per word: 0.03 denars ($3.28)

 

This information might be more conveniently summarized as follows, listing only the dollar-per-word estimate and putting the Gospels in the proposed order of composition:

 

Matthean Priority Hypotheses

• Augustinian Hypothesis
  • Matthew: $1.10
  • Mark: $20.38
  • Luke: $3.45
• Griesbach and Orchard Hypotheses
  • Matthew: $1.10
  • Luke: $3.22
  • Mark: $47.96

 

Markan Priority Hypotheses

• Two-Document Hypothesis
  • Mark: $1.10
  • Matthew: $5.72 / Luke: $3.34
• Farrer Hypothesis
  • Mark: $1.10
  • Matthew: $2.55
  • Luke: $3.45
• Wilke Hypothesis
  • Mark: $1.10
  • Luke: $3.28
  • Matthew: $5.95

 

Observations

An Overall Pattern

An obvious pattern that emerges is that the first Evangelist to write got the most “bang for his buck,” paying the equivalent of a little more than $1 for each original word he wrote.

This is what you would expect. For the first Evangelist to set pen to papyrus, all of his words would have been in Gospel form for the first time, and so his cost per original word would be lowest. The later Evangelists following the Synoptic format would have higher per-original-word costs since fewer of their words would be original.

According to most of the hypotheses, the cost then rose for the second Evangelist, and then rose again for the third.

This pattern is probable but not guaranteed. The second Evangelist to write could have used a high ratio of his predecessor’s work and included little new material, making his per-original-word cost higher than the third Evangelist to write. Thus the Augustinian hypothesis is an exception, whereby Mark’s costs are higher than Luke’s, even though Mark would be the second Evangelist to write on this view. (The Two-Document hypothesis is also something of an exception since it proposes that Matthew and Luke were written independently and either could have come before the other).

Still, the pattern of rising costs with each new Synoptic Evangelist is what you would expect if their authors were trying to achieve these goals:

1. use the Synoptic format (i.e., the same general approach to telling the story of Jesus),
2. incorporate material from their predecessor(s),
3. introduce new material, and
4. keep their Gospels to a certain general length.

To use the Synoptic format (goal 1), an Evangelist would have had to include a substantial amount of material or he would be telling the story of Jesus in a substantially different and non-Synoptic way. If he also kept his Gospel at a certain length (goal 4) then the major free play would have been between goals 2 and 3.

Thus, the more an Evangelist wanted to incorporate material from his predecessors (goal 2), the less room he would have had to incorporate new material (goal 3). As the number of predecessors increased, the less space there would have been for new material without violating one of the four goals.

Thus, as the number of Synoptic Gospels increased, the cost-per-original-word ratio would have tended to increase, as in most of the hypotheses above.

 

Beyond the Synoptic Gospels

The increasing cost of having something original to say in a Synoptic Gospel is likely part of why we have only three such Gospels. If someone contemplated writing a fourth Gospel in this format, he would have been confronted by the limitations of what can be done with this format.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke had already explored what could be done with different approaches to style and organization of material. They had also put a great deal of Jesus tradition into Gospel form.

What would a person with additional Jesus tradition have seen his options as being?

It would depend on how many traditions he had. As the first century wore on, fewer and fewer eyewitnesses were around, and though many had passed on some of what they knew to others, this was not going to be kept in living memory forever, and many of the higher value traditions were already in the Synoptic Gospels. The march of time meant that fewer original traditions would be available with each passing decade.

If a prospective Evangelist had only a few Jesus traditions, they might not be of sufficient value to undertake writing a whole new Gospel, given the costs. While we today would love to have any additional Jesus tradition, a first century tradent could decide that it wasn’t worth writing a whole new Gospel just to have a few additional stories of healings or an extra few sayings in Gospel form.

He might conclude this even if he had a few more valuable Jesus traditions. After all, the world might be ending soon, the Jesus traditions were already out there orally, our prospective Evangelist could himself repeat them orally, and if he wrote a new Synoptic Gospel that was basically a remix of Matthew, Mark, and Luke with a few extra traditions thrown in then he could be accused of too closely aping previous authors and wasting everybody’s time. Besides, writing a new Gospel was very expensive, and it just wouldn’t be worth it for getting a few extra traditions in Gospel form.

If he was really determined to put his traditions in writing, a person in this situation might write something much shorter than a Gospel. If anyone did that, though, it hasn’t survived—presumably because a small collection of Jesus traditions wasn’t seen as valuable enough to be regularly copied and thus preserved.

On the other hand, if a person had a large number of Jesus traditions that he considered worth preserving in a Gospel, he might write a very long Gospel—perhaps a multi-volume one—but that would put it out of the price range of all but the rich, and it would serve the Christian community better to make the work shorter and thus more affordable.

The obvious alternative would be to write a Gospel that did not incorporate large amounts of material from the Synoptic Gospels—to make a different kind of Gospel. This is what John did. Indeed, his Gospel appears to be a deliberate attempt to supplement the Synoptics tradition, and particularly Mark, without copying the Synoptic format (see Richard Bauckham, “John for Readers of Mark” in The Gospels for All Christians).

Many later efforts, such as the Gospel of Thomas and various Gnostic Gospels, did the same thing—apparently concluding that the basic story of Jesus had already been adequately told by the canonical Gospels, including the Synoptics.

Some groups apparently produced edited versions of one of the Synoptics (Marcion did so with Luke, and there were apparently edited versions of Matthew in use among some Jewish Christians). However, the creation of these Gospels seems to have been driven by sectarian concerns, and they were not accepted by the broader Christian community, which seems to have thought that the possibilities of the Synoptic tradition had been sufficiently explored and that producing new, slightly different Gospels on this model wasn’t sufficiently valuable given those that already existed.

This leads us to a consideration of the individual Synoptic hypotheses proposed above.

 

Matthean vs. Markan Priority

The most basic division is between the hypotheses that propose Matthean priority and those that propose Markan priority.

Here we notice two distinctly different patterns in the cost-per-original-word ratio:

• Under the assumption of Markan priority, the costs rise for each additional Evangelist, but they stay within an order of magnitude, with the final Evangelist’s ratio being a little more than five times that of the first Evangelist’s.
• Under Matthean priority, however, the ratio for Mark is vastly higher than either of the other Synoptics. This holds whether Mark is viewed as the second Gospel written (the Augustinian hypothesis) or the third (the Griesbach and Orchard hypotheses). On the former, the Markan cost-to-original-word ratio is almost 20 times that of Matthew, and on the latter it is more than 40 times!

This leads to an important argument against Matthean priority, and it gives numerical expression to an intuition that many have had: Mark’s Gospel would not have been viewed as worth producing if Matthew (or Matthew and Luke) had already existed.

On the Augustinian hypothesis, Mark would contain only 664 words not derived from Matthew—equaling 5.8% of its length. On the Griesbach and Orchard hypotheses, it would contain a mere 307 words not taken from Matthew or Luke—equaling 2.7% of its length.

It is impossible to see how Mark could have viewed these words as so important that they would justify the costs associated with writing his Gospel (the equivalent of $13,524 on the Augustinian hypothesis and $14,724 on the Griesbach and Orchard hypotheses). Indeed, these words include only lesser value traditions.

Therefore, if Mark used Matthew, he would have had to have some other powerful reason to write his Gospel. Yet what this would be isn’t clear. Mark does not dramatically improve on Matthew’s style (Matthew’s style is better). Mark does not arrange the Jesus traditions in a markedly better way (again, Matthew’s arrangement is better). And the extra material Mark adds to Matthew is small and of lesser significance.

There appears to be no adequate reason for Mark to write—and pay the costs associated with his Gospel—if Matthew (or Matthew and Luke) already existed.

Further, unless Mark was independently wealthy (which we do not have evidence for), he would have needed to convince his backer(s) that he had enough that was new and worth saying to justify the costs of producing his Gospel. Yet what he could have argued in making his pitch is far from obvious.

We thus have a strong argument against Matthean priority. The existence of Mark is easier to explain if Mark wrote first and Matthew and Luke expanded it.

The survival of Mark is also easier to explain. Given the high single-copy costs of the Gospels, it is hard to see why people would pay for copies of Mark if Matthew (or Matthew and Luke) already existed. Without copies being paid for, though, Mark would not have survived.

But if Mark was the first Gospel written and had already established itself by the time Matthew and Luke appeared—including establishing a reputation as being Scripture—then it is easier to see why people would be willing to pay for copies and thus why it survived.

Even so, it would be less popular than Matthew and Luke, and so they would overtake it in the number of copies produced. This is what the number of surviving early manuscripts indicates (see Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, ch. 1). But its survival is more understandable if it was already viewed as Scripture before Matthew and Luke were penned.
The Markan Priority Hypotheses

Although our cost analysis gives us a strong argument against Matthean priority, it does not allow us to so easily distinguish among the Markan priority hypotheses.

The Farrer hypothesis has the lowest cost-to-original-word ratios ($1.10 for Mark, $2.55 for Matthew, and $3.45 for Luke). Both the Two-Document hypothesis and the Wilke hypothesis keep Luke in the $3 range ($3.34 and $3.23, respectively), but both put Matthew near $6 ($5.72 and $5.95, respectively).

This, however, is not a decisive difference. On the Two-Document hypothesis, Matthew wrote without knowing about Luke and thus could not have judged the worth of his Gospel—and the costs of undertaking it—in light of the existence of Luke.

On the Wilke hypothesis, Matthew used Luke but easily could have judged the costs he was shouldering to be worth it, given the other goals he had for his Gospel, which included an organizational scheme that many have preferred to Luke’s and focusing on themes that Luke does not emphasize (such as the regal dimension of Jesus’ Messiahship, Joseph’s role in in Christ’s early life, and a general orientation to Jewish Christians rather than Gentile ones).

An analysis of the costs of producing the Gospels thus can shed light on the Synoptic Problem but does not resolve all its aspects.

 

According to many scholars, Matthew and Luke based their Gospels principally on two sources: Mark and a now-lost source dubbed “Q.”

The reason for the latter is that Matthew and Luke contain about 235 verses that are not paralleled in Mark. This amounts to about a fifth of each of their Gospels, which is too much for the 235 verses to be due to random chance.

This means the material could have been picked up in one of three ways: (1) Matthew got it from Luke, (2) Luke got it from Matthew, or (3) they both got it from a lost source.

Many scholars dismiss the first two options without serious thought, but sometimes the following argument is used to support the third option: If Matthew knew Luke or vice-versa, we would expect him to include material from the other Gospel that he doesn’t contain. This argument is made particularly concerning material found in the Infancy and Resurrection Narratives.

We’ve already looked at the argument based on the Infancy Narratives (here), and now we will look at the argument based on the Resurrection Narratives.

To do this, we first need to look at the contents of the two narratives.

(NOTE: See here for other parts of my exploration of the Synoptic Problem.)

 

Matthew’s Resurrection Narrative

Beginning just after the point where Jesus is buried, the material in Matthew’s Resurrection Narrative may be divided (with an eye toward how it differs from Luke’s narrative) like this:

a)    Securing the Tomb (27:62-66)

b)   The Women Visit the Tomb (28:1-7)

c)    The Women Leave to Tell the Disciples (28:8)

d)   The Women Encounter Jesus (28:9-10)

e)    The Report of the Guards (28:11-15)

f)     The Disciples Encounter Jesus in Galilee (28:16-17)

g)    Jesus’ Final Instructions (28:18-20)

This material amounts to a total of 25 verses.

 

Luke’s Resurrection Narrative

Beginning just after the point where Jesus is buried, the material in Luke’s Resurrection Narrative may be divided (with an eye toward how it differs from Matthew’s narrative) like this:

a)    The Women Visit the Tomb (24:1-8)

b)   The Women Leave to Tell the Disciples (28:9-11)

c)    Peter Visits the Tomb (24:12)

d)   Encounter on the Road to Emmaus (24:13-35)

e)    Jesus Appears to the Eleven (24:36-49)

f)     The Ascension (24:50-53).

This material amounts to a total of 53 verses.

 

Evaluating the Alternatives

To see whether the Resurrection Narratives provide evidence that Matthew and Luke did not know each other’s Gospels, we need to look at both alternative hypotheses—that Luke knew Matthew and that Matthew knew Luke. We will cover both in the sections below.

First, though, we need to make a point that was explored at more length in the paper on the Infancy Narratives (here), which is that on either alternative, the Evangelist in question was expanding Mark with only select bits of the other Synoptic.

On the hypothesis that Mark wrote first, to put the matter concisely, Matthew used about 90% of the verses in Mark, while Luke used 55% of it. This means that Matthew had a strong preference for using material from Mark, while Luke had only a weak preference for it.

The key question, for our purposes, is what Matthew and Luke would have done with each other’s Gospels.

If Luke used Matthew then he included about 235 verses from it, which amounts to 20% of all of Matthew or 50% of Matthew if you ignore the parts of it that came from Mark.

If Matthew used Luke then, again, he included about 235 verses from it, which amounts to 20% of all of Luke or 30% of Luke if you ignore the parts of it that came from Mark.

In either case, one Evangelist was cherry-picking the other—selecting only those bits he thought would be of particular value for his audience. Neither had a default decision in favor of including a particular verse from the other. If Luke was using Matthew, it was a 50-50 tossup whether he would include a given verse unique to Matthew, and if Matthew was using Luke then the odds were 70% that he would skip a particular verse unique to Luke.

This is important because it reveals something about how we should evaluate the way one Evangelist would have used material found in the Resurrection Narrative of the other: Mathematically speaking, the burden of proof is not on a person to show why either Evangelist chose to skip material he would have seen in the other’s Gospel. (Indeed, in the case of Matthew, there would be a mathematical burden to show why he would include material found in Luke’s Resurrection Narrative.)

This does not mean there can’t be particular pieces of content that an Evangelist would have found so compelling that he should have used them if he was aware of them. But we need to argue why such content would have been so compelling to the Evangelist, not just assume that it would have been, given the numbers.

 

If Luke Used Matthew

Considering the case that Luke might have used Matthew, Robert H. Stein, who writes:

Why would he [Luke] have omitted . . . the story of the guards at the tomb (Matt. 27:62-66) and their report (Matt. 28:11-15); the unique Matthean material concerning the resurrection (Matt. 28:9-10, 16-20); and so on? (The Synoptic Problem, 102).

How much weight does Stein’s argument have?

It is worth noting that he only poses it as a series of bare questions about why Luke wouldn’t have included certain things from Matthew. He doesn’t provide any arguments why Luke should have included these things.

As a result, his argument does not have a great deal of force. It would have force if Luke had a strong default decision in favor of including material from Matthew, but we have seen that he did not. It was tossup in any particular case.

So let’s look at the seven pericopes (designated a-g) that Luke would have had before him if he was selecting material from Matthew. Given the material they contained, are there particular reasons Luke would have wanted to use them?

 

The Guards

Two of the pericopes—(a) and (e)—are a matched set. They deal with the guards that were set over the tomb and what they had to say when it was found empty. Including one without the other would have made no sense, so Luke would have been in an “in for a penny, in for a pound” situation.

He thus would have needed to include material based on Matthew 27:62-66 and 28:11-15. Luke would also have needed to include an additional verse (Matt. 28:4), which deals with the guards fainting, even though it is in the midst of pericope (b). That’s a total of 11 verses.

Would this material have been particularly interesting to Luke?

It does have some interest. For one who has confidence in the Gospel material, it closes off an alternative explanation to the resurrection (i.e., that the body was stolen). Matthew indicates that this alternative explanation had some currency in the Jewish community (Matt. 28:15).

However, Luke was not writing for a member of the Jewish community (given the strong Gentile interest of his Gospel and the Greek name or title Theophilus for the man of whom he was principally writing and who was possibly the patron funding the writing of the Gospel; cf. Luke 1:3, Acts 1:1).

Luke would have had less interest in rebutting an alternative explanation common among non-Christian Jews, particularly if Theophilus would not have come into contact with it. In that case, even raising the question of whether the body could have been stolen might have raised doubts and been seen as contrary to his purpose of showing Theophilus “the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed” (Luke 1:4).

It also would have meant lengthening his Gospel—already the longest of the four—by 11 verses or a significant fraction of that (if he abbreviated the material). That’s not a huge amount, but it is also not nothing, and, given that Luke only includes half of the uniquely Matthean verses, it would not be particularly surprising that he omitted these.

 

The Women

Another three of our Matthean pericopes—(b), (c), and (d)—concern the women who visited Jesus’ tomb. This material represents Matthew 28:1-10.

One verse of this (Matt. 28:4) is where the guards faint and can be pulled out of the total as belonging with the above topic.

The remaining 9 verses are ones where Luke simply chose to use the Markan version over the Matthean one. Of these, Matthew 28:1-8 (except 28:4) represent material that is found in the shorter ending of Mark, which means we only have two verses—Matthew 28:9-10—that Luke would have chosen to omit from what he saw in Mark.

These two verses read as follows:

And behold, Jesus met them and said, “Hail!” And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him.

Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me” (Matt. 29:9-10).

These verses contain two notable things:

1. A brief resurrection encounter
2. A directive to the disciples to go to Galilee

We would expect Luke to include the first in his Gospel only if he were determined to include even the briefest, least-described post-resurrection encounter.

However, we know that this is not the case. He has his own resurrection encounters that he wants to narrate at much longer length (Luke 24:13-53), and he omits multiple encounters in the Pauline tradition with which he would have been familiar (1 Cor. 15:5-7).

Therefore, given his tossup attitude toward Matthean material, it is not surprising that he would have omitted the extremely brief encounter that Matthew describes between Jesus and the women.

This leaves us with the directive to go to Galilee, which is dealt with below.

 

Galilee

The final two pericopes we identified—(f) and (g)—contain the final five verses of Matthew (Matt. 28:16-20).

In Matthew, all of this is indicated as taking place in Galilee (Matt. 28:16). This corresponds to Mark 16:7, where Jesus tells the women to instruct the disciples to go to Galilee, where they will see him (as he previously indicated in Mark 14:28).

In this case, Matthew seems to simply be following Mark, but is there reason to think that Luke wouldn’t?

Mark Goodacre writes:

[W]hat author, whose second volume plots events “beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47; cf. Acts 1:8) could plausibly have included an account of an announcement in Galilee? (The Case Against Q, 58).

This is an important point. Luke has already established that “repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47) and that the disciples should “be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8)—a structure which governs the book of Acts.

Furthermore, Luke omits the two Markan references to the disciples seeing the risen Jesus in Galilee.

In view of this, it is easy to see how Luke would have wanted to end his Gospel with material in which Jesus addressed the apostles in the area of Jerusalem in Judea—not in Galilee.

Given his tendency to only include half of the uniquely Matthean verses, it is easy to see how he could have skipped the entirety of Matthew’s last five, Galilee-centered verses.

But did he do so entirely? Goodacre writes:

It is worth asking what in Matthew’s Great Commission (Matt 28:16-20) would have been most likely to have appealed to Luke, and whether we can see any signs of it at the end of Luke’s Gospel. Perhaps the most Lukan-friendly elements here in Matthew would be Jesus’ universalistic commission . . . (“Go, therefore, making disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” Matt 28:19). And it is exactly this element in the commission that is echoed in Luke’s own version of it . . . (“proclaiming in his name repentance and forgiveness of sins to all the nations,” Luke 24:47). To speak, then, of Luke omitting this material won’t do. A clear echo of Matthew’s resurrection story is present in Luke, and it is striking that the echo is at the most Luke-friendly juncture, the command to disciple (Matthew) or preach (Luke) to all the nations” (The Case Against Q, 58).

The close juxtaposition of the exhortation to do things “in the [divine] name” for “all the nations” is a noteworthy indicator that one of these Evangelists worked with the other in front of him at the end of his Gospel.

Since the same juxtaposition could have been created independently, due to narrative forces in the text, this is not certain, but it is probable.

Given Luke’s tossup approach to uniquely Matthean material, it could easily indicate that Luke used Matthew.

Or it could indicate the reverse . . .

 

If Matthew Used Luke

Matthew and Mark

If Matthew had Luke’s Gospel in front of him when he composed his own then the first pericope—(a), Matt. 24:1-8—is easy to account for, since it would have been Matthew’s rewriting of Mark 16:1-8.

In fact, Matthew’s use of Mark may have continued beyond this point if there was an original, longer ending to Mark and if Matthew had access to it. At the point where Mark’s narrative cuts off in the shorter ending, the women have just been instructed to tell the disciples that Jesus will see them in Galilee (Mark 16:7), as he previously indicated (Mark 14:28).

Both of these verses are paralleled in Matthew, who also has the women instructed to tell the disciples to see Jesus in Galilee (Matt. 28:7), as Jesus previously indicated (Matt. 26:32).

Given these instructions, the narrative in both Mark and Matthew would naturally go on to indicate that the women told the disciples, who then had an encounter with Jesus in Galilee.

That is, in fact, what we find in Matthew (Matt. 28:8, 16-20). The only additions to this are the report of the guards (Matt. 28:11-15) and a brief encounter with Jesus as the women are going to tell the disciples, in which they meet the risen Lord, worship him, and are again instructed to tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee (Matt. 28:9-10).

Given the absence of the placing of the guards in Mark, the account of their report would be something Matthew would have supplied, but the brief meeting with the women is something that could have been present in an original, lost ending of Mark.

We therefore should consider the possibility that Matthew’s Resurrection Narrative is essentially an edited version of Mark’s original ending with the addition of the material involving the guards.

If so, Matthew simply continued his practice of including virtually everything in Mark and supplementing it with only selected bits of Luke. (Also, this possibility would mean that the reference to the disciples doing things “in the [divine] name” for “all the nations” may have been in Mark’s original ending, in which case Luke could have picked it up from there rather than from Matthew.)

But suppose this is not the case. Suppose that Mark’s original, longer ending (if there was one) had already been lost by the time Matthew wrote, and so his use of Mark stopped at Matthew 28:8. How compelling would Matthew have found the remaining material in Luke’s Resurrection Narrative?

 

The Women

Luke has a brief account of what the women did after they left the tomb (Luke 24:9-11). In this account, the women tell the disciples what happened (v. 9), several of the women are identified by name (v. 10), and they are not initially believed (v. 11).

None of this would have been particularly compelling to Matthew. He has already indicated that the women went to tell the disciples (Matt. 28:8), he has already named some of the women (Matt. 28:1), and he elsewhere notes the doubts of the disciples (and in an even more startling place; Matt. 28:17).

 

Peter

Luke also indicates (Luke 24:12) that Peter ran to the tomb and found it empty.

Given Matthew’s interest in Peter—as illustrated by his inclusion of the “You are Peter” tradition (Matt. 16:17-19)—we might expect him to include this from Luke.

However, Matthew’s interest in Peter can be overestimated. He wasn’t uniquely interested in Peter in a way Luke and John weren’t, as both of them include parallels that make the same basic point as the “You are Peter” tradition (Luke 22:31-32, John 21:15-17).

More decisively, we can show that Matthew was not interested in highlighting Peter in his Resurrection Narrative. We know this because he omitted a reference to Peter that was in front of him in Mark. The instruction the angel gave the women there was, “Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee” (Mark 16:7), but Matthew edits this to, “Go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee” (Matt. 28:7).

Having deliberately omitted a reference to Peter from Mark’s Resurrection Narrative, Matthew would hardly have been likely to include Luke’s reference to Peter’s inconsequential visit to the empty tomb.

 

The Road to Emmaus

The encounter on the road to Emmaus is a favorite—a heartwarming story that illustrates Jesus’ playful and mysterious sides—but would Matthew have found it compelling enough to take into his Resurrection Narrative?

Probably not.

First, the story is very lengthy, comprising a full 23 verses (Luke 24:13-35), making it just two verses shorter than Matthew’s entire Resurrection Narrative! Having included parallels to 90% of Mark, Matthew finds space at a premium, and the story would need to have significant value for him to include it.

Second, no major doctrines or disciples are involved. In fact, one of the disciples is entirely unnamed, and the other (Cleopas) is someone we know very little about. If Matthew has just omitted a reference to Peter—the rock on which Jesus said he would build his Church—then he is scarcely likely to find this an essential story.

Third, and most importantly, the encounter at Emmaus occurs just outside Jerusalem—not in Galilee, where Matthew’s narrative has three times indicated Jesus will see the disciples (Matt. 26:32, 28:7, 10).

Consequently, it is easy to see why Matthew would leave his default decision to omit material from Luke in place for this event.

 

Jesus Appears to the Eleven

The account of the Emmaus encounter leads directly into an appearance that Jesus makes to the Eleven, and there are several reasons why Matthew would not have viewed this material as fitting his purposes.

First, the encounter takes place in Jerusalem, and Matthew has set his face to go to Galilee to meet the resurrected Christ.

Second, a good bit of the encounter deals with Jesus letting the disciples handle him and eating fish in front of them to prove he is not a ghost (Luke 24:36-43)—points Matthew easily could have considered unnecessary to make given the space they take.

Third, Luke is recording traditions that set up the readers for the book of Acts, with its preaching of the Gospel “beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47), whereas Matthew is headed to Galilee.

Fourth, in Luke Jesus specifically tells the disciples, “stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). This would directly fly in the face of the trip to Galilee that Matthew is planning.

One part of the narrative that would be congenial to Matthew’s purposes would be the general evangelistic instruction to do things “in the [divine] name” for “all the nations”—and this is reflected in Matthew (28:19), so Matthew may have been influenced by Luke’s text here.

 

The Ascension

The final part of Luke’s Resurrection Narrative is a brief account of the Ascension. This is such a compelling event that we might expect Matthew to pick it up from Luke, but this expectation is mistaken.

Matthew would not have been dependent on Luke for knowledge of the Ascension. It’s not like he would have read it for the first time in Luke’s Gospel and thought, “Oh, wow! You mean Jesus ascended into heaven? That’s awesome! I have to let my readers know about that!”

Knowledge of the Ascension was widespread—indeed, universal—in the early Christian community, and is referred to elsewhere in the New Testament (cf. John 20:17, Rom. 8:34, Eph. 1:20, Col. 3:1, Heb. 1:3, 1 Peter 3:22, etc.).

Knowledge of the Ascension was an essential part of the Christian message. If Jesus had been raised from the dead, where was he now? Not walking the streets of Jerusalem or Capernaum.

And if Matthew is scrupulous about showing that Jesus’ body could not have been stolen, he certainly understood—and expected his readers to understand—that Jesus’ body was not to be found anywhere on earth, alive or otherwise.

His decision not to include the Ascension was therefore a deliberate choice, influenced in part by the fact that the tradition that Jesus ascended was universally known—and, undoubtedly, also influenced by the fact that it was recorded as taking place in the vicinity of Jerusalem (Luke 24:50-53) rather than Matthew’s destination of Galilee.

 

Conclusion

We thus do not see the Resurrection Narratives providing compelling evidence that Matthew and Luke must have worked independently.

There are no compelling reasons why Luke would have included material found in Matthew’s narrative—and there are reasons why he definitely would not have included some of it.

The matter is even stronger if Matthew used Luke’s Gospel. Not only does he have a strong preference against picking up most Lukan material, but the contents of Luke’s Resurrection Narrative are particularly ill-suited to his purposes.

We do, however, see some indication that one Evangelist may have used the other, given the way both Gospels end with Jesus urging the apostles to do things “in the [divine] name” for “all the nations.” Unless both Evangelists are using a now-lost ending to Mark, this points toward one using the other.

The Resurrection Narratives thus do not give us reason to think that there was a lost Q source.

In this paper we will look at what the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke may tell us about the way these Gospels were composed. Specifically: We will look at an argument (described more fully here) that the two Infancy Narratives are so different that Matthew and Luke did not know each others’ Gospels.

This claim has broader implications for the way the Gospels were composed, because Matthew and Luke have about 235 verses that parallel each other but that do not have parallels in Mark or John.

We will call these 235 verses “the double tradition,” because it is found in two of the four Gospels.

If Matthew did not know Luke and Luke did not know Matthew, where did the material in the double tradition come from? It represents substantial amount of material that totals more than a fifth of both Gospels, which seems to be too much to attribute to random chance. The most likely answer, therefore, would be that both Matthew and Luke used a now-lost source that scholars have named “Q.”

(NOTE: See here for other parts of my exploration of the Synoptic Problem.)

 

Verse-by-Verse Parallels

To appreciate the force of this argument, let’s look at the kind of parallels that we find in the double tradition. It consists both of stories and sayings.

Here’s part of a story that both Gospels have a version of.

MATTHEW:

And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’” (4:3-4).

LUKE:

The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.”

And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’” (4:3-4).

Here is some sayings material that they each have a version of.

MATTHEW:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. . . .

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. . . .

“Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (5:3-4, 6, 11).

LUKE:

And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said: “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

“Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.

“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man!” (6:20-22).

In both the story and the sayings material, the phrasing found in each Gospel is a bit different, but the material is in parallel on a verse-by-verse level—Matthew 4:3-4 corresponds directly with Luke 4:3-4, and Matthew 5:3-4, 6, and 11 parallel Luke 6:20-22.

Although there are differences in phrasing and order, it is generally possible to match up the double tradition material in this manner throughout Matthew and Luke.

 

Authorial Conservatism

The way the double tradition material can be paralleled verse-by-verse is striking, and it didn’t have to be that way. One Evangelist could have used the other as a source but so completely rewritten the material that such verse-by-verse parallels wouldn’t appear or would be much less common.

In fact, some might argue that this is what the Evangelist John did—that he took certain stories and sayings from the Synoptic tradition and wrote them in such a different manner that the connection is rarely obvious.

It has been claimed, for example, that his account of the healing of the official’s son (John 4:46-54) is a different telling of the healing of the centurion’s servant (Matt. 8:5-13, Luke 7:1-10; note that in Matt. 8:5 the centurion asks for the healing of his pais—which in Greek can mean either “boy” or “servant”).

Similarly, it has been argued that John’s discourses convey the teachings of Jesus in a paraphrased, literary way that makes specific verse-by-verse parallels to the Synoptics uncommon (though they do exist; e.g., Matt. 10:24, Luke 6:40, John 13:16, 15:20).

The fact verse-by-verse parallels appear in the double tradition, over and over through Matthew and Luke, indicates a form of authorial conservatism: Phrasing and order might be tweaked, but the material still clearly hangs together on the levels of verses and blocks of texts.

Wherever the double tradition came from, it was treated with significant conservatism by Matthew and/or Luke, and that could lead us to expect the same for how one author would treat the Infancy Narrative of the other..

 

No Verse-by Verse Parallels

The striking thing is that there are no verse-by-verse parallels in the Infancy Narratives—at least no obvious ones as in the previous section.

This can be seen by comparing the verses in which Matthew and Luke describe the one event they definitely both record—the birth of Jesus:

MATTHEW:

[B]ut [Joseph] knew her not until she had borne a son; and he called his name Jesus (1:25).

LUKE:

And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn (2:7).

These verses both describe the same event, but they relate it in very different ways that are utterly unlike the kind of parallels we find in the double tradition.

 

Lack of Parallels on the Pericope Level

The same thing is true when we compare the Infancy Narratives on the level of blocks of text, or what scholars call pericopes (per-IH-ko-PEES). While the material can be divided different ways, here is one way of looking at it.

MATTHEW’S INFANCY NARRATIVE (31 verses):

• Jesus’ birth announced to Joseph (1:18-25)
• The arrival of the magi (2:1-12)
• The flight to Egypt (2:13-15)
• The slaughter of the innocents (2:16-18)
• The return from Egypt (2:19-23)

LUKE’S INFANCY NARRATIVE (128 verses):

• John the Baptist’s birth announced to Zechariah (1:5-25)
• Jesus’ birth announced to Mary (1:26-38)
• Mary visits Elizabeth (1:39-56)
• The birth of John the Baptist (1:57-80)
• The birth of Jesus (2:1-7)
• The arrival of the shepherds (2:8-20)
• The circumcision and presentation in the temple (2:21-38)
• Return to Nazareth (2:39-40)
• The finding in the temple (2:41-52)

Again, the material is very different, and not just in matters of phrasing or organization. Though both narratives deal with the birth and childhood of Jesus, the topics covered in the two are strikingly different.

 

Two Alternatives

These lack of verse-by-verse parallels and the lack of pericope parallels suggest one of two things:

1. Matthew and Luke didn’t know each others’ Gospels and wrote independently.
2. One did know the other’s Gospel but chose to treat its Infancy Narrative very differently.

We may concede an initial advantage to the first hypothesis since, if one Gospel is dependent on the other, its author obviously thought highly of the work he had in front of him.

If Luke used Matthew then he thought highly enough of the material in Matthew to take a fifth of it into his own Gospel. We might expect him to do the same with Matthew’s Infancy Narrative.

Exactly the same would be true if Matthew used Luke: He used a fifth of Luke’s material, so we might expect him to do the same with Luke’s Infancy Narrative.

This initial advantage is far from insuperable, however. An author does not have to slavishly follow the same procedure in handling each part of his sources. It is perfectly possible for an author to see sufficient value in some parts of his source to include them but not enough value for his purposes to include other parts.

Indeed, we have a control case in Luke’s “Great Omission.” This is a section of Mark’s Gospel that runs approximately 75 verses, from Mark 6:47 to 8:27a. Although Luke borrows a great deal of material from elsewhere in Mark, he simply leaps over this section, apparently because he didn’t think it had sufficient value for his purposes.

This shows that Luke is quite capable of omitting large sections of his sources. In fact, at 75 verses, the Great Omission is more than twice as long as Matthew’s Infancy Narrative, which is only 31 verses. Luke was thus capable of omitting sections of his sources much longer than Matthew’s Infancy Narrative.

In view of this, we can overcome the initial advantage of the independence hypothesis if we can show that there are significant reasons why Matthew or Luke would have treated the other’s Infancy Narrative differently than the material in the double tradition.

Are there such reasons?

 

The Question of Length

One reason which is easy for moderns to miss entirely, or to dramatically undervalue, is the question of length. In the ancient world, books were amazingly expensive to produce.

There were multi-volume works, such as Tacitus’s Histories and Annals, which together comprised thirty books. However, only the rich could afford to author or own such collections.

As a result, epitomes (abridgments) were very popular in the ancient world. They allowed people to get the gist of a longer work without having to pay the staggering cost to own it. Because epitomes were so popular, they often survived the ages when the original, unabridged works did not.

A well known example is 2 Maccabees, which is an abridgement of a five-volume work by Jason of Cyrene (2 Macc. 2:23). The epitome of this larger work has survived and is in our Bibles today, but the original has perished.

This illustrates the price pressure on ancient authors to keep their works short. If you wanted only the rich to have your work, multi-volume collections were fine, but if you wanted a broader audience—which the Evangelists would have (see Richard Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians)—then you needed to keep your work to a single volume.

Indeed, there was even price pressure for single-volume works to be shorter rather than longer, since it cost more to author and copy longer ones. Authors of such works needed to find the right balance between content and length, delivering the highest value content for their purposes in the shortest space possible.

This is likely a factor in the popularity of the different Gospels in the ancient world. Using numbers given by Larry W. Hurtado (The Earliest Christian Artifacts, ch. 1), here are the four Gospels ranked from shortest to longest, with the number of surviving manuscripts from the second and third centuries, which is one of our best indicators of how popular they were at the time:

• Mark (1 copy)
• John (16 copies)
• Matthew (12 copies)
• Luke (7 copies)

Even allowing for randomness or “noise” in the number of the copies that have survived, Matthew and John—the Evangelists who wrote middling-size Gospels—seem to have found the sweet spot for the ancient audience, delivering the right combination of high value content and brevity.

Matthew (1071 verses) provided a broad and well-organized representation of the Synoptic tradition, being richer in content than Mark (661 verses with the shorter ending, 678 verses with the longer ending) and both briefer and less expensive than Luke (1151 verses). John (879 verses) was on the short side and provided a wealth of material not found in the Synoptics. It’s no surprise that these proved to be the most popular Gospels in the ancient world.

The full force of the length consideration isn’t felt until you try figuring out just how expensive authoring and copying such works was. While it is intrinsically difficult to do cross-cultural price comparisons, such efforts have been made.

For example, E. Randolph Richards estimates that it would have cost Paul around $2,275 to produce Romans and have one copy to mail and one to retain for his records (Paul and First-Century Letter Writing, 169). Romans contains 433 verses, and if we scale that up for the Gospels, we get these figures:

• Mark: $3,562
• John: $4,618
• Matthew: $5,627
• Luke: $6,047

The production prices would have been even more if (as is likely) the Evangelists had more than one initial copy of their work prepared for distribution, and the costs could have been multiple times the sums involved in making a single personal copy and a single copy for distribution.

In view of these prices, it’s easy to see the motivation the Evangelists had to keep their Gospels short—partly for the sake of their own pocket books but also for the sake of their readers. The longer they wrote, the fewer people would be able to afford their works and the fewer souls would benefit.

Length is likely the consideration responsible for Luke’s “Great Omission.” This is suggested by a look at its contents:

• Walking on the Water (6:45-52)
• People Flock to Jesus (6:53-56)
• The Hand-Washing Controversy (7:1-23)
• The Syro-Phoenician Woman (7:24-31)
• Healing a Deaf Man (7:32-37)
• Feeding the Four Thousand (8:1-9)
• Interpreting the Time (8:10-13)
• “Beware the Leaven” (8:14-21)
• Healing a Blind Man (8:22-26)

The material in this section is not particularly “low value” in and of itself, but it is largely material of the same kind we find elsewhere in Mark (and Luke).

When space is at a premium—and it would be especially for Luke as the author of the longest Gospel—one only needs so many accounts of healings, exorcisms, and multiplications of loaves. It’s easy to see how Luke could have reviewed this section of Mark and decided to skip forward since he was already planning on including parallels to much of this.

This gets us back to the question of how Matthew and Luke selected the material that they did include.

 

How Matthew and Luke Used Mark

If Mark wrote first then it’s clear that both Matthew and Luke used his Gospel to obtain their general outline. In a sense, they both start with Mark and then supplement it.

They do this in different ways, however. Ninety percent of the verses of Mark are paralleled in Matthew, but only fifty-five percent are paralleled in Luke (B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels, 160).

Matthew thus had a stronger preference for using material from Mark than Luke did. Matthew’s default position was to include material from Mark unless there was a particular reason not to do so (as there apparently was in the case of ten percent of Markan material).

For Luke, there was a general preference to use material from Mark, but it wasn’t nearly as strong, as he was willing to let forty-five percent of the verses in Mark go without parallel.

 

How Matthew and Luke Used Their Source for the Double Tradition

It is sometimes argued that virtually all of the Q source must be preserved in Matthew and Luke since the original document is lost. If Q contained much material that wasn’t picked up by the Evangelists, why wasn’t it copied enough to survive?

This argument might be strengthened by an appeal to Matthew, who used ninety percent of Mark. If that’s how he handled Mark, wouldn’t he handle Q the same way?

There are easy rejoinders to this.

First, the idea that Matthew would have treated both his sources the same way is a weak assumption. He may have seen much more value in Mark than in Q and thus only preserved part of Q.

Second, there is the example of Luke, who used only fifty-five percent of Mark. If that’s how Luke treated Mark then we might expect him to treat Q in the same way. This is the flip side of the weak assumption that Matthew would have treated both sources the same.

Third, the only method we have of “identifying” Q material is the fact that it appears in both Matthew and Luke. It’s sheer speculation how the two authors would have treated a Q source, and without knowing how both of them would have treated it, we can’t infer anything with confidence about how much of it they would have used.

Fourth, the argument that if Q contained substantial additional material then it would have survived is weak.

Jesus ministered with his disciples for more than three years, and the Gospels taken together represent only a fraction of the things he said and did. This point is expressly made by John (hyperbolically) at the end of his Gospel:

But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written (John 21:25).

Memory of the majority of things that Jesus did has perished, and we can’t assume that Q would be an exception to this. The vast majority of documents from the ancient world—Christian ones included—are now lost, and the fact that an individual one survived is the exception rather than the rule.

Finally, all of the above assumes that there even was a Q. But suppose there wasn’t? What would that tell us about how Matthew and Luke handled their source for the double tradition?

The answer is straightforward.

If Luke picked up the double tradition material from Matthew then, in addition to selecting a little more than half of Mark for inclusion in his Gospel, he also took 235 verses from Matthew that he thought fit his purposes well. Most of these were taken from Matthew’s large discourses, but since Luke (apparently, on this theory) has less patience for large discourses, he put them at other locations in his Gospel.

On the other hand, if Matthew picked up the double tradition material from Luke then, after making the basic decision to use as much of Mark as possible, he went through Luke and selected 235 verses that he thought were valuable enough for his purposes to include, while still keeping his Gospel a reasonable length. He then integrated most of these verses into his five large discourses.

In either case, one Evangelist selected 235 verses—or about a fifth—of the other Gospel for inclusion in his own. To put the matter another way, one Evangelist “cherry-picked” the other—in the positive sense of selecting the best items for his purposes (not the negative sense of suppressing things he disagreed with).

One can also look at this another way, which results in somewhat different ratios.

Matthew contains 470 verses that are not paralleled in Mark. If Luke used approximately 235 of those then he would have used fifty percent of what remained of Matthew when we take away the Markan material.

Similarly, Luke contains 785 verses that are not paralleled in Mark. If Matthew used approximately 235 of those then he would have used thirty percent of what remained of Luke when we take away the Markan material.

In both cases, the Evangelist would not have a default position in favor of using material from the other Gospel. In Luke’s case, it would be a fifty-fifty tossup as to whether he used material from Matthew, while in Matthew’s case there would be a seventy percent chance he would skip material from Luke.

Whichever way one looks at the cherry-picking, it has implications for our evaluation of how each would have treated the other’s Infancy Narrative.

 

The Formulas They Would Have Used

One implication is that we can see the formulas that the two Evangelists would have used in composing their Gospels:

LUKE:

• About 365 verses from Mark (55% of the total)
• About 235 verses from Matthew (20% of the total; 50% without Markan material)
• About 550 verses from other sources

MATTHEW:

• About 600 verses from Mark (90% of the total)
• About 235 verses from Luke (20% of the total; 30% without Markan material)
• About 230 verses from other sources

In both cases, the procedure would have been to produce a shortened version of Mark, supplemented by select material from other sources, one of which was the other Synoptic.

In view of the limited amount that would have been drawn from the other Synoptic, the numerical burden does not fall on the Q skeptic to show why the Evangelist omitted certain material.

The burden would fall on the Q skeptic if there was a bias in favor of including material, but there isn’t. In Luke’s it’s a tossup whether he would include a particular Matthean verse, and in Matthew the odds are that he would not include a particular Lukan verse.

Of course, this looks at the question from a numerical point of view rather than a content point of view. One could still argue that the content of a particular verse would be so compelling that the an Evangelist would have used it, but this has to be argued rather than assumed, and the above numbers indicate the freedom to skip material that both Evangelists would have felt.

(Note: One could argue with the numbers above if one could show that Matthew borrowed a significant amount of material from Luke even though the same material was also found in Mark, or that Luke borrowed a significant amount of material from Matthew even though it was also found in Mark. Determining which version of a verse an Evangelist used—the one found in Mark or the one found in the other Evangelist—would require a significant amount of work that I do not presently have leisure for. The results also would be quite debatable, and they would not change much, since the Evangelist would know that the material was found in both of his sources, making it somewhat arbitrary which version he used. He still would be using only fifty or thirty percent of the remaining verses.)

 

The Psychology of Cherry Picking

Today, when our knowledge of Jesus is filtered almost exclusively through the four canonical Gospels, every bit of Jesus tradition takes on added value.

Imagine how exciting it would be to have a new story or saying from Jesus that we knew for a fact was accurate. It would be mind blowing!

If we put ourselves in the position of one of the original Evangelists writing a Gospel, it’s easy to imagine that we would include every scrap of Jesus tradition we knew. How could we not? Forget cost and length considerations! To do otherwise would be to risk losing a Jesus tradition for future generations forever!

But the Evangelists were not in the position we are. They had access, orally or otherwise, to many Jesus traditions that have now perished, and—except for John—they may not have had an expectation that there would be future generations. They may have thought that the world would be ending soon and that the memory of the many unwritten things that Jesus said and did would be preserved until the end.

There was therefore less pressure on them to include every Jesus tradition they knew, and this made it possible for them to cherry pick their sources without the debilitating fear that we today would have of losing traditions.

This pressure was also lessened by the fact that later Evangelists knew what the earlier ones had written. They knew that the material was already “out there” in print—that those Jesus traditions had already been preserved in writing. They therefore had less of a psychological need to include every tradition they knew.

Furthermore, as the statement from the end of John’s Gospel intimates, there was a vast pool of Jesus traditions that was still preserved in living memory. The practical realities of book writing, and the corresponding realities of evangelization through books, meant that they had to be selective in what they included.

As Martin Hengel points out regarding Luke (in this case concerning Paul, but the same applies concerning Jesus):

[W]e cannot even claim without further ado, as is the habit of so many scholars today, that Luke only knew what he reported about the early period of Christianity. He certainly knew a good deal more than he put down; when he is silent about something, there are usually special reasons for it. Only by this strict limitation of his material can he ‘put his heroes in the right perspective’ (Earliest Christianity, 36, emphasis added).

The same was true regarding the other Evangelists: They all knew a good deal more than they wrote, and we should not assume that they didn’t know a tradition just because they didn’t record it. The better question is usually why they chose to include a tradition rather than why they chose to omit one.

The assumption that an Evangelist did not know a Jesus tradition just because he doesn’t mention it is absurd given the way the later Evangelists (Matthew, Luke, and John) treated Mark in the composition of their own Gospels. None of them—not even Matthew—preserves every Jesus tradition that Mark does, yet they each knew the Jesus traditions in Mark and deliberately omitted some, in greater or lesser degrees.

When we add to this the facts that there was an even broader pool of Jesus traditions to which the Evangelists had access, and that they were writing under strong pressure to keep their Gospels short, the assumption that silence implies ignorance is more absurd still.

This puts us in a position to look directly at the choices Matthew and Luke would have made regarding the Infancy Narratives.

Both Matthew and Luke wanted to include material about Jesus birth and early life, as is obvious from the fact they included Infancy Narratives. But are there reasons why they wouldn’t use extracts from each others’ narratives the way they would have the double tradition material?

There are, and we’ll look at them from the viewpoint of each Evangelist.

 

If Luke Used Matthew

Matthew’s Infancy Narrative is only 31 verses. If Luke had chosen to include them, his Gospel would have grown to 1182 verses, representing an expansion of under three percent.

That’s not a big expansion, but it’s also not nothing. Considerations of length could have played some role—but a minor one—in Luke’s decision to omit Matthew’s Infancy Narrative.

What if we consider the content of Matthew’s narrative?

Basically, it consists of two stories. The first deal’s with Joseph learning of Mary’s pregnancy and his reaction (1:18-25) and the second deals with the arrival of the magi and the series of events it sets in motion (2:1-23). This could make it somewhat difficult for Luke to excerpt Matthew without including the whole of one or both stories.

Faced with that choice, he presumably would not have a great deal of interest in recording the first story. Internal indications in Luke strongly suggest that Mary herself was one of his sources (either directly or at a close remove; see Luke 2:19, 51), and he was especially interested in presenting the traditions derived from her.

It could have been difficult to pull away and re-show the situation from Joseph’s perspective, particularly without disrupting the literary rhythms he was establishing with the parallels between John the Baptist’s birth and Jesus’ birth.

Also, given Joseph’s initial intention to divorce Mary (Matt. 1:19), including him in the narrative could cause him to appear in an undesirable, negative light due to comparisons with Zechariah, who initially did not believe (Luke 1:18-20, cf. 1:45).

Regarding the second story, much of it could not be easily excerpted—the flight to Egypt, the slaughter of the innocents, and the return from Egypt to Nazareth make no sense without a discussion of the magi.

Luke could have offered an abbreviated account of the magi’s visit without going into the events their arrival caused. Indeed, some have thought he should have done so given his interest in Gentiles. Robert H. Stein writes:

Why would Luke have omitted such material as the coming of the wise men (Matt. 2:1-12)? Would not the presence of such Gentiles at the birth of Jesus have been meaningful for Luke’s Gentile-oriented Gospel? (The Synoptic Problem, 102).

Stein misspeaks, because the magi did not come at Jesus’ birth. They came up to two years after his birth (Matt. 2:16), and that of itself could provide Luke with a disincentive to mention the visit. Given his interest in providing an orderly narrative (Luke 1:3), he would have needed to indicate a lengthy stay in Bethlehem, which may have been more chronology than he wanted to go into.

Further, he already had the story of the shepherds’ visit, and they were there the night of Jesus’ birth. This tradition presumably came from Mary herself, and Luke was keen to include the traditions he had from her. If he wanted to include that story, he may have considered the visit of the magi less important to record. He would have needed to indicate that the shepherds came and then, a year or two later, the magi arrived.

We have already seen how he recorded the Feeding of the Five Thousand (Luke 9:10-17) but he omits its sequel, the Feeding of the Four Thousand (Mark 8:1-9). In the same way he may have wished to include the initial visit of the shepherds but considered this sufficient to show the miraculous arrival of witnesses, without a need to include the event’s delayed sequel.

Finally, some have argued that Luke may have had other reasons to omit the account. Mark Goodacre writes:

Luke is the only writer other than Matthew in the New Testament to give us a hint of his view of the magi and it is negative—a certain Simon Magus is one of the villains in Acts of the Apostles (8:9-24). Moreover, at least since Conzelmann scholars have been sensitive to Luke’s apparent reticence to have Jesus coming into contact with Gentiles in the Gospel. One only has to witness the lengths to which Luke has gone to keep the Centurion out of Jesus’ sight to see the point (Matt 8:5-13 // Luke 7:1-11) (The Case Against Q, 56).

Personally, I’m more inclined to see Matthew as omitting mention of the centurion’s agents as a way of keeping his narrative of the event uncluttered, but there are still sufficient reasons why, if Luke had Matthew’s Gospel in front of him, he could have decided not to include the material in Matthew’s Infancy Narrative.

Now let’s look at the possibility that Matthew used Luke.

 

If Matthew Used Luke

The consideration of space would have weighed heavily on Matthew if he used Luke’s Gospel in producing his own. Luke’s infancy narrative is 128 verses long. For Matthew to include it would lengthen his Gospel to 1199 verses, making it the longest Gospel and increasing its volume by twelve percent!

If Matthew had Luke in front of him, he likely wanted to produce something shorter than Luke (since he did), and going even longer would be something he would resist.

Another way of looking at this is by the proportionate length of the Infancy Narratives. Matthew’s is 31 verses long, while Luke’s is 128 verses long. This means that Luke’s Infancy Narrative is more than four times as long as Matthew’s! It’s easy to see how Matthew might have wanted to keep his Infancy Narrative shorter and not devote a large fraction of his whole Gospel to it (as Luke did, with his Infancy Narrative amounting to eleven percent of his whole Gospel).

Further, in keeping with his fundamental choice to only include select material from Luke (twenty percent of it), it is easy to imagine him sticking with his default choice to omit Lukan material when it came to that Gospel’s Infancy Narrative and not lift pericopes from it.

This is particularly the case when we look at the content of Luke’s Infancy Narrative.

First, much of it is taken up with speeches, such as Gabriel’s announcement of John’s birth (1:13-17), Gabriel’s announcement of Jesus’ birth (1:28-33), Mary’s canticle (1:46-55), Zechariah’s canticle (1:68-79), the angels’ announcement to the shepherds (2:10-14), and Simeon’s speech (2:29-35).

Second, much of the material isn’t about Jesus’ birth at all but John the Baptist’s.

Third, the material about John the Baptist’s birth is interwoven with the material about Jesus’ birth in a way that would make it difficult to pull them apart. Much of Gabriel’s appearance to Mary and all Mary’s visit to Elizabeth only make sense if read in light of the John the Baptist birth narrative.

Fourth, Luke spends time narrating how Mary and Joseph did perfectly ordinary things for Jesus that any Jewish parents would do for their firstborn son (2:21-24).

Fifth, Luke relates minor incidents like the encounter with the prophetess Anna (who isn’t even quoted; 2:36-38) and the finding in the temple (2:41-51). As heartwarming as these are, they are not high-priority items, as illustrated by their omission by the other three Gospels.

If you pull out these elements, there is basically nothing left of Luke’s Infancy Narrative, so it is easy to see how a space-pressed Matthew could have looked at Luke 1 and 2 and decided to stick with his default decision to omit rather than include. He has his own traditions about Jesus’ birth that he wants to record, he can relate the important facts about Jesus birth (see the next section) without excerpting Luke, and he knows Luke’s traditions have already been preserved in writing.

 

Common Elements

Thus far we’ve been looking at the Infancy Narratives through the lens of what is different between them. If not balanced, this can lead to a false impression, because the two narratives also have multiple points in common.

In his book The Birth of the Messiah, Raymond E. Brown notes eleven points shared by the two narratives:

a)        The parents to be are Mary and Joseph who are legally engaged or married, but have not yet come to live together or have [sic] sexual relations (Matt 1:18; Luke 1:27, 34).

b)        Joseph is of Davidic descent (Matt 1:16, 20; Luke 1:27, 32; 2:4).

c)         There is an angelic announcement of the forthcoming birth of the child (Matt 1:20–23; Luke 1:30–35).

d)        The conception of the child by Mary is not through intercourse with her husband (Matt 1:20, 23, 25; Luke 1:34).

e)        The conception is through the Holy Spirit (Matt 1:18, 20; Luke 1:35).

f)         There is a directive from the angel that the child is to be named Jesus (Matt 1:21; Luke 1:31).

g)        An angel states that Jesus is to be Savior (Matt 1:21; Luke 2:11).

h)        The birth of the child takes place after the parents have come to live together (Matt 1:24–25; Luke 2:5–6).

i)         The birth takes place at Bethlehem (Matt 2:1; Luke 2:4–6).

j)         The birth is chronologically related to the reign (days) of Herod the Great (Matt 2:1; Luke 1:5).

k)        The child is reared at Nazareth (Matt 2:23; Luke 2:39) (pp., 34-35).

What accounts for this material? In his book, Brown makes the following argument:

Since it is generally agreed among scholars that Matthew and Luke wrote independently of each other, without knowing the other’s work, agreement between the two infancy narratives would suggest the existence of a common infancy tradition earlier than either evangelist’s work—a tradition that would have a claim to greater antiquity and thus weigh on the plus side of the historical scale (p. 34).

Brown’s argument assumes that Matthew and Luke wrote independently of each other. Since that is what we are reconsidering, it’s logical to reject this premise and see what the results might be: If one Evangelist had the other’s Gospel in front of him, could that be responsible for these similarities?

It’s difficult to imagine Matthew or Luke being totally dependent on the other for his knowledge of traditions about Jesus’ birth. Such traditions were already out there in the Christian community, and they are reflected elsewhere in the New Testament. For example:

• Jesus is descended from David (Mark 10:47, John 7:42, Rom. 1:3, 2 Tim. 2:8, Rev. 5:5, 22:16, etc.).
• Jesus is from Bethlehem (John 7:42).
• Jesus is “of Nazareth” (Mark 1:9, John 1:45, Acts 2:22, etc.).

It’s difficult to imagine an individual well-informed enough and motivated enough to write a Gospel including an Infancy Narrative not to have done his own research into the question of what happened at Jesus’ birth. Therefore, even if one Evangelist used the other, it’s unlikely that he drew all of the common elements from the other.

It is more likely that each Evangelist knew some or all of the common elements from his own sources and that he included them because they communicated things he wanted his readers to know about Jesus.

However, even if both Evangelists had their own sources for each of the common elements, this does not mean that they worked with no knowledge of the other Evangelist. As Goodacre points out regarding the possibility that Luke knew Matthew:

[K]nowledge of a source is not the same as direct use of a source, and one of the key questions is whether there are any signs of Luke’s knowledge of Matthew in the Birth Narrative. After all, Luke may well have been inspired by Matthew’s account to write his own somewhat different account. If this possibility is taken seriously, the focus shifts away from the lack of extensive parallels between Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 toward the more nuanced question of evidence for Luke’s knowledge of Matthew. In other words, rather than looking at the obvious points of divergence between the accounts, we might ask whether any of the points of contact are sufficiently marked to suggest that Luke may have known Matthew [op. cit., 56].

The same is true of the possibility that Matthew used Luke.

So: Are there indications that one Evangelist knew the other?

 

Indications of Knowledge?

Goodacre writes:

Though it is not often appreciated, there are indeed signs that Luke knows Matthew’s Birth Narrative. Not only do they agree on matters unique to the two of them within the New Testament, like Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, the name of Jesus’ father (Joseph) and, most importantly, the Virginal Conception, they even share words in common, including the following key sentence:

Matt 1:21

teksetai de huion kai kaleseis to onoma autou Iēsoun.

She will give birth to a son and you shall call him Jesus.

Luke 1:31

kai teksē huion kai kaleseis to onoma autou Iēsoun.

You will give birth to a son and you shall call him Jesus (op. cit., 56-57).

The initial items that Goodacre mentions could be explained other ways. The belief that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem was widely held, and it even is mentioned in John (7:42), so this was out there in the Christian community. Similarly, anyone within living memory of Jesus’ birth would have been able to find out the names of his parents. And the Virgin Birth is so striking an event that it would have been widely noted in Christian circles.

What about the word-for-word passage that the two share in common? This is certainly not the only time that heaven has directed a child to be given a particular name. In fact, we saw the same thing earlier in Luke, when Gabriel told Zechariah what to name John the Baptist (Luke 1:13).

The same thing has precedents in the Old Testament (e.g., Is. 8:3, Hos. 1:4, 6, 9). Particularly notable are Genesis 16:11, 17:19 and Isaiah 7:14, which in the Septuagint read as follows:

Genesis 16:11

su en gastri ekheis, kai teksē huion, kai kaleseis to onoma autou Ismaēl.

you are with child, and shall bear a son; you shall call his name Ishmael.

Genesis 17:19

hē gunē sou teksetai soi huion kai kaleseis to onoma autou Isaak.

your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac.

Isaiah 7:14

hē parthenos en gastri lēpsetai, kai teksetai huion, kai kaleseis to onoma autou Emmanouēl.

a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

These are so similar to what we find in Matthew and Luke that it is reasonable to conclude, with Joseph A. Fitzmyer, that:

The message to Mary is couched in rather stereotyped OT phraseology for announcing the conception and birth of an extraordinary child (The Gospel According to Luke (1-9), 346).

Rather than evidence of one Evangelist borrowing this phrasing from the other, it is just as likely that they were borrowing from the Old Testament.

That’s particularly the case with Matthew, who in the next two verses indicates the origin of the angel’s phraseology, stating that the angel’s message was a fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14 (“All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel,” Matt. 1:22-23).

While Luke could have been influenced by Matthew to use this kind of phraseology in his Gospel, the phraseology itself is too common for this to be relied upon. Luke easily could have written independently of Matthew and come up with the same phrasing from the Old Testament parallels.

 

Mirror Elements

If the above parallels between the Infancy Narratives are not persuasive, do any exist that are?

I think so. Brown notes that some of the common elements in the Infancy Narratives appear in different forms:

For example, while both Gospels have Jesus’ birth announced by angels, in Matthew the angel speaks to Joseph but in Luke the angel speaks to Mary (op. cit., 34).

This is not the only element of its kind. We may note several elements Brown does not record that mirror each other, in addition to the initial one:

1)        Angels speak to both of Jesus’ parents—Joseph in Matthew and Mary in Luke (Matt 1:20–23; Luke 1:30–35).

2)        The birth of Jesus is attended by celestial phenomena—a star in Matthew and a host of angels in Luke (Matt 2:2, 7, 9, 10; Luke 2:9-15).

3)        These celestial phenomena were observed by others, who were motivated to visit the child and his parents (Matt 2:1-12; Luke 2:15-20).

4)        The child’s visitors were of different social statuses (shepherds being of low education and rank and magi being of high education and rank).

5)        The child’s visitors were of different ethnicities (the shepherds being Jews and the magi being Gentiles).

Stepping outside the narrow bounds of the Infancy Narratives, we also may also add:

6)        Both Gospels include genealogies of Jesus but they are strikingly different in multiple respects (see below).

The way Matthew and Luke mirror each other on these points suggests that one was writing in response to the other. The question is: Why?

One reason might be supplemental intent—that is, one Evangelist knew the other had preserved one set of traditions in writing, and he wanted to preserve additional ones. This kind of intent is demonstrable elsewhere in the Gospels, as when John intentionally supplements Mark (see Richard Bauckham, “John for Readers of Mark,” The Gospels for All Christians; see also here).

However, the way the elements mirror each other suggests that more than just supplemental intent was at work. It has long been noted that:

• Matthew’s narrative focuses almost exclusively on Joseph, while Luke’s focuses almost exclusively on Mary
• Matthew accentuates Jesus’ regal dimension (his genealogy records Jesus’ descent from Solomon and the line of kings that followed him, King Herod being threatened by Jesus’ birth, and the visit of foreign dignitaries seeking to honor the new king) while Luke presents Jesus as a man of the common people (his genealogy records Jesus’ descent from Nathan, Mary praising God for his deeds on behalf of the lowly, and the visit of humble shepherds)

These are significant clues to why one Evangelist may have wanted to respond to the other. The question is: Who was responding to whom?

If Luke was responding to Matthew then he may have found the latter’s emphasis on Joseph and Jesus’ regal dimension not fully to his taste. He then balanced it by using the traditions he had regarding Mary and by bringing out the dimension of God’s compassion through Jesus on the lowly.

If Matthew was responding to Luke then he may have felt that Luke omitted information and themes which would have been important for his audience of Jewish Christians. He may have felt that Luke’s overwhelming emphasis on Mary and his populist themes needed to be balanced for a Jewish audience with an emphasis on Joseph, through whom Jesus would have had legal claim to the Davidic monarchy. He similarly may have felt that the regal aspect of Jesus needed further emphasis, and the traditions he had at his disposal allowed him to accomplish both of these goals.

 

A Word About the Genealogies

Having mentioned the genealogies of Jesus (Matt. 1:1-17, Luke 3:23-38), it is appropriate to say a few words about them, though they are only ambiguously grouped with the Infancy Narratives. (Matthew’s genealogy could be conceived of either as separate or as part of his Infancy Narrative, while Luke’s is found outside his Infancy Narrative, in his account of Jesus’ ministry.)

Given the well-known differences between these genealogies, including the fact that they trace Jesus’ descent through different lines, many have seen the two as evidence of the independence of Matthew and Luke. Thus Stein writes:

[I]f Luke had before him Matthew’s birth account and genealogy, one wonders if he would not have sought in some way to ‘harmonize’ the one we have in his Gospel with the Matthean version (The Synoptic Problem, 102, emphasis added).

Once again, there are plausible reasons why one Evangelist would choose to include a different genealogy than the one he saw the other using.

If Luke knew Matthew’s Gospel then several things may have leapt out at him regarding its genealogy: (1) It only goes back to Abraham (Matt. 1:1, 17), (2) it omits multiple generations in order to fit a scheme of three, fourteen-generation blocks (Matt. 1:17), (3) it’s right up at the front of the Gospel (Matt. 1:1-17), and (4) it shows Jesus descending from David through Solomon and the line of kings down to Jeconiah (Matt. 1:6-12).

Luke thus may have chosen to include his genealogy to balance each of these: Thus (1) he took his genealogy all the way back to Adam, to make explicit the parallels between Jesus and Adam as sons of God in unique ways (Luke 3:38; cf. Rom. 5:14, 1 Cor. 15:22, 45, 47), (2) he included a fuller list of the generations that is not compressed the way Matthew’s is (though it may be seen as eleven blocks of seven generations; see Richard Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in Early Christianity, 318-321), (3) he placed his genealogy later in the Gospel so that it would not provide the abrupt, contextless start for his Gentile readers that Matthew’s placement of the genealogy right at the front of his Gospel would have, and (4) he recorded Jesus’ descent from David through his son Nathan (Luke 3:31), thus avoiding the line of kings terminating in Jeconiah.

The last deserves special comment. Jeremiah had pronounced a curse upon Jeconiah (aka Coniah, Jehoiachin), indicating that his sons would not be king after him:

As I live, says the Lord, though Coniah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, were the signet ring on my right hand, yet I would tear you off. . . . Thus says the Lord: ‘Write this man down as childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days; for none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David, and ruling again in Judah’” (Jer. 22:24, 30).

Because of the flexibility of the Old Testament concept of “son,” it could be questioned whether the prophecy applied to Jeconiah’s immediate sons or to all of his male descendants, in which case none of them would have a claim to being the Messianic son of David (at least not due to their descent from Jeconiah).

Whether the Messiah could be a son of Jeconiah is disputed in Judaism today, and it may well have been in Jesus’ day.

If so, Luke might have included his genealogy to make it clear that Jesus’ claim as Messiah did not rest merely on his descent from David through Jeconiah; he had a claim to being a son of David and thus a potential candidate for Messiah apart from this.

Or the problem may not have been just Jeconiah, but the entire line of kings from Solomon to David. Bauckham writes:

[I]n the Old Testament prophetic tradition, which both condemned the kings of Judah and expected a renewal of the Davidic monarchy, under a righteous king in the future, the dominant expectation was for a new Davidic king who was not descended from David through the royal line of the kings of Judah. This expectation is classically embodied in Isaiah 11:1: ‘There shall come forth a shoot (ḥōṭer) from the stump of Jesse, and a branch (nēṣer) shall grow out of his roots’ (RSV). The image is of a tree chopped down to a stump. A new shoot grows up from the roots (see Job 14:7–9 for the image). The natural meaning is that the tree of the royal house of David will be cut down in judgment, and the ideal king of the future will be derived, not from the royal line of the kings of Judah, but from the origins of the dynasty, indicated by the reference to Jesse. He will represent, as it were, a fresh start, taken, like David himself, from non-royal stock. If he is a descendant of David at all, then he will have to come of a line of David’s descendants other than the royal line through Solomon and the kings of Judah.

That this is the correct interpretation of Isaiah 11:1 is confirmed by the similar implication of Micah 5:2 (Hebrew 5:1):

But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah,
who are little to be among the clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
one who is to be ruler in Israel,
whose origin is from of old, from ancient days (RSV).

The new king is to be born not in the royal palace in Jerusalem, but in insignificant Bethlehem, where David’s line began. He will derive not from the royal line of the kings of Judah, but from the ancient origins of the line, from the beginnings of David’s dynasty. Again there is doubtless the intention of going back behind the corruption of the kings of Judah and making a fresh start, comparable with God’s original choice of David himself (Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in Early Christianity, 334-335).

In fact, there appears to have been a tradition that the Messiah would be a descendant of Nathan in particular (Bauckham, op. cit., 347-354).

For each of these reasons, if Luke had Matthew’s Gospel in front of him, he may have been prompted to include his own genealogy, making the descent from Nathan rather than the line of kings ending in Jeconiah clear.

On the other hand, if Matthew had Luke’s Gospel in front of him, several things also would have jumped out about its genealogy: (1) It’s in a very non-traditional, reverse order, (2) it ends in Adam, (3) it’s in a very unexpected place, and (4) it skips entirely the line of kings after David.

Matthew then would have included his own genealogy to balance these: (1) A reverse-order genealogy was extremely unusual for a Jewish genealogy, and Matthew may well have wanted to give his Jewish Christian readers a more standard presentation of the Messiah’s lineage, (2) he may have wanted to relate the Messiah more clearly to the people of Israel and its great historic events (Abraham, David, the Babylonian Exile), compared to the universalist, Lukan genealogy linking the Messiah to the dawn of the whole human race, (3) he may have wanted to put his genealogy of Jesus before his account of the birth, which better reflects the placement of genealogies in the Old Testament and which avoids Luke’s highly unusual placement of Jesus’ genealogy after his baptism, and, finally, (4) for those unfamiliar with or unconvinced by the prophetic interpretations above (a group that may, in fact, have been a majority among ordinary people; “Of course the Messiah is a descendant of the line of Davidic kings! He’s the royal Son of David!”), Matthew may have wanted to make it clear that Jesus did have a claim to being the Messiah via descent through Solomon and the line of Davidic kings.

The fact the two genealogies trace Jesus’ descent from different sons of David is likely explained by ambiguity in Jesus’ day regarding precisely how the Messiah would be descended from David. Indeed, the fact that people had different opinions about this is likely why Jesus’ family (among others) preserved the memory of its descent through both lines—and why the Evangelists felt the need to present both to their audiences.

In view of each of the factors listed above, for both Evangelists the point deliberately would have been not to present the lineage of the Messiah in the same way as the Gospel he had in front of him but to present it in a different way.

 

Overall Design

A final indication that Matthew and Luke were not writing independently is that they both came up with such similar overall designs for their Gospels. This goes beyond the Infancy Narratives and the genealogies, but it also includes them and so is relevant here.

Both Evangelists saw a promising foundation in Mark, but they wanted to expand it in order to reach particular audiences. The fact that they both expanded it in the same way suggests that one may have been prompted by the work done by the other.

One of the expansions they made was to include post-Resurrection narratives that went beyond the shorter ending of Mark. If Mark originally ended without such appearances or if its original ending had already been lost, then it is easy to understand why they did so. This would be a natural expansion that their audiences would have wanted—as illustrated by the fact that post-Resurrection appearances are also found in John (20:11-21:23), in the longer ending of Mark (16:9-19), and even outside the Gospels in Paul (1 Cor. 15:5-8).

What’s more significant is the fact that they both included Infancy Narratives, and narratives of the kind they did. Considering the possibility that Luke used Matthew, Goodacre writes:

The theory that Luke could not have known Matthew because he does not copy wholesale from his Birth Narrative is not, therefore, especially convincing. Indeed like many arguments for Q, reflection on the evidence can lead in quite the opposite direction, in favor of Luke’s familiarity with Matthew. Perhaps Matthew’s Birth Narrative gave Luke the idea of writing a Birth Narrative of his own; perhaps it was the catalyst for Luke’s identical decision to preface Mark’s Gospel with an account featuring both prenatal (Matt 1 // Luke 1) and postnatal (Matt 2 // Luke 2) stories about Jesus. Because many readers are so familiar with the Birth Narratives, it is easy to assume that prefacing a Gospel with a Birth Narrative is a natural step to take, but neither Mark nor John thought that it was such an obvious thing to do and, all things considered, the presence of a Birth Narrative in Luke is probably a sign that Luke knows Matthew (op. cit., 57).

Or it is a sign that Matthew knew Luke.

In the same way, one Evangelist may have prompted the other to include a genealogy—something no other author of the New Testament chose to do.

The overall design of Matthew and Luke—the fact that they decided to expand on Mark in such similar ways—can thus be seen as further evidence that they were not writing independently.

 

Conclusion

The argument that the differences in the Infancy Narratives of Matthew and Luke show that they were writing independently of each other is utterly unconvincing.

It rests on the premises that the two Evangelists must have been ignorant of what they did not mention or that one would have found quoting material from the other’s Infancy Narrative irresistible.

Both of these premises are false. As their handling of Mark reveals, Matthew and Luke demonstrably left out Jesus traditions that they were aware of, and there are sound reasons why both could have chosen to omit the material found in the other’s Infancy Narrative. Chief among these reasons are the then-pressing need to save space (particularly for Matthew) and the need to serve the respective Jewish and Gentile audiences they were trying to reach.

Indeed, serving the needs of these audiences is likely the reason why multiple elements of the Infancy Narratives mirror each other, which would not be expected if the accounts were independent. This applies also to the twin genealogies of Jesus, whose inclusion in the New Testament is otherwise very perplexing.

These considerations—as well as the fact that they both chose to compose Gospels that expanded Mark using the same overall design—provide a compelling alternative to the Q hypothesis that must be taken seriously.

There is a clear literary relationship between three of the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

That’s why these three are known as the “synoptic” Gospels—because they offer a “shared view” of Jesus’ life (Greek, sun = “together” + opsis “seeing”).

The question of how they are related is known as the Synoptic Problem, and you can read my discussions of it here.

 

Which Evangelist Wrote First?

Through much of Church history, the dominant view has been that Matthew’s Gospel was the first to be written and that Mark either abbreviated Matthew or that Mark combined and abbreviated both Matthew and Luke.

After careful study, I would argue that neither of these proposals fits the evidence. Mark did not abbreviate Matthew (see here), nor did he combine and abbreviate Matthew and Luke (see here). Further, the earliest testimony we have—likely from one of the other authors of the New Testament—indicates that Mark wrote first (see here and here).

I therefore conclude that modern scholars are most likely correct when they argue that Mark wrote his Gospel first and Matthew and Luke used it as sources.

I am skeptical, however, of the claim of many modern scholars that Matthew and Luke also used another, now-lost, source known as Q (from the German word Quelle = “source,” though see F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, ch. 4, fn. 9).

 

Kinds of Material Found in the Synoptic Gospels

The fundamental reason that scholars propose the existence of a lost Q source is that the material in Matthew and Luke falls into one of four categories:

a)    Material that Matthew and Luke have in common with Mark

b)   Material that Matthew and Luke have in common with each other and that is not found in Mark.

c)    Material that Matthew alone has.

d)   Material that Luke alone has.

On the view that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, we can assume that both Evangelists derived the category (a) material from Mark.

The category (c) material, which is uniquely found in Matthew, must have come from sources unique to Matthew, and the same would be true for the category (d) material that is uniquely found in Luke.

But what about the category (b) material—the material in both Matthew and Luke that couldn’t have come from Mark, because it isn’t in Mark?

 

Explanations for the Material in the Synoptic Gospels

Scholars seem capable of proposing a limitless number of complex, convoluted ways that this material can be explained—involving a tangle of hypothetical sources and lost editions of the Gospels—but Occam’s Razor suggests that we not turn to these unless simpler explanations fail.

This makes our job easier because there are four, and only four, simple explanations for the category (b) material:

1. Matthew and Luke got it from a hodgepodge of different sources, and it happened to end up in both Gospels by chance
2. Matthew and Luke both got it (or most of it) from a common source, which is now lost
3. Luke got it from Matthew
4. Matthew got it from Luke

If the material that Matthew and Luke have uniquely in common amounted to only a few verses—perhaps a few sayings or stories of Jesus—then we might chalk this up to chance.

The difficulty with this view is that there is rather a lot of material in category (b): It amounts to around 235 verses, which is 22% of the verses in Matthew (1071 verses in total) and more than 20% of the verses in Luke (1151 verses in total). In both cases, the category (b) material amounts to more than a fifth of the respective Gospels.

This seems like too much material to attribute to random chance.

That points us to the possibilities that there is a lost source (dubbed Q), that Luke got the material from Matthew, or that Matthew got the material from Luke.

Why do modern scholars prefer the first of these proposals?

To some extent, it may be because of peer pressure. Around a hundred years ago, scholars began to prefer the first proposal—the Q hypothesis—and there was a snowball effect. They saw their peers adopting this proposal, and they naturally adopted it, too.

This tendency is sometimes called the bandwagon effect, and it is a known phenomenon in human psychology. However, that doesn’t mean that it is more likely to lead to the truth. Objectively, one still needs reasons to prefer the proposal favored by the majority to the alternative proposals.

So: Are there reasons to prefer the Q hypothesis to the alternatives that Luke got the material from Matthew or visa versa?

 

Christ’s Infancy and Resurrection

One way of trying to answer the question is to go through Matthew and Luke in minute detail—looking at the Greek text of individual verses to see what they tell us about the possibility that each of the proposals is correct.

This is an important task, but it requires a close reading of the Greek texts which is not easily accessible to the average reader. Many of the individual data points are also quite technical and debatable.

My preference here is to look at larger elements of the text which are found even in translations of the original language, such as modern English Bibles.

Even if we here put aside the details of individual verses, it is clear that there are certain passages in Matthew and Luke that could serve as tests for how the Synoptic Gospels were written.

These are the Infancy Narratives, which deal with Jesus’ birth and infancy (Matt. 1:8-2:23, Luke 1:5-52) and the Resurrection Narratives (Matt. 28:1-20, Luke 24:1-53).

The argument is that these two sections are so different from each other that Matthew and Luke did not know each other’s Gospels. In other words, if Luke knew Matthew (or visa versa) then he would not have written his Infancy Narrative or his Resurrection Narrative so differently from the other Gospel. They would have been more similar to each other.

A version of this argument is implicitly offered by Robert H. Stein, who writes:

One final argument that can be listed against the theory that Luke used the Gospel of Matthew as a source is the lack of M [i.e., category (c)] material in Luke. (The same type of argument can also be made for Matthew’s not having used Luke, i.e., the lack of any L [i.e., category (d)] material in Matthew.) . . . Why would Luke have omitted such material as the coming of the wise men (Matt. 2:1-12)? Would not the presence of such Gentiles at the birth of Jesus have been meaningful for Luke’s Gentile-oriented Gospel? Why would he have omitted the flight to Egypt and return to Nazareth (Matt. 2:13-23); the story of the guards at the tomb (Matt. 27:62-66) and their report (Matt. 28:11-15); the unique Matthean material concerning the resurrection (Matt. 28:9-10, 16-20); and so on? Added to this is the observation that if Luke had before him Matthew’s birth account and genealogy, one wonders if he would not have sought in some way to ‘harmonize’ the one we have in his Gospel with the Matthean version (The Synoptic Problem, 102).

I say that Stein’s version of the argument is implicit, because he does not note that each of his examples is drawn from either the Infancy Narratives or the Resurrection Narratives (a point made by Mark Goodacre; The Case Against Q, 55).

An argument from the Infancy and Resurrection Narratives is legitimate in principle. If one Evangelist used the other then we would expect there to be traces of that in his presentation of Christ’s infancy and resurrection. If we find no such traces then that suggests Matthew and Luke wrote independently. And, in that case, the material they have in common would most probably be attributed to a lost source (Q).

However, before adopting this conclusion, we need to ask whether the two narratives are really so different from each other, whether they can be explained by Luke using Matthew or Matthew using Luke, or whether there are reasons why one Evangelist would avoid using the other in these parts of his Gospel.

This we will do in the next two posts.

Up next . . .

• The Infancy Narratives and Q
• The Resurrection Narratives and Q

According to a view that St. Augustine proposed when he began his Harmony of the Gospels, Mark was the second Gospel to be written, and it was basically an abridgement of Matthew.

Luke then wrote third, and John last.

This idea is known as the “Augustinian hypothesis.”

Despite its historical popularity, there are several reasons to think that it is incorrect.

 

Augustine’s Arguments

St. Augustine wrote:

Mark follows him [Matthew] closely, and looks like his attendant and epitomizer.

For in his narrative he gives nothing in concert with John apart from the others: by himself separately, he has little to record; in conjunction with Luke, as distinguished from the rest, he has still less; but in concord with Matthew, he has a very large number of passages.

Much, too, he narrates in words almost numerically and identically the same as those used by Matthew, where the agreement is either with that evangelist alone, or with him in connection with the rest [Harmony of the Gospels, I:2:4].

Augustine thus argued that Mark followed Matthew (he was “his attendant”) and that he shortened Matthew (he was his “epitomizer”). He therefore offers two arguments for his proposal:

1) Mark has a great deal of material in common with Matthew compared to Luke and John.

2) Mark’s wording is very similar to that of Matthew compared to Luke and John.

 

The Argument from Parallels

It’s quite true that Mark’s Gospel has a great deal in common with Matthew’s Gospel.

It is commonly estimated that 90% of the material found in Mark is also found in Matthew (B. F. Streeter, The Four Gospels, 160). Nine out of ten verses in Mark are paralleled in Matthew!

There are more parallels between Mark and Matthew than in any two other pairings of Gospels, so there does seem to be a special relationship between the two.

Augustine could be correct, then, that Mark took Matthew’s Gospel and abridged it, but it could also be the other way around: Matthew could have taken Mark’s Gospel, used nine tenths of it, and then added traditions from other sources.

Like many arguments concerning the Synoptic Problem, this one is reversible. Either Gospel could be using the other, so more evidence is needed to decide the question.

 

The Argument from Language

A problem for Augustine’s argument based on similarity of language is that, even if he is right that Mark’s language is most similar to Matthew’s, the argument would be reversible.

Just as with the previous argument, such similarity of language could be explained either by Mark using Matthew or by Matthew using Mark.

We still need to look for more evidence.

 

Matthew the Eyewitness

Some have argued that if, as traditionally has been held, Matthew was the author of the Gospel that bears his name then he would have been unlikely to use the Gospel of Mark.

It is pointed out that Matthew was an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry, whereas Mark was not. Would an eyewitness really base his Gospel on one written by a non-eyewitness?

Some have suggested that the answer is no, he would not be likely to do that. Therefore, since there is a relationship between Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels, this relationship is better explained if Mark—the non-eyewitness—used Matthew’s Gospel rather than the other way around.

How good is this argument?

One could challenge it by arguing that Matthew didn’t write the Gospel attributed to him, but I support the traditional authorship view, so I don’t have an interest in going that route.

I do, however, think the argument is open to serious critique.

 

It’s Weak

First, each of the Gospels uses material that the author was not an eyewitness of. None of them are simply memoirs of what someone experienced when they were with Jesus.

This demonstrates that the Evangelists were not averse to describing events that they did not witness and for which they had to rely on sources.

Second, Matthew’s Gospel indicates that he was not among Jesus’ first disciples. That group was recruited in chapter 4, but Matthew doesn’t appear until chapter 9.

While Matthew likely heard the content of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) multiple times during his time with Jesus, he is dependent on others for what happened before he joined Jesus’ band of disciples.

Third, the issue is not whether a text was written by an eyewitness but whether it is accurate.

If Matthew thought that Mark’s Gospel was accurate then he could use it as a source whether it was written by an eyewitness or not. Indeed, he could have found that Mark corresponded well with his own memories of Jesus’ ministry and used it as a source.

Fourth, the earliest evidence we have—evidence that dates from the first century figure known as John the Presbyter (who may or may not be the same as John the Apostle)—indicates that Mark was based on the preaching of Peter, and Peter was an eyewitness.

Indeed, Peter was an even more authoritative eyewitness than Matthew (cf. Matt. 16:18). He was also one of Jesus’ first disciples and had been with Jesus longer than Matthew.

The view that Mark’s Gospel was based on Peter’s preaching was present in the first century, and for precisely this reason Matthew might have chosen to use it as one of his sources.

Furthermore, according to Acts, Matthew and Peter seem to have spent more than a decade living and preaching in Jerusalem after the ministry of Jesus. Matthew thus would have heard Peter’s preaching on many occasions and would have been able to recognize Mark as an accurate record of it.

 

My Own Experience

I can also speak from my own experience, here.

In the ancient, pre-copyright age, authors borrowed much more freely from each other than they do today.

This was particularly so in anonymous works, which both Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels were in the sense that their names are not recorded in the text itself.

If Matthew came across Mark’s Gospel and realized that it presented the core of the story of Jesus in much the way he would present it then he would have been inclined to use it as a laborsaving means.

Why reinvent the wheel? Why not use what’s already there, supplement it, and polish it?

This is an experience I have had many times. For over twenty years, I have worked in an educational ministry that publishes a lot of resources, often without bylines.

In this informal, collaborative environment, I have had the occasion many times to take a text originally written by someone else, apply it to a new purpose, and modify it accordingly.

I don’t do that for books, articles, or blog posts that are meant to be copyrighted and published under my name. Modern rules about copyright and plagiarism apply to those.

But there is another class of materials (e.g., materials the ministry publishes without a byline or that are attributed to “staff”) where those rules do not apply, and different internal authors may freely borrow from one another.

If I was producing such a text, and a prior text of the same category was available that did much of what I wanted the new text to do, I would not hesitate to use its language—extracting, expanding, abridging, and editing it to fit the new purpose.

This environment is much like the one that seems to have prevailed among the Synoptic Evangelists—where they were all united in the common purpose of telling the story of Jesus and questions of authorial “ownership” of their texts were secondary.

Since Matthew was not producing a memoir but a biography, he was willing to use sources to describe things that he didn’t see. Given that, he likely would have been willing to use sources to describe things he did witness—rather than insisting on deliberately starting from scratch to describe them.

Based on my own experience, I have no difficulty imagining Matthew taking Mark’s Gospel in hand and saying, “This does much of what I want. I’ll use it as a base text and expand and modify it to suit the purposes I want my own Gospel to fulfill.”

The argument that Matthew would not have used Mark because Mark was not an eyewitness thus strikes me as very weak.

 

Mark the Epitomizer?

Augustine said that “Mark follows him [Matthew] closely, and looks like his attendant and epitomizer” (Latin, Marcus eum subsecutus, tanquam pedissequus et breviator ejus videtur).

Many moderns may be puzzled by the meaning of this, because for us the term “epitome” is usually understood to mean an outstanding example of something (e.g., “George was the epitome of a Southern gentleman”).

In the ancient world, though, an epitome was something else: It was a shortened version of a literary work—something like the Reader’s Digest “condensed” books that were popular some time ago.

If you’re too young to remember those then think of the book summaries published by CliffNotes or SparkNotes, though those aren’t as close a parallel.

Epitomes allowed ancient readers to get the gist of a work of literature without having to read the whole thing, which could often be quite long–and expensive, given the ancient cost of producing books.

By saying that Mark “looks like” Matthew’s epitomizer, Augustine means that Mark appears to have made a condensed version of Matthew.

 

A New Opportunity

The idea that Mark is an epitome of Matthew opens up a new way to shed light on our question because it allows us to ask: “If Mark is an epitome of Matthew, does it fit the model of other ancient epitomes?”

If Mark works like other ancient epitomes then it would strengthen Augustine’s case.

On the other hand, if Mark does not work like other ancient epitomes then it would weaken it.

It is clear that Mark looks like an epitome of Matthew in two respects:

1. It is shorter than the original.
2. It parallels much of the substance of the original rather than just a part or a few parts of it.

In every other way, though, Mark does not look like an epitome of Matthew.

This is perhaps why Augustine uses somewhat cautious language, saying that Mark “looks like” Matthew’s epitomizer rather than fully asserting it. Augustine may realize that Mark didn’t fit the model of other ancient epitomes.

 

Ancient Epitomes

In 2001, Robert Derrenbacker published a fascinating doctoral thesis entitled Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (online here). He has a very helpful discussion of ancient epitomes and how they worked (see, esp., pp. 79-86).

One of the things that Derrenbacker brings out is the fact that ancient epitomes tended to be abridgements of much longer works.

For example, 2 Maccabees is an abridgement of a five-volume history by Jason of Cyrene (2 Macc. 2:23). This means that 2 Maccabees, which originally fit in a single scroll, was a condensation of a work that originally filled five scrolls.

Another thing Derrenbacker brings out is that ancient epitomizers didn’t just shorten works. That’s something they could do simply by deleting sections of the work. Instead, they also tightened up individual sections—or pericopes (per-ih-ko–PEEs)—of the works.

Thus, in the case of a historical or biographical epitome, they would recount incidents found in the original book but use fewer words to tell the story.

This was one of their key tools in making the epitome shorter than the original since it allowed them to save space without losing substance.

 

Mark vs. the Epitomes

When we compare the Gospel of Mark with the kind of epitomes used in the ancient world, we find that it is dramatically different on both of the counts just mentioned.

Matthew has 18,345 words in the Greek New Testament, while Mark has 11,304. This means that Matthew is only 1.6 times as long as Mark. (Put another way, Mark is 62% as long as Matthew.)

Contrast that to the original work of Jason of Cyrene, which was at least 5 times longer than 2 Maccabees.

Furthermore, Matthew was itself a fairly short work that could fit inside a single scroll. Given its word count, it could be read out loud in less than two hours.

Matthew was thus not the kind of work that called for an epitome. It was too short for that.

And it certainly didn’t call for an epitome that was 62% the length of the original. That’s not a great deal of space savings, and so there wouldn’t have been a great deal of demand for such a work.

 

Mark’s Pericopes

Another striking way in which Mark does not look like an epitome of Matthew is the fact that the individual pericopes within it don’t tend to be shorter than the parallels in Matthew. Instead, they tend to be longer.

B. H. Streeter notes:

For example, the number of words employed by Mark to tell the stories of the Gadarene Demoniac, Jairus’ Daughter, and the Feeding of the Five Thousand are respectively 325, 374 and 235; Matthew contrives to tell them in 136, 135 and 157 words [The Four Gospels, 158].

So Mark typically uses more words to tell a given story about Jesus than Matthew does.

But that is not what ancient epitomizers did. As we said, they tended to tighten up stories and use fewer words to recount them because this was a key tool in making an epitome: It allowed the author to save space while retaining substance.

The fact that Mark does the opposite would make him unlike any other epitomizer in the ancient world, and thus we have evidence that he wasn’t epitomizing.

Instead, the fact that Matthew uses fewer words to tell the same stories as Mark suggests that Matthew was producing an expanded edition of Mark—keeping 90% of the substance but tightening up the stories for reasons of style and perhaps to make room for all the additional material he wanted to include.

This brings us to the question of editorial choices the Evangelists made about what material to include.

 

Important Material Cut Out?

If Mark is an epitome of Matthew then we must ask the question of why he omitted the particular parts of Matthew that he did.

Doing so surely saved space, but he could have achieved the same goal by omitting other parts of Matthew—so why did he skip the ones that he did?

Here’s a list of the pericopes of Matthew that Matthew would have had to leave out:

• The Genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1:1-17)
• The Birth of Jesus (Matt. 1:18-25)
• The Slaughter of the Innocents (Matt. 2:1-23)
• The Beatitudes (Matt. 4:23-5:12)
• The Value of the Law (Matt. 5:17-20)
• Teaching About Killing and Anger (Matt. 5:21-24)
• Make Peace with Your Accuser (Matt. 5:25-26)
• Teaching on Adultery and Lust (Matt. 5:27-30)
• Teaching on Divorce and Adultery (Matt. 5:31-32)
• Teaching on Swearing (Matt. 5:33-37)
• “Love Your Enemies” (Matt. 5:38-48)
• Piety Before Men and Alms (Matt. 6:1-4)
• Piety Before Men and Prayer (Matt. 6:5-8)
• The Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9-15)
• Piety Before Men and Fasting (Matt. 6:16-18)
• “Treasure in Heaven” (Matt. 6:19-21)
• “The Lamp of Your Body” (Matt. 6:22-23)
• “You Cannot Serve God and Mammon” (Matt. 6:24)
• “Do Not Be Anxious About Your Life” (Matt. 6:25-34)
• “Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged” (Matt. 7:1-5)
• Pearls Before Swine (Matt. 7:06)
• “Ask, Seek, Knock” (Matt. 7:7-11)
• The Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12)
• The Narrow Gate(Matt. 7:13-14)
• “No Good Tree Bears Bad Fruit” (Matt. 7:15-20)
• Putting Jesus’ Teaching into Action (Matt. 7:21-27)
• The Centurion’s Servant (Matt. 8:5-13)
• Excuses for Not Following Jesus (Matt. 8:18-22)
• Healing Two Blind Men (Matt. 9:27-31)
• Exorcizing a Mute Demoniac (Matt. 9:32-34)
• “The Harvest is Plentiful” (Matt. 9:35-38)
• Fear and Comfort (Matt. 10:26-33)
• Jesus Brings Division (Matt. 10:34-36)
• The Cost of Discipleship (Matt. 10:37-11:1)
• A Question from John the Baptist (Matt. 11:2-19)
• Woe to Unrepentant Cities (Matt. 11:20-24)
• Hidden from the Wise (Matt. 11:25-30)
• “By Your Words You Will be Justified” (Matt. 12:33-37)
• “The Sign of Jonah” (Matt. 12:38-42)
• The Unclean Spirit Returns (Matt. 12:43-45)
• The Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds (Matt. 13:24-30)
• The Parable of the Leaven (Matt. 13:33)
• The Parable of the Weeds Explained (Matt. 13:34-43)
• The Parable of the Treasure in the Field (Matt. 13:44)
• The Parable of the Precious Pearl (Matt. 13:45-46)
• The Parable of the Net Thrown into the Sea (Matt. 13:47-52)
• Does Jesus Pay the Tax? (Matt. 17:24-27)
• The Parable of the Lost Sheep (Matt. 18:12-14)
• Forgiving the Brother Who Sins (Matt. 18:15-22)
• The Parable of Unforgiving Debtor (Matt. 18:23-35)
• The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16)
• Jesus in the Temple (Matt. 21:14-17)
• The Parable of the Banquet (Matt. 22:1-14)
• Woe to the Scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 23:1-36)
• “Your House Is Forsaken” (Matt. 23:37-39)
• “The Son of Man Is Coming at an Unexpected Hour” (Matt. 24:42-51)
• The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matt. 25:1-13)
• The Parable of the Talents/Pounds (Matt. 25:14-30)
• The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt. 25:31-46)
• Securing the Tomb (Matt. 27:62-66)
• Explaining the Empty Tomb (Matt. 28:11-15)

One can imagine Mark omitting material he considered to be of lesser importance, but that does not seem to be a description of much of the material in this list.

Mark would have deleted everything concerning the genealogy, birth, and early life of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of Jesus’ parables, as well as other notable passages.

While we might suppose he would omit some of the items above for space reasons, some are simply too important—in contrast to what Mark retained—to suppose that this is the answer.

For example, is the Lord’s Prayer—which he would have omitted—really less important than the encounter with the Syrophoenician woman or the healing of the man with the withered hand—both of which he would have chosen to retain?

 

Unimportant Material Added?

On the epitome hypothesis, Mark didn’t just omit material from Matthew. He also added new material of his own:

• Exorcising an Unclean Spirit in the Synagogue (Mark 1:23-28)
• Departure from Capernaum (Mark 1:35-39)
• Jesus Teaches by the Sea (Mark 2:13)
• Jesus’ Family Hears (Mark 3:20-21)
• The Kingdom Like Seed (Mark 4:26-29)
• Healing a Deaf Man (Mark 7:32-37)
• Healing a Blind Man (Mark 8:22-26)
• The Unauthorized Exorcist (Mark 9:38-41)
• Visiting the Temple (Mark 11:11)
• The Widow’s Mite (Mark 12:41-44)
• Jesus Appears to Two Disciples (Mark 16:12-13)

Again: Is this material of sufficient value to warrant omitting much of the material he would have excluded?

Is the Lord’s Prayer really less important than Mark’s note about Jesus departing Capernaum or his family hearing about what was happening with Jesus before they show up?

Is it worth omitting the bulk of Jesus’ teachings as found in Matthew in order to add material that largely concerns additional stories about healing and exorcism and that duplicate other, similar accounts?

By contrast, if Matthew used Mark then, given the minor importance and largely duplicative nature of this material, it is easy to see how Matthew could have omitted it in interests of space (so he could add all Jesus’ teaching material) rather than the other way around.

 

An Unsuccessful Epitome?

One of the things that Derrenbacker brings out in his discussion of epitomes is that they tended to replace the works that they abridged.

Very often the epitome was more popular than the original, and so more copies of it were made than of the original. This allowed the epitome to survive the ages while the original perished.

A case in point is 2 Maccabees. We have this epitome, but Jason of Cyrene’s original, five-volume history is lost.

The reason for this phenomenon is that the epitomes were of more value to the ancient audiences than the original. It was a case of “less is more”:

1. The epitomes took much less time to read and absorb, while still allowing the reader to get the gist of the original.
2. Also, being shorter, they were much cheaper in an age in which books had to be hand written and so were much more costly than today’s printing technology makes possible.

But what value did Mark think he would be adding for the reader by producing an epitome of Matthew?

He wasn’t giving them extra value in terms of dramatic space savings. And he wasn’t giving them extra value in terms of new material. The handful of minor, reduplicative stories he would have added would scarcely offset the loss of the huge bulk of teaching material in Matthew that he would have had to set aside.

This lack of added value—both in terms of space and content—would have set Mark up to be an unsuccessful epitome.

And, in fact, Mark’s Gospel was by far the least popular of the four Gospels in the early Church. One of the ways that we know this is by counting the number of early manuscripts of the Gospels that have survived.

Of the Gospel manuscripts that date to the second and third centuries a.d., there are 12 of Matthew, 7 of Luke, 16 of John, and only 1 of Mark! (Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, ch. 1). The fact that so few manuscripts of Mark have survived from this period compared to the others suggests that there were fewer copies of Mark in circulation.

Given that there are twelve ancient manuscripts of Matthew and only one of Mark, it is clear that Matthew was quite a bit more popular than Mark.

This means that Mark, if it was an epitome of Matthew, was a spectacularly unsuccessful one that did not, in the eyes of the ancient readers, add significant value over its original. Indeed, as the number of surviving manuscripts suggests, they saw it as quite a bit less valuable.

The Case Against the Augustinian Hypothesis

We have seen a number of reasons to be skeptical of St. Augustine’s proposal that Mark was the second Gospel written and that it was an epitome of Matthew:

• Both of the arguments that Augustine proposes are reversible and can support either the view that Mark used Matthew or that Matthew used Mark.
• The idea that Matthew wouldn’t use Mark because the latter was not an eyewitness is unconvincing.
• We have first century evidence, via John the Presbyter, that Mark was based on the preaching of Peter rather than on Matthew.
• Matthew is not a long enough a work to need an epitome.
• Mark is not a major abridgment of Matthew, being 62% as long as the proposed original.
• By regularly using more words rather than fewer to recount the same stories, Mark would have been behaving very unlike ancient epitomizers and rejecting one of the key tools they used to make their abridgments.
• Much of the material Mark would have omitted seems more important than what he retained.
• The material that Mark would have added to Matthew seems much less important than the material he omitted.
• By adding so little value in terms of space savings and content, Mark would be a badly designed and unnecessary epitome which went on to be very unpopular.

In view of these facts, Augustine’s impression that Mark “looks like” Matthew’s epitomizer is true only in a very superficial sense. A closer examination of the matter suggests that Mark’s Gospel is not an epitome of Matthew.

 

Augustine’s Later Doubts?

In his initial discussion of the matter, Augustine used cautious language—only asserting that Mark “looks like” or “seems like” Matthew’s epitomizer.

He may have become even less confident of this idea as he worked on his Harmony of the Gospels, because there is a later passage that some scholars have taken as a modification of his initial view.

After having worked through and carefully compared the three Synoptics, Augustine makes this statement:

Mark . . . either appears to be preferentially the companion of Matthew, as he narrates a larger number of matters in unison with him than with the rest . . . or else, in accordance with the more probable account of the matter, he holds a course in conjunction with both [the other Synoptists]. For although he is at one with Matthew in the larger number of passages, he is nevertheless at one rather with Luke in some others [Harmony of the Gospels 4:10:11].

Here Augustine seems to make two proposals.

• The first seems to be a restatement of the view he expressed at the beginning of his harmony—that Mark accompanies or is “the companion of Matthew” as he writes his Gospel.
• The second acknowledges that as he writes his Gospel he “holds a course in conjunction with both” Matthew and Luke, though he follows the first more than the second.

This may mean that, after his close comparison of the Gospels, Augustine had reason to modify his view of Mark as an apparent epitome of Matthew and that he may have concluded that “the more probable account of the matter” was that Mark used both Matthew and Luke.

This would be consistent with the modern Griesbach Hypothesis, though we must be careful here, because Augustine is not fully clear in what he says.

By speaking of Mark accompanying and “holding a course” with the other two Synoptic Evangelists, he may simply be noting the parallels in sequence that occur between them, without supposing a particular theory of how they were composed.

If so, he would have arrived at the insight that many moderns have proposed—that Mark is the “middle term” between Matthew and Luke. This, however, can be explained in more than one way. The Griesbach Hypothesis is one proposal that makes Mark the middle term, but there are others.

Thus David Pearson, who wrote a key paper on this topic, cautioned:

The question of whether or not Augustine had two views of the order in which the gospels were composed just as he had two views of their mutual relationships must remain open [“Augustine and the Augustinian Hypothesis: A Reexamination of Augustine’s Thought in De consensu evangelistarum,” in New Synoptic Studies: The Cambridge Gospel Conference and Beyond (ed. William R. Farmer, Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1983) 37-64].

Regardless of whether Augustine later changed his view of the order in which the Gospels were composed, his initial proposal that Mark was an epitome of the Gospel of Matthew appears to be mistaken.

Recently, I’ve been doing a series of blog posts about how the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke relate to each other.

In biblical studies, this is known as the Synoptic Problem.

Today the most popular solution to this problem is known as the “Two-Source Hypothesis.”

According to this view, Mark was the first Gospel to be written, and it was used by both Matthew and Luke.

In addition, this view holds that Matthew and Luke also used a lost, hypothetical source known as Q.

 

Q and Me

Personally, I am a Q skeptic. That’s why I’ve written more than once about reasons to doubt the existence of Q.

I think that the data that advocates of Q appeal to likely can be explained in other, better ways.

Before resorting to hypothetical, lost documents to explain the fact that Matthew and Luke have a large number of verses in common, we should give serious consideration to the idea that Luke drew these verses from Matthew or that Matthew drew them from Luke.

 

Hating on Q

I’ve been surprised, in the comments boxes and on Facebook, at the amount of hostility that some folks have displayed toward the idea of Q.

For example, some have dismissed Q as “the claptrap of modernistic historical criticism” and declaring it “a diversion from the truth” and similar things.

But while disagreement with the Q hypothesis can be justified, outright hostility toward it is uncalled for.

 

The Basis for the Idea

The idea behind Q is that there was a source—likely a written source—behind the 235 verses in Matthew that are paralleled in Luke but not in Mark or John.

This is a large number of verses, and it amounts to more than a fifth of Matthew and Luke.

Given that amount of material in common—and the fact that the material is sometimes presented in the same order—it isn’t unreasonable to propose that there is a source behind this material.

In fact, we’ve already seen two such proposals: Matthew was Luke’s source for this material, or Luke was Matthew’s source for it.

Either of these possibilities would explain both the content of the material and the elements of common order that it displays.

 

But If . . .

But if one could show that both of these possibilities are unlikely for some reason then it would not be unreasonable to propose that there was a third source that both Matthew and Luke drew upon for the material.

Neither would it be unreasonable to propose that this source was written.

Luke even alludes to previous written accounts of Christ’s ministry (Luke 1:1).

Since he says that he wrote his own Gospel after “having followed all things closely for some time past”—with “all things” seeming to include the previous written accounts—it is very likely that Luke used such written sources.

Indeed, virtually everyone agrees that he either used Matthew or Mark as a source (possibly both), so there is no reason to be hostile to the idea that he used another such source.

 

A Lost Source?

Since we don’t have any manuscripts of Q today, if it ever existed, it has been lost.

But the idea of a lost source is not intrinsically problematic.

Indeed—all of the sources that the Evangelists used, whether written or oral, seem to have perished, leaving only the Gospels themselves.

 

An Objection

One could object that many of the people who advocate Q—including some of its earliest advocates—have tried to use the claim to undermine the authority of the Gospels.

This is true, but it does not ultimately matter.

The idea that there is a common source behind the 235 verses Matthew and Luke have in common does not do anything, of itself, to undermine the authority of the Gospels.

The Gospels are based on sources—as Luke acknowledges—and so the idea of sources behind them is not intrinsically threatening.

The proposal that a common source is behind these 235 verses is an idea that needs to be evaluated based on the evidence—not who proposed it or what their motives were.

 

Ad Hominem Arguments

Indeed, arguments that attack an idea based on who proposed it or what that person’s motives were—rather than evaluating the evidence for and against it—are known as ad hominem arguments (i.e., arguments “to the man” rather than to the evidence).

Such arguments are at high risk of committing a logical fallacy.

More generally, rejecting an idea because of where it came from risks committing the genetic fallacy.

 

A Better Way

A better way of approaching the question is to set aside these issues and look at the Q proposal objectively, weighing the evidence for and against it.

If you want to go after Q based on the evidence, have at it!

I do that myself!

In fact, here’s a book by Mark Goodacre that can help you do that.

And here’s another.

 

Faithful Q Scholars

While it may be true that some advocates of Q have an agenda of undermining the authority of the Gospels, they are by no means the only Q advocates out there.

There are also lots of biblical scholars who thoroughly uphold the authority of Scripture and who endorse the Q hypothesis.

Indeed, in a 2003 speech, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) addressed the Pontifical Biblical Commission and noted that the Two-Source Hypothesis (which proposes Q as one of the sources behind Matthew and Luke) is “accepted today by almost everyone” [Relationship Between the Magisterium and Exegetes].

That “almost everyone” includes lots of faithful Catholic biblical scholars, as well as lots of non-Catholic ones who support the authority of the Gospels.

 

A Present Minority

Actually, the fact that Q-skeptics, such as myself, are a small minority today is something that provides us with another reason to keep the rhetoric cool.

If you want to get people to change their minds about Q, a calm, reasoned approach based on the evidence will get you a lot farther than just dumping on the view of the majority.

And there is another, even more fundamental reason to take this approach . . .

 

The Golden Rule

Majorities can often ill-treat minorities, and it’s certainly been the case that some advocates of Q have used inflammatory, insulting language regarding those who are skeptical of Q.

Indeed, if you read the books of Q skeptics, they point out the inflammatory language that has been used against them and their proposals.

Naturally, they don’t like being treated that way in print.

Fortunately, many of them—including many of the most effective Q skeptics—have resisted the temptation to answer in kind.

After all, didn’t Jesus say something about treating others the way that you would like to be treated?

That statement is found in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31, but it isn’t found in Mark or John.

Ironically, it’s part of the Q material!

And whether Q was a separate, written source or not—this saying of Christ is authoritative.