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Was Mark just a cliff-notes version of Matthew? Jimmy Akin looks at the evidence concerning St. Augustine’s ancient theory: reversible arguments, eyewitness claims, and why Mark’s “epitome” would have failed. Discover why the 90% overlap between the two Gospels points to Mark being written first—making it unpolished, raw, and based on Peter’s preaching.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Around the year 400 St. Augustine wrote a 4-volume work called the Harmony of the Gospels.
In it, he sought to show that the four Gospels can be harmonized with each other and that they do not contradict each other.
In the course of writing this work, St. Augustine proposed that Mark was the second Gospel to be written, and it was basically an abridgment of Matthew.
Luke then wrote third, and finally John wrote last.
This idea is known as the “Augustinian Hypothesis,” and it was very popular for many centuries.
Despite its historical popularity, there are several reasons to think that it is incorrect.
Let’s get into it!
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Augustine’s Arguments
St. Augustine wrote:
Harmony of the Gospels 1:2:4
Mark follows [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.
Augustine thus argued that Mark followed Matthew (saying he was “his attendant”) and that he shortened Matthew (saying 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.
This is what’s known as a Reversible Argument. You could argue from the parallels between the two Gospels that Mark used Matthew, but you could also argue that Matthew used Mark. The argument can be reversed and go either way.
This is true of many of the arguments concerning the Synoptic Problem—that is the question of how Matthew, Mark, and Luke are related.
See Episode 57 for an introduction to the Synoptic Problem.
Reversible arguments are inconclusive.
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, this is also a Reversible Argument.
To account for the similarity, Mark could have borrowed language from Matthew, but Matthew could also have borrowed language from Mark. Again, it can go either way.
Just as before, Mark could have used Matthew or Matthew could have used Mark.
So we still need to look for more evidence.
Matthew the Eyewitness
Some have argued that if the apostle Matthew was the author of the Gospel that bears his name then he would have been unlikely to use the Gospel of Mark as a source.
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?
You 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 (Matthew 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 (See Matthew 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—at least in the sense that their names are not recorded in the text of the two Gospels.
The issue of anonymity is actually more complex than that, and I’ll discuss it in a future episode.
But 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 thirty years, I have worked at Catholic Answers, a religious education 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—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 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.”
Was Mark Hupomnemata?
There’s also another reason Matthew could feel free to use the text of Mark.
In Gospels before the Book, Matthew Larsen argues that Mark was not intended to be a finished book on its own.
In the ancient world, there was a genre of literature known in Greek as Hupomnémata and in Latin as Comentarii.
These were basically quick, unpolished collections of notes on a subject—not finished, polished literary works.
Sometimes these unpolished note collections were published. For example, Julius Caesar published his Gallic War as a set of commentarii.
And sometimes hupomnemata or commentarii were used as the basis on which to compose a later, more polished work.
Sometimes the later author would be the same person as the one who wrote the hupomnemata, and sometimes it would be a different individual.
In fact, hupomnemata were sometimes sold to another author as the basis for composing a later, more polished work.
We don’t have any evidence of a financial transaction like that among the authors of the synoptic Gospels, but Mark does look remarkably like a set of hupomnemata.
It has an unpolished literary style, and it leaves out things we would expect an ordinary biography of Jesus to include, like an infancy narrative and accounts of his resurrection appearances.
If Mark were an unpolished, unfinished collection of notes, that would explain these facts.
And it looks like Matthew and Luke both used Mark exactly as hupomnemata were commonly used—as a base text they used in composing their own more finished, polished Gospels.
If Mark was a set of unpolished notes that could be used to compose a later, more finished work, that would be an extra reason Matthew would have felt free to use it when composing his own Gospel.
The argument that Matthew would not have used Mark thus strikes me as very weak.
Mark the Epitomizer?
Augustine said that “Mark follows [Matthew] closely, and looks like his attendant and epitomizer.”
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, like if someone said, “George was the epitome of a Southern gentleman.”
But in the ancient world, 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 was extremely expensive, given the ancient cost of producing books.
A single copy of what we would consider a very short book cost the equivalent of several thousand dollars, so there was price pressure to create shorter summaries of books for those who couldn’t afford the full-length versions.
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.
Mark does look like an epitome of Matthew in two respects:
- It is shorter than the original.
- 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 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. In the show notes or video description, we’ll have a link to where you can read it online for yourself.
It contains a very helpful discussion of ancient epitomes and how they worked.
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 (See 2 Maccabees 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 have done simply by deleting sections of the longer work.
Instead, they also tightened up individual sections—or Pericopes = Sections—of the work.
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 same 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.
So 2 Maccabees was only = 20% of original as long as the original it was based on.
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 in Mark don’t tend to be shorter than the parallels in Matthew.
Instead, they’re longer. Sometimes much longer. B. H. Streeter writes:
The Four Gospels, p. 158
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.
So Mark typically uses a lot more words to tell a given story about Jesus than Matthew does.
But that is not what ancient epitomizers did. 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 to make room for all the additional material he wanted to include in his Gospel.
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?
In an article on my website that we’ll have a link to in the show notes or video description, we’ll have a list of 61 pericopes that Mark would have had to omit from Matthew if he were epitomizing him.
These would be passages that Mark chose to omit entirely—not just shorten, which is what epitomizers normally did.
- 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)
These would be passages that Mark chose to omit entirely—not just shorten, which is what epitomizers normally did.
So once again, Mark is not looking like an ancient epitomizer.
But we still have to ask why Mark would have omitted these sections of Matthew.
You can imagine Mark omitting material he considered less important, but that does not describe 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 healing of the man with the withered hand, which he retained?
Unimportant Material Added?
On the epitome hypothesis, Mark didn’t just omit material from Matthew. He also added new material of his own.
Here’s a list of 11 sections I identified Mark as including that are not found in Matthew:
- 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)
If Mark were epitomizing Matthew, we wouldn’t expect him to include any of these pericopes, because the point of an epitome is to produce a shorter version of a much longer work.
Introducing new material that’s going to lengthen your own work is contrary to the purpose of an epitome.
So Mark would once again not be acting like an ancient epitomizer.
But apart from that, we’d still need to ask why Mark chose to include these specific pericopes compared to those he omitted.
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 reduplicative nature of this material, it is easy to see how Matthew could have omitted these pericopes 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.
That’s why we still have 2 Maccabees today, 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.”
The epitomes took much less time to read and absorb, while still allowing the reader to get the gist of the original.
Also, being shorter, they were much cheaper in an age in which books had to be handwritten.
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 since Mark is 62% as long as Matthew, which fits on a single scroll anyway.
And Mark wasn’t giving them extra value in terms of new material—which we wouldn’t expect an epitomizer to include, anyway.
The handful of minor, reduplicative stories he would have added would scarcely offset the loss of the huge bulk of valuable 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.
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.
In his book The Earliest Christian Artifacts, Larry Hurtado gives a list of the Gospel manuscripts that were available at the time his book was published and that date to the second and third centuries A.D.
There are 12 of Matthew, 7 of Luke, 16 of John, but only 1 of Mark!
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 if Mark was an epitome of Matthew, it 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.
On the other hand, if Mark wrote first and Matthew then produced an upgraded, enhanced version of the same material, it makes sense why Matthew would have become popular and eclipsed Mark.
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 from John the Presbyter that Mark was based on the preaching of Peter rather than on Matthew.
- And Mark looks like the kind of hupomnemata, unfinished notes collection that Matthew would base a later, finished work on.
- Matthew also 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 doing the opposite of what ancient epitomizers did, and he would have been 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 quite 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:
Harmony of the Gospels 4:10:11
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.
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, which holds that Matthew and Luke wrote first and then Mark combined them, 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.
For example, if Mark wrote first and was then used by Matthew and Luke, he would still be the middle term between the two, as on the Farrer and Wilke hypotheses.
When it comes to what Augustine ultimately concluded, David Pearson, who wrote a key paper on this topic, cautioned:
“Augustine and the Augustinian Hypothesis”
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.
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 simply mistaken.
Conclusion
And this has implications for which view of the Synoptic problem is ultimately correct.
Although it’s hypothetically possible to still hold that Mark fused Luke and Matthew on the Griesbach hypothesis, numerous problems that we’ve seen with the Augustinian hypothesis plague it also:
- Mark is very unpolished in Greek compared to Matthew and Luke.
- It omits key things that you would expect a biography of Jesus to have—and that Matthew and Luke do have, like the infancy narratives and resurrection appearances.
- Mark uses more words to tell the same stories that Matthew and Luke do, which is more explainable if Mark wrote first, and Matthew and Luke then told stories from Mark in fewer words so they could fit more material into their Gospels.
- Mark would bizarrely leave out a ton of high-value material that is found in both Matthew and Luke.
- He would even more bizarrely add a handful of stories of much lower value—the kind of stories that Matthew and Luke could easily omit since they reduplicate other stories they were including.
- And we have first century testimony from John the Presbyter—who was personally acquainted with authors of the New Testament—that Mark based his Gospel on Peter’s preaching.
All of these strongly suggest that Mark wrote first—that it was an unpolished, first draft of a Gospel that was later expanded and refined by Matthew and Luke, just as ancient authors did with hupomnemata.
We can discuss the Griesbach hypothesis more in future episodes, but based on what we’ve seen thus far, I have concluded that the vast majority of modern scholars are correct in holding that Mark wrote first.
I disagree with many and think it unlikely that there was a lost, hypothetical Q source, and so I think the Farrer and Wilke hypotheses are more likely.
In particular, I think the Wilke hypothesis has the best evidence in its favor—and we can talk about that, too, in future episodes—but I think it is basically certain that Mark wrote first.
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