Markan Priority

History

Roots

For most of church history the order of the gospels in the Bible was taken for the order in which they were written. Augustine stated it plainly: Matthew wrote first, Mark followed him “as his attendant and epitomizer,” then Luke, then John (On the Harmony of the Gospels 1.2, c. 400). That verdict had a practical effect. Mark was copied, bound and read, but almost never expounded; there is no patristic commentary on Mark to set beside Chrysostom’s ninety homilies on Matthew.

The order was questioned once the gospels began to be studied as documents with sources. Johann Jakob Griesbach proposed in 1783 that Matthew came first, Luke used Matthew, and Mark abridged both — the hypothesis that still carries his name. That put the question of literary dependence on the table, even though his answer kept Matthew in front.

Causes

Three German scholars reversed it within a generation. Karl Lachmann observed in 1835 that where the three gospels diverge in the order of their material, Matthew and Luke each tend to agree with Mark rather than with one another, which is hard to explain if Mark is the abridgement. Christian Hermann Weisse gave the argument its classic shape in 1838 by pairing Markan priority with a second source of sayings, and Heinrich Julius Holtzmann’s work of 1863 made the two-source hypothesis the working assumption of German scholarship.

B. H. Streeter’s The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (1924) carried the case into English and extended it to four sources. His arguments are still the ones textbooks use: almost all of Mark reappears in Matthew or Luke; where the wording agrees, Mark’s is usually the rougher and the other two look like corrections; Mark’s order is the common thread; and Matthew and Luke almost never agree against Mark in order.

Influence

Markan priority reshaped the study of Jesus. If Mark is earliest, it is the closest surviving witness to what the first Christians said about him, and every nineteenth-century life of Jesus was rebuilt on that assumption. It also made Mark worth reading for itself, which is why the great Mark commentaries all date from the last century and a half: R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark (2002), and Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (2007), among them.

The Roman Catholic Church, which had once bound scholars to Matthean priority through the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s decrees of 1911–1912, relaxed the requirement after the Second Vatican Council, and Catholic exegesis now works with Markan priority as freely as Protestant exegesis does.

Key ideas and contributors

Mark is the shortest and the roughest, and that cuts against abridgement. Mark’s Greek is plainer than Matthew’s or Luke’s, his sentences are strung together with “and,” and he uses the historic present constantly. Where the parallel accounts differ in tone, Mark is the one that says Jesus was angry (3:5), that his family thought him out of his mind (3:21), and that he could do no mighty work at Nazareth (6:5). It is easier to believe Matthew and Luke smoothed these than that Mark roughened them.

The order argument. Lachmann’s point remains the strongest single piece of evidence. Matthew rearranges Mark’s sequence and Luke rearranges it differently, but they almost never rearrange it in the same way at the same time. On Markan priority this follows automatically; on the Griesbach hypothesis it needs explaining.

The sayings source. Matthew and Luke share about 230 verses of teaching that Mark does not have, often in near-identical Greek. The two-source hypothesis explains this with a lost sayings document labelled Q, from the German Quelle. Q is an inference, not a manuscript; no copy has ever been found.

Peter behind Mark. Those who hold Markan priority and also hold the gospel’s traditional authorship combine the two: Mark is early because it rests directly on Peter’s preaching, as Papias says (Eusebius, Church History 3.39). Richard Bauckham argues the case at length in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006).

Key controversies

Does Q exist? The sharpest live dispute is not over Markan priority but over its usual companion. Austin Farrer argued in “On Dispensing with Q” (1955) that if Luke simply read Matthew, the hypothetical document becomes unnecessary. Mark Goodacre developed the case in The Case Against Q (2002), pressing the minor agreements — places where Matthew and Luke agree against Mark in wording — as evidence of direct contact. Defenders of Q answer that Luke’s ordering of the shared material makes no sense as a reworking of Matthew. Both camps hold Markan priority; they divide on the second source.

The Griesbach revival. William R. Farmer’s The Synoptic Problem (1964) argued that Markan priority won on fashion rather than evidence, and revived the two-gospel hypothesis in which Mark abridges Matthew and Luke. The school is small but persistent, and it forced the standard arguments to be stated more carefully than before.

Theological anxiety. Some conservative readers resisted Markan priority because it unsettles the apostolic authorship of the first gospel: if Matthew the apostle copied Mark, who was not an eyewitness, the chain of testimony looks weaker. Defenders answer that Mark’s own authority runs through Peter, and that an evangelist using a reliable written source is no stranger than Luke saying outright that he did (Luke 1:1–4). Biblical Inerrancy as formulated in the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy takes no position on source criticism as such.