Exam 22: Q Material, Synoptic Writers, and Pseudonymous Documents in the New Testament

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Matthew contains over 90 percent of the material we also find in Mark, and of that 90 percent over 50 percent is a verbatim, word-for-word copy of that material in the Greek. In addition, 55 percent of Mark's Gospel recurs in Luke's Gospel, and of that 55 percent, there is a 53 percent verbatim or word-for-word correspondence. This suggests that either Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source or Mark used both Matthew and Luke as a source or Matthew, Mark, and Luke used another source. With regard to the last mentioned, the more scholars sought to identify what this common source would have had to look like in order to generate the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the more that common source document looked like the Gospel of Mark. The arguments for Markan priority (as opposed to seeing Mark as abridger of Matthew and Luke) present the fewest obstacles and make the most sense of the data we have. For one thing, it is not difficult to imagine that later writers (Matthew and Luke) would view Mark's Gospel as deficient; without, for example, the Sermon on the Mount, one would be hard-pressed to explain why a writer would want to cut the entire Sermon on the Mount out of a document that originally contained it. For another, the style and grammatical structure of Mark are rougher than those of Matthew and Luke. That a later writer would smooth out grammar and polish style is far more defensible than postulating that a writer took a smooth, polished work and intentionally vulgarized it.