Measuring the Disparity Between Matthew, Mark and Luke

Revised: 26-Jan-2015

In 1959 I found myself attempting to study the Greek text of the Gospel of Mark with a view to translating it to modern Hebrew. The rather strange Greek of Mark, the Hebraic word-order, and the impossibility of rendering to Hebrew some of the special Markan Grecisms (like καὶ εὐθύς and πάλιν, which have no ancient Hebrew equivalents) left me wondering what kind of literary creation we have in this fascinating book.^[22]

Of course, a translator who is mainly interested in producing the message of a book for the Hebrew-speaking Church in Israel need hardly occupy himself with the question why a short book like Mark shares so many verbal parallels with Matthew and Luke, yet rarely manages to give exact verbal parallels to these for more than a phrase or two. However, my curiosity was aroused and I began to wonder whether it was not important to get to the bottom of questions like these.

I tried first to see if ancient manuscripts of Mark might shed some light on a possible vorlage (a prior version) of Mark which would show a less linguistically confused text. This proved a blind alley. It is clear that second-century Greek Christians felt the oddities of Markan order and wording, but their attempts to “improve” its text by replacement of phrases from Matthew or Luke only show that their real problem was with the kind of text we have in our printed Greek versions of Mark.

• ^[1] Albert Huck, Synopsis of the First Three Gospels (9th ed. by Hans Lietzmann; 1936). ↩
• ^[2] From my interest as a translator of the Greek to Hebrew I would make a further observation, namely, that the starting of a story with the words “and he went out” sounds highly Hebraic. The conjunction “and” followed by the verb is itself a Hebraic construction found often in the Gospels, and the idea of “going out” as an opening part of a narrative is equally Hebraic, as in the command of the Lord that the “people” should “go out” and gather a day’s portion of manna (Exod. 16:4) or in the demand of the people of Samuel’s day that they be given a king who would “govern us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Sam. 8:20). ↩
• ^[3] William Sanday, "The Conditions under which the Gospels Were Written, in Their Bearing upon Some Difficulties of the Synoptic Problem," in Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem (ed. William Sanday; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 34-41. ↩
• ^[4] In his article on Q for the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (vol. 3; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962), D. T. Rowlingson writes: "There is widespread agreement among scholars that this source [Q] is represented mainly, if not entirely, by the parallel non-Markan material in Matthew and Luke; that it contained little narrative and no passion story; that it was composed largely of detached sayings of Jesus; and that its order is better preserved by Luke than Matthew" (p. 973). ↩
• ^[5] B. C. Butler, The Originality of St. Matthew: A Critique of the Two-Document Hypothesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 5. ↩
• ^[6] But such an assertion is a serious departure from the normal view of the Two-Source Hypothesis (2SH), according to which Mark and Q are two very different types of document. Mark, as we know, consists mainly of action, whereas Q is described as a "sayings source" containing little or no narrative. According to the Two-Source Hypothesis, Mark is supposed to account for the Triple Tradition material, while Q is the source for the Double Tradition. Appealing to Q to account for the Matthean-Lukan agreements in the Temptation story departs from the normal view of Q in two significant ways: 1) by attributing to Q several verses of narrative, and 2) by appealing to Q as a source for Matthew and Luke in a Triple Tradition context. In this view a Temptation account was known to Mark and Q and was later independently combined into a single narrative by Matthew and Luke. ↩
• ^[7] For proponents of the Two-Source Hypothesis, however, this explanation is problematic because the more it becomes necessary to appeal to Q for Matthean-Lukan agreements in Markan contexts, the greater the overlap between Mark and Q becomes and the less one is able to speak of two sources, for at some point the overlap becomes so extensive that Mark is absorbed into Q. One is instead forced to consider the existence of a single source that stands behind both the Triple and the Double Tradition materials. (Cf. R. Steven Notley's statements: "The effect is that Q tends to look more like a 'Proto-Gospel' than a simple non-Markan 'sayings source.' Such a source removes the necessity for Q and Mark as the primary sources for Matthew and Luke," and "If...Matthew knew...a source on which Luke is based, as well as Mark, then the need for Q to explain non-Markan material would be eliminated" ("Book Review: Robert Lindsey's A Comparative Greek Concordance of the Synoptic Gospels"). ↩
• ^[8] Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (London: Macmillan, 1924), 182-186, 273-292. ↩
• ^[9] Lindsey, A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark, 19-22. The objection may be raised that not all the Double Tradition pericopae show the same high verbal identity between Matthew and Luke. Bussmann noted that in about half of the Double Tradition, verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke is striking, while in the other half it is mainly subject matter that indicates the Synoptists are using the same non-canonical material (Wilhelm Bussmann, Synoptische Studien [3 vols. in 1; Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1925-1931], 2:124-126). Due to this fact, he quite rightly suspected that the subject matter that did not show high verbal similarity must be due to the use of a source other than that responsible for the high-identity materials. However, the fact that at least one of the Synoptists may know for part of his Double Tradition a source different than that used for another part of this material in no way cancels the observation that in the absence of Mark, Matthew and Luke can at times depend on the same source so completely that they achieve enormous verbal identity, yet they cannot do the same in the Triple Tradition. Mark somehow stands between Matthew and Luke, both separating them on verbal points and uniting them on pericope order. For a list of the 42 Double Tradition pericopae, and a list of the 24 "Type 2 Double Tradition" pericopae (low verbal identity), see "Introduction to A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark." ↩
• ^[10] Samuel Davidson, An Introduction to the Study of the New Testament: Critical, Exegetical and Theological (London: Longmans, 1868), 2:97. ↩
• ^[11] Davidson, An Introduction to the Study of the New Testament, 2:97. ↩
• ^[12] Hans-Herbert Stoldt, History and Criticism of the Marcan Hypothesis (trans. and ed. by Donald L. Niewyk; Macon, GA: Mercer University Press; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1980; trans. of Geschichte und Kritik der Markushypothese; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupecht, 1977). ↩
• ^[13] Campbell Bonner, “Traces of Thaumaturgic Technique in the Miracles,” Harvard Theological Review 20 (1927): 171-181. ↩
• ^[14] Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins, 202-203; Vincent Taylor, The Passion Narrative of St Luke: A Critical and Historical Investigation, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series, no. 19 (ed. Owen E. Evans; Cambridge: University Press, 1972), 3. ↩
• ^[15] Taylor, The Passion Narrative of St Luke, 3. ↩
• ^[16] Charles F. Burney, The Poetry of Our Lord: An Examination of the Formal Elements of Hebrew Poetry in the Discourses of Jesus Christ (Oxford: Clarendon; 1925), 74-75. ↩
• ^[17] Lindsey, A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark, 49-56. ↩
• ^[18] Robert L. Lindsey, "Paraphrastic Gospels," Jerusalem Perspective 51 (Apr.-Jun. 1996): 10-15 (JP art. 2769). ↩
• ^[19] Lindsey, A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark, 57-63. I refer to these terms as "stereotypes" because Mark has a disproportionately high number of occurrences of these terms compared to their occurrence in Matthew and Luke. It is important to note that these "stereotypes" cannot be translated into first-century Hebrew. ↩
• ^[20] Many other changes Mark made to the Lukan story of Jesus' baptism are "pickups" from Acts 8 and 10. ↩
• ^[21] A Concordance to the Greek Testament According to the Texts of Westcott and Hort, Tischendorf, and the English Revisers (eds. William F. Moulton and Alfred S. Geden; 4th ed.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1963). ↩
• ^[22] I have told in greater detail some of my experience in trying to unravel these mysteries in my A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark (2nd ed.; Jerusalem: Dugith, 1973) [see now, Robert L. Lindesy, “Introduction to A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark”–eds.], and in my Jesus, Rabbi and Lord: A Lifetime’s Search for the Meaning of Jesus’ Words (2nd ed.; Jerusalem: Jerusalem Perspective Online, 2009). ↩