Marcan priority

Marcan priority is the hypothesis that the Gospel of Mark was the first-written of the three Synoptic Gospels and was used as a source by the other two, Matthew and Luke. This hypothesis is a central one in discussion of the Synoptic Problem, the question of the documentary relationship among these three Gospels.

Marcan priority has been accepted by most scholars since the late nineteenth century and forms the foundation for the widely accepted two-source theory, although a number of scholars support different forms of Marcan priority or reject it altogether.

History

The tradition handed down by the Church Fathers regarded Matthew as the first Gospel written. This view of Gospel origins, however, began to be challenged in the late 18th century, when Gottlob Christian Storr proposed in 1786 that Mark was the first to be written.

Storr's idea met with little acceptance at first, with most scholars favoring either Matthaean priority, under the traditional Augustinian hypothesis or the Griesbach hypothesis, or a fragmentary theory (according to which, stories about Jesus were recorded in several smaller documents and notebooks and combined by the evangelists to create the Synoptic Gospels). Working within the fragmentary theory, Karl Lachmann in 1835 compared the Synoptic Gospels in pairs and noted that while Matthew frequently agreed with Mark against Luke in the order of passages and Luke agreed frequently with Mark against Matthew, Matthew and Luke rarely agreed with each other against Mark. Lachmann inferred from this that Mark best preserved a relatively fixed order of episodes in Jesus's ministry.