The Case For Matthean Priority: A Study in the Synoptic Problem

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The New Testament contains four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are generally recognized to exhibit much more similarity to one another than John, and they are referred to as the synoptic gospels.

The synoptic gospels are so similar in some places that most scholars believe that some degree of literary dependence exists among them. Determining which gospel was written first and to what extent the other synoptics depended upon it or upon each other is the goal of scholars who specialize in what is known as the synoptic problem.

As Mark Goodacre puts it, "the synoptic problem might be defined as the study of the similarities and differences of the synoptic gospels in an attempt to explain their literary relationship." Calling it a "problem" is, of course, a bit misleading, as it suggests that there's some flaw or fault in the synoptic gospels. Stanley Porter and Brian Dyer point out, "The word 'problem' implies that there is something potentially wrong with how the synoptic gospels relate to one another. Instead of an appreciation for the similarities that one finds between the synoptics, this term automatically labels their relationship a *d dma* and therefore in need of fixing." It may be more helpful, therefore, to think of it as the "synoptic puzzle" rather than the "synoptic problem."

For over a century now, the prevailing scholarly opinion has favored Markan priority: the idea that the gospel of Mark was written first and that the gospels of Matthew and Luke depended upon Mark. If correct, this hypothesis requires us to believe that virtually every early Christian writer who spoke on the subject was wrong about the order of the gospels, and this, in turn, casts doubt upon the reliability of their witness to the traditional authorship of the gospels. In other words, because the same sources which tell us that Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote these documents also tell us that Mark was not the first gospel written, if they are wrong about the order, then there is some reason to think that they are wrong about the authorship as well.

Goodacre expresses the general sentiment which most synoptic scholars have towards the early church on this matter when he says, "The patristic evidence therefore is not marked enough to encourage us to disregard the overwhelming internal evidence for Markan priority. It will be most prudent to continue to treat the patristic witness with a pinch of salt."

But how strong is the evidence for Markan priority? Is it really so overwhelming, or are there compelling reasons to believe that Matthew is actually written first, and that scholars have been too quick to dismiss the unanimous testimony of the early church on this point? As we shall see throughout this series, the evidence for Markan priority has been vastly overstated, and the evidence instead supports the idea that Mark was written last. But developing this case will take some time. In this video, I will only introduce the key terms and hypotheses, leaving assessments and critiques for future videos.

This is an introduction to the synoptic problem. Studies in the synoptic problem are entirely motivated by the conviction that literary dependence exists between the synoptic gospels. But there are some scholars, such as David Farnell, who would deny this conviction. Farnell believes that the synoptic gospels are completely independent of one another, arguing that, in contrast to historical-critical ideology, "the independence view maintains that each gospel writer worked independently of the other three, each having no need to derive information from the other three."

If Farnell is right, there is no synoptic problem and, consequently, no need for any research into it. There is, however, a very serious objection to Farnell's hypothesis, namely that there are areas of verbatim agreement among the synoptics. For example, consider a parallel story in Matthew 21:23-27, Mark 11:27-33, and Luke 20:1-8. You'll notice that these passages exhibit word-for-word correspondence in a great many places. This might seem easily explained by all three gospels simply reflecting what Jesus and his critics really said. But remember that Jesus probably originally spoke in Aramaic, and that the gospels are translating his words into Greek. It is highly unlikely that three authors working independently of each other would make the exact same translation choices. This, furthermore, the gospels were written several years after Jesus's ministry. It is implausible to suppose that all three gospel writers would remember Jesus's words verbatim, or get their information from those who did, all those years later. This makes it doubtful that the gospel authors even had Jesus's exact words from which to translate in the first place. This casts doubt on the complete independence view and makes it reasonable to consider that there is literary dependence at play.

In reply to this sort of argument, Farnell resorts to appealing to the divine inspiration of scripture. He argues that God revealed Jesus's exact words to the gospel authors, as well as, apparently, the way in which he wanted them to be translated into Greek. He says, "Although the Bible was written by man, God's superintendence of those men in the inscription of his word supernaturally overshadowed the product, so that the Holy Spirit guaranteed the accuracy of what the men recorded. Such precision in composition is without parallel in human historiography."

While Farnell's evident respect for the divine inspiration of scripture is admirable, there are three serious problems with his response. In the first place, from the perspective of the historical apologist, it is question-begging. Historical apologetics seeks to argue that the gospels are historically reliable, and that on this basis we can believe in Jesus's miracles, and that for this reason we can believe the words of Jesus, and that it is because of this that we can believe that the Bible is divinely inspired. There is a logical order here. In addressing the synoptic problem is part of defending the first plank in the argument. Until this has been done, from the perspective of the historical apologist, there are no grounds for assuming the inspiration of scripture. Farnell thus risks justifying his position in a circular fashion.

In the second place, if Farnell wants to invoke divine verbal inspiration of Jesus's exact words to explain verbatim agreement within the synoptics, it becomes unclear how he can explain the differences. For although there are striking examples of word-for-word agreement in the synoptics, there are likewise striking examples of parallel passages where Jesus says essentially the same thing, but in very different words. Is Farnell going to say that God did not choose to inspire the exact words of Jesus in these instances? And if so, why is God so selective about when he is going to inspire Jesus's exact words and when he is not? Farnell owes us an explanation for this.

The final problem is that verbatim agreement is not limited to the words of the people within the synoptic narratives; it also appears in the narrator's comments. For example, consider Matthew 24:16 and Mark 13:14, where the narrator specifically addresses the reader in the exact same words. This casts doubt on the idea that Farnell's theory, if it explains anything at all, can explain all of the relevant verbatim agreements within the synoptic gospels.

The conclusion, then, is that the complete independence hypothesis is false. There is literary dependence among the synoptic gospels. But what is the order of the dependence? Which gospel was first, and which gospel was last? Several hypotheses have been put forward on that front, and I shall briefly introduce them now.

For the past 100 years or so, the dominant proposal regarding the synoptic problem has been the two-source hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that the gospel of Mark was written first, and that Matthew and Luke both drew information from it, thereby explaining the material common to all three synoptic gospels. It additionally posits the existence of a document which we do not possess, called Q, and says that Matthew and Luke also used Q as a source. This is supposed to explain the material common to both Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark. Thus, because it posits that Matthew and Luke worked independently of one another, depending upon two different sources, it is called the two-source hypothesis.

Until fairly recently, this hypothesis was thought to be the assured result of biblical scholarship. As Arthur Bellon says, "Whether justifiably or not, one of the most widely accepted conclusions of 20th-century New Testament scholarship has been a simple literary solution, namely the hypothesis that Mark was the earliest written gospel, that the authors of Matthew and Luke in writing their gospels used Mark and a second source commonly designated Q, and perhaps one or more additional sources."

But for good reason, the two-source hypothesis has waned in popularity among scholars, despite still being the most widely held. The most popular alternative is the so-called Farrer hypothesis, spearheaded by Austin Farrer in the mid-20th century, and in modern times by Mark Goodacre. This hypothesis agrees with the two-source hypothesis on the priority of Mark, as well as Matthew and Luke's use of Mark, but it dispenses with the hypothetical Q document. Instead, it explains the material common to Matthew and Luke by recourse to Luke utilizing Matthew. As Goodacre explains, "Acceptance of the priority of Mark alongside Luke's knowledge of Matthew fundamentally alters the way in which we might view the growth and development of the Gospel genre or subgenre. The Farrer theory suggests a genetic relationship among the synoptics in which each gospel's predecessor provides not only source material but also the catalyst for writing."

The priority of Mark is not universally granted, however. Though boasting a few defenders in modern times, one historically important synoptic theory is called the Augustinian hypothesis. This hypothesis posits that the synoptic gospels were written in the order in which they appear canonically in the New Testament: Matthew 1, Mark 2, and Luke 3rd. One defender of this theory in recent memory is John Wenham, who explains it as follows: "There seems to be a good case for believing that Matthew, possibly in a Semitic language, was the first gospel; that Mark is substantially the teaching of Peter, who knew Matthew's gospel; and that Luke knew and used both Matthew and Mark."

Lastly, we come to the two-gospel hypothesis, also known as the Griesbach hypothesis. This hypothesis agrees with the Augustinian hypothesis in affirming that Matthew was the first gospel to be written. It differs, however, in that it views Luke as being the second gospel and Mark as being the third gospel, rather than the other way around. In this way, Mark, being the shortest gospel, becomes an abbreviated combination of both Matthew and Luke, with some degree of unique material added in. Because it posits that Mark is a combination of two other Gospels, it takes the name the two-gospel hypothesis.

William Farmer explains, "Taking into account the fact that Mark could not be understood simply as an epitomize of Matthew, Griesbach proposed that Mark was written later than Luke and was dependent on both Matthew and Luke. The very extensive agreement between Matthew and Luke then was due to Luke's use of Matthew. And peculiar agreements between Matthew and Mark in order and content, combined with the peculiar divergences from Matthew by Mark in both order and content, was explained by holding that Mark almost never diverged from Matthew in order, and seldom in content, unless he was following the order and content of Luke."

It's important to keep in mind that not all proponents of the two-gospel hypothesis agree with Griesbach or Farmer that Luke depended upon the canonical Gospel of Matthew. Ward Powers, for example, defends a version of the two-gospel hypothesis which views canonical Matthew and Luke as being written prior to Mark and also independently of one another. Powers argues that "the evidence indicates that neither Matthew nor Luke saw the completed gospel written by the other prior to publishing his own, and this points to the publication of both of them in the same year. Later, the gospels of Matthew and Luke had begun to circulate among the churches, and Mark used both of them as the basis of his gospel."

But we shall explore these questions more in future videos. For now, suffice it to say that the two-gospel hypothesis only requires one to accept that Matthew was written first, Luke was written second, and Mark was written last. It doesn't necessarily commit one to accepting that Luke knew or used Matthew.

In this video, we have begun to explore the nature and scope of the synoptic problem and explained its relevance to Christian apologetics. I have endeavored to argue that there is a genuine puzzle to solve regarding the relationship of the synoptic gospels to one another. Attempts to deny this fail to explain the verbatim agreements among the synoptics. I have also briefly surveyed the major ways in which scholars have sought to understand the relationships among the synoptic gospels. Ultimately, this series will argue that the two-gospel hypothesis is the best explanation of the evidence internal to the synoptics themselves, as well as the external evidence consisting primarily of the early patristic testimony bearing on the order of the gospels. But this video has simply been intended to lay the groundwork for that argument by introducing viewers to the relevant issues and the available options.

In my previous video, I introduced viewers to the synoptic problem and surveyed four historically important solutions which have been proposed to explain the data. Two of these solutions presupposed that the gospel of Mark was written first, while the other two preferred to think that Matthew was written first. It's safe to say that synoptic theories which depend upon the priority of Mark are clearly preferred in modern times. This is because the priority of Mark is taken to be the one thing which is virtually certain in synoptic studies.

"Even a cursory look at the literature will bear this out. Just the absolutely fundamental thing here, absolutely fundamental thing, is Mark and priority. Dennis and I agree, like the majority of scholars, that Matthew and Luke both had a copy of something that resembles our Gospel of Mark, not exactly the same, but it must have been along those lines. This is so fundamental to so much good historical scholarship on the Gospels, and I, I've referred to it in writing before as one of the crown jewels in biblical study scholarship. It's just one of those things which has enabled historians to get a whole fresh light on the historical Jesus, on the development of early Christianity. So that really fundamental thing, we're agreed on."

But what is the actual evidence for the priority of Mark? The confidence with which this dogma is held by modern scholarship would lead one to think that the evidence must be overwhelming and unassailable. This impression is strengthened by the long list of arguments for Markan priority which can be confidently cited. However, when one looks beneath the surface, questions the status quo, and assesses the logic behind these arguments, they will discover that the case for Markan priority is far from airtight.

This dogma was first historically accepted upon the basis of fallacy-riddled and unfalsifiable arguments, and when these problems were exposed, yet more problematic arguments were proposed, right down to the modern day. Even Peter Head, "Markan Prioris," admits as much, saying, "Since the loss of confidence in many of the arguments that previous generations had used to establish Markan priority, new arguments have been actively sought by the scholarly community ever since Markan priority became the consensus view."

At least from a historical perspective, much of synoptic research looks like a scramble to find ever more ingenious ways to prop up this idea. David Dungan makes this point rather memorably: "It would seem that we live in the ironic situation where confidence in Markan priority rises to ever new heights, despite the fact that after 45 years of steady criticism, knowledgeable defenders of the hypothesis have been forced to abandon one basic argument after another to the point where there are at present no formal arguments left that will justify it. And the compositional arguments are just as questionable. It has rightly earned the sober title, the Teflon hypothesis."

This video will critically assess the major arguments which have been cited to support the theory of Markan priority, both in the past and in the present.

One historically significant argument for Markan priority comes from the pericope order within Mark's gospel. This argument was popularized by the English scholar B.H. Streeter, and while it was famously shown to be fallacious decades ago, it still turns up from time to time, especially among those scholars who do not specialize in the synoptic problem as such. It is worth reviewing the argument, as well as its key weaknesses.

The argument is based upon the fact that Mark's order of pericopes and events is generally also found in Matthew and Luke. And when either Matthew or Luke has an order which differs from Mark, then the other gospel usually follows Mark's order. Matthew and Luke only rarely agree together against Mark in their pericope order. From this phenomenon, Streeter inferred that Matthew and Luke must have used Mark, as they rarely agree in order against Mark's order. This argument proved persuasive to many scholars, and indeed, it proved instrumental in turning the tide of scholarship in favor of Markan priority.

In reality, however, the argument does nothing more than to establish that Mark is the middle term between Matthew and Luke. Either Matthew and Luke have chosen to follow Mark's order, except for when they disagree with him, or else Mark has chosen to follow Matthew's order in some instances and Luke's order in others. In short, the argument demonstrates that dependency exists among the three synoptics, and that Mark has to be either first or last. But it does not, and cannot, indicate the direction of dependency. For this reason, arguments from order cannot establish the priority of Mark.

The argument is guilty of what has become known as the Lachmann fallacy. As Ward Powers says, "There is no doubt that the evidence is completely in accord with and is explained by Markan priority, but it is completely incorrect to think that Markan priority is the only way to explain the evidence. In fact, the evidence is consistent with all four of the major theories of literary interrelationship and of the numerous variations on these that have been proposed. Certainly, these are not arguments for Markan priority against Markan independence, because they equally support the Markan independence hypothesis."

Back in 1951, the English scholar C.C. Butler gave a refutation of Streeter's argument as entire as has ever been offered since, and due to the historical importance of his critique of Streeter, as well as his eminent flair, I quote at some length here:

"On the basis of this accurate statement of highly important data, Streeter inferred, following in the wake of a distinguished line of critics and himself not the last in the ranks, rests an inference which is obviously false. Since the argument conceals a schoolboyish error of elementary reasoning at the very base of the two-document hypothesis as commonly proposed for our acceptance, we may be forgiven for devoting to its refutation more space than it intrinsically deserves. The deduction to be drawn from these facts is no longer that Mark contains the whole of a document which Matthew and Luke have independently used, but that there is a relation of dependence one way or the other between Matthew and Mark, and again between Mark and Luke. Is it too much to hope that the Lachmann fallacy will no longer be displayed with every appearance of superior logic before the imagination of an unsuspecting public, prone to submit to the claim to reason and slow to examine its validity? The cantina of authors listed above as propagating this fallacy should at least suggest a doubt whether the present dominance of the theory of Markan priority is really due, as is commonly supposed, to a triumph of honest criticism over traditionalism and fantasy."

Another once-popular argument for the priority of Mark comes from the presence of Semitisms, or distinctively Jewish words, in the text of Mark. The assumption is that Semitisms indicate temporal priority, in view of the fact that Jesus was Jewish, and so Semitisms represent words which were most likely original to Jesus. Further, it assumes that later Christian writers would have been motivated to reduce the number of Semitisms in their writings in order to appeal to the increasing number of Gentile Christians.

W.D. Davies and Dale Allison ask us, "How then do proponents of Markan priority account for the six Semitic expressions found in Mark but not in Matthew?" In the first place, even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that Christians writing to Gentile audiences would have been motivated to reduce the number of Semitisms in any given gospel, there is no obvious reason to think that Semitisms necessarily indicate temporal priority, because we don't know exactly who the original audience of any particular gospel might have been. It is entirely possible for a later document to be written for a substantially more Jewish Christian community and therefore to include additional Semitisms.

But more than this, it is doubtful that Matthew and Luke really do exhibit a desire to include fewer Semitisms than Mark. Matthew, in particular, tends to have much more of an eye towards Jewish interests than the other synoptics, suggesting that he may have had a substantially Jewish audience. Ward Powers sums things up nicely: "It is as valid to argue that Mark changed Matthew's Greek to his preferred style or in order to reflect Peter's use of such Semitisms in his preaching as that Matthew changed it the other way. We seem to be dealing here with the personal preferences of an author rather than a decisive proof of relative antiquity. Moreover, the evidence concerning Semitisms in general indicates that Matthew has the highest level of Semitisms in the New Testament, followed by Luke, while Mark has only about 55% as many as Matthew. It is thus very difficult to argue that Matthew and Luke had the redactional tendency of avoiding Semitisms."

One newer argument for the priority of Mark comes from the supposed lower Christology present within the gospel of Mark compared to the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Examples such as Jesus's supposed inability to perform miracles in Mark 6:5 or his alleged denial of his own deity in Mark 10:18 are used to motivate this line of reasoning. Had Matthew and Luke been using Mark, so the argument goes, it is easy to explain why they would change some of Mark's statements about Jesus which make him look less divine, in light of the ever-increasing reverence Christians had for Jesus as they began to view him as divine. Conversely, had Mark been using Matthew and Luke, it's very difficult to see why Mark would make their more divine view of Jesus more human.

This argument hinges on two dubious assumptions. In the first place, it assumes that belief in Jesus's deity evolved over time and was not present from the very inception of Christianity. In the second place, it assumes that Mark actually does portray Jesus as being less divine than Matthew and Luke. But these assumptions are far from certain.

First, the idea that divine Christology evolved later on in the history of Christianity is demonstrably false. By all accounts, the writings of the Apostle Paul predate the gospel of Mark, and yet in Paul, we see clearly that Christians already regarded Jesus as fully divine before Mark ever wrote his gospel. 1 Corinthians 8:6 says, "yet for us there is only one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things and we exist through him." Romans 9:5 says, "and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all God blessed forever. Amen." Colossians 1:15-20 says, "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is also the head of the body, the church; and he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in him, and through him to reconcile all things to himself."

As Richard Bauckham has famously said, "the earliest Christology was already the highest Christology." So the assumption that divine Christology was a later development within Christianity is clearly and seriously flawed, meaning that even if Mark does demonstrate a lower Christology than the other synoptics, this cannot be taken to indicate that his gospel is any earlier than theirs. If anything, this would be evidence that Mark was written later, since all of the evidence suggests that lower Christology, rather than higher Christology, was a later development.

But is it even true that Mark has a lower Christology than Matthew and Luke? Let's take a look at the two most popular examples where Matthew allegedly redacted Mark to reflect a higher Christology. A favorite example is Mark 6:5-6, which reads, "And he could not do any miracle there except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he was amazed at their unbelief." Whereas the parallel in Matthew 13:58 says, "And he did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief."

Peter Head sees support from Markan priority here, saying, "This passage has often been cited in connection with the Christological argument for Markan priority because of the difference between Mark's statement, 'he could do no mighty works there and he marveled because of their unbelief,' which suggests that Jesus was unable to perform miracles in Nazareth, and Matthew's, 'he did not do many mighty works there.'"

But is this really what Mark intended to convey when he said that Jesus could not do any mighty works there? Did Mark really believe that people's faith somehow gave Jesus the ability to do miracles? A careful reading of Mark's gospel will clearly yield a negative answer to these questions. Consider the story of the healing of the paralytic in Mark 2:3-12: "And some people came bringing to him a man who was paralyzed; and Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the paralyzed man, 'Son, your sins are forgiven.' But some of the scribes were sitting there and thinking it over in their hearts, 'Why does this man speak that way? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins except God alone?' Immediately Jesus, aware in his spirit that they were thinking that way within themselves, said to them, 'Why are you thinking about these things in your hearts? Which is easier to say to the paralyzed man, "Your sins are forgiven," or to say, "Get up and pick up your pallet and walk"? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins'—he said to the paralyzed man—'I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet, and go home.' And he got up and immediately picked up the pallet and went out in the sight of everyone."

Several relevant facts follow from a careful reading of this passage. First, we see a theme in Mark that Jesus chooses to heal those who first have faith. Second, we see that Jesus has the ability to forgive sins, which is evidence of his deity. And third, we see that Jesus has the ability to heal the man as proof of his deity. As Seager Grindheim argues, "In the forgiveness sayings of Mark 2:5 and 10, with their focus upon the earthly authority of Jesus, Jesus took upon himself a role that was known as the prerogative of God himself. Unlike others in the early Christian community, Jesus did not refer beyond himself to warrant his authority; his authority was demonstrated by his own act of healing. The best explanation for Jesus's acts is that he understood himself to have an authority that, in a Jewish context, was exclusively attributed to God. Jesus appears to have put himself in a role that was reserved for God and thus implicitly claimed to be God's equal."

Thus, Mark very clearly regards Jesus as divine, endowed with authority from God, incapable of proving this through miracles. If Head is correct in how he is interpreting Mark 6, Mark is completely contradicting everything which he told us about Jesus in Mark 2. If instead, we choose to read Mark 6 through the lens of what Mark already told us in Mark 2, this allows Mark to be consistent with his own Christology. We see that Jesus was only unable to heal many people in Nazareth because he had chosen to do miracles on the condition of faith, and that condition was not being met.

Craig Evans, a Markan prior who uses Christological arguments for Markan priority, is perfectly willing to say that Matthew and Luke improved Mark's Christology. Yet, even he acknowledges that "there is no intention on Mark's part to paint Jesus as genuinely lacking the ability to do miracles in Nazareth." In this passage, regarding this verse, he says, "Did Jesus choose not to do Miracles here, or was he unable to do so? Being the Son of God, Jesus could do Miracles when he chose to do so, but he would not heal anyone who did not believe in him. Therefore, it is appropriate to say that Jesus was unable to heal many because there were so few who believed."

This is also clear in Mark 6:6: "And he was amazed at their unbelief." Matthew and Mark are making the same point. In sum, we can only read Mark as suggesting that Jesus was literally lacking the ability to do miracles in Nazareth if we read Mark 6:5 in exclusion of everything else which Mark tells us about Jesus's divine power and authority. To the extent that we accept that, taken in isolation from the rest of Mark's gospel, this verse makes it look like Jesus was less powerful than Matthew does, we may say that Mark may have been careless with his word choice here. For, as we have already seen, Mark clearly regarded Jesus as divine and possessing the ability to heal the sick. Consequently, he could not have intended to convey any inability on Jesus's part in Mark 6:5. If that is the unintentional effect of this verse, this is to be explained by recourse to Mark's carelessness. But there is no reason to suppose that Mark would have been less careless had he been dependent upon Matthew here. So, in fact, Mark 6:5 tells us nothing whatsoever about the priority of Mark.

Perhaps the favorite text of proponents of Christological arguments for Markan priority is Mark 10:18. The verse reads, "But Jesus said to him, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.'" But in Matthew 19:17, we read, "And he said to him, 'Why are you asking me about what is good? There is only one who is good.'"

From this, Peter Head argues that Matthew alters Mark's text "with a view to correcting or at least protecting from possible misunderstanding the implicit suggestion in Mark's potentially embarrassing account that Jesus is not good and not God." As we have already seen in our consideration of Mark 2, the author of Mark's gospel clearly regards Jesus as being God. Consequently, he cannot be intending to have Jesus deny his own deity in Mark 10:18. And in fact, a careful reading of the text demonstrates that Jesus cannot be denying his own deity, since he is asking a question rather than making a declarative statement.

As Brant Pitre observes, "First and foremost, Jesus does not deny that he himself is good. He does not say, 'I am not good.' If he had said this, we would have to admit that he did not regard himself as God. Yet all Jesus affirms is that there is only one who is truly good: God. Jesus uses questions and riddles to lead his audience into the mystery of who he is. In the case of the Rich Young Man, Jesus poses a question that is meant to lead the young man to follow out the implications of his own words. If Jesus is good and God alone is good, then who exactly is Jesus? Jesus ends by telling the rich young man that the one thing he still lacks is to sell all he has and follow him. This ending is essential for unlocking the riddle of his words, yet it is constantly overlooked by those who claim that Jesus is denying that he is God. After making this declaration about the goodness of God, Jesus does something stunning: he adds a command to follow him to the obligation to keep the Ten Commandments. Here is Jesus adding the command to follow him as if that was on par with keeping the Commandments. When we interpret the story of Jesus and the Rich Young Man in its first-century context, we discover that the passage most frequently used to argue that Jesus does not claim to be divine, upon closer inspection, turns out to be powerful evidence that Jesus does claim to be God."

If Pitre is right, then the Christological argument for Markan priority depends upon a superficial comparison of Matthew 19:17 and Mark 10:18. This again fundamentally misunderstands Mark by wrenching a single verse out of the larger context to try to make Mark portray Jesus as being less than divine. But a careful reading of Mark cannot sustain this interpretation. We must never miss the forest for the trees when comparing particular passages of the synoptic gospels. Mark portrays Jesus as being in every sense just as divine as the other synoptic gospels.

There is a troublesome unfalsifiability to many arguments for Markan priority. Consider that Mark's supposed mistakes and his accuracy, as well as Matthew's supposed mistakes and his accuracy, are both taken as evidence for the priority of Mark. G.M. Styler is representative of this contradictory sort of thinking among Markan priors: "Of all the arguments for the priority of Mark, the strongest is that based on the freshness and circumstantial character of his narrative. In effect, the suggestion amounts to the view that Mark had direct access to what was in fact Matthew's ultimate source, to the authentic version of the story which Matthew has often abbreviated or modified." And yet, just a few pages earlier, Styler said, "In fact, the relative roughness of Mark is one of the strongest arguments on the other side. In textual criticism, it is accepted that all things being equal, the harder reading is to be preferred, since it is more probable that the harder should have been altered to the easier than vice versa. Numerous examples can be produced in which, in one way or another, Matthew's version looks easier than Mark's."

Mark Goodacre makes a similar sort of mistake, saying in one place, "It is with Mark's gospel that we are afforded a brief glimpse into a slightly more gritty, more realistic picture of Jesus," and then just a few pages later, "whereas Mark calls Herod Antipas 'King' four times in the passage, Matthew more correctly has 'tetrarch.' Precision, which is typical of Matthew. Matthew is working from his Markan source, making characteristic changes." In short, when Mark gets the details right, this is taken as evidence that Mark was first. But when Mark gets details wrong, this is also taken as evidence that Mark was first. When Matthew gets details right, he must be correcting Mark because Mark was first. When Matthew gets details wrong, it must be because he strayed from Mark, who is first. When Matthew gets details right, it must be because he was correcting Mark.

Ward Powers is correct when he says, "To consider the implications of these last two arguments: when Mark is wrong and Matthew and Luke do not contain the mistake, this proves Mark in priority. But when Matthew or Luke is wrong and Mark does not contain the mistake, this proves Mark in priority. But when Mark has a better structure and context than Matthew or Luke, this proves Mark in priority. And then when Matthew or Luke has a better structure or context than Mark, this proves Mark in priority. What sort of argument is that?"

With so many of the historically prominent arguments for Markan priority being based upon such manifestly fallacious reasoning, and with neo-Griesbachian scholars pointing out this inconvenient fact throughout the last half of the 20th century, there has become a need for new arguments to sustain Markan priority. No one has dedicated themselves to this task more fervently, nor more creatively, than Mark Goodacre. While Goodacre departs from the still dominant two-source hypothesis, his own Farrer-Goodacre hypothesis retains the idea that Mark was the first gospel. I think it is safe to say that Goodacre is by far the most formidable defender of the priority of Mark in the modern age. As such, I shall devote a lot of space to discussing his arguments.

Goodacre refers to his first argument as the "argument from additions and omissions." This argument begins by considering the synoptic material that is unique to Mark, as well as the material which does not appear in Mark. It then asks if it is more plausible that the unique material was added by Mark or omitted by the other synoptic authors, and whether it is more plausible that the material which is absent from Mark was more likely to be deliberately omitted by Mark or unknown or unavailable to Mark. Supposedly, when this is done, it's supposed to strike one as more plausible that some of the unique material in Mark, such as Jesus healing with spit, or Jesus being belittled by his own family, or the unidentified naked man in the Garden of Gethsemane, is unlikely to have been added by Mark as supplementary material. Likewise, it's supposed to strike one as more plausible that Matthew and Luke contain material which Mark would have never deliberately omitted if it had been available to him, such as the birth narratives, the Sermon on the Mount, or the resurrection appearances.

As Goodacre explains, "Mark's gospel is considerably shorter than both Matthew and Luke. One of the most pressing issues, therefore, for adherents of the Griesbach hypothesis is to provide an account for why Mark omitted the material their theory dictates that he omitted. Furthermore, this needs to be studied alongside the additions Mark allegedly makes, and some account of the relationship between the omissions and additions will be necessary."

There are several reasons for thinking that Markan priority and the theory of mutual omission by Matthew and Luke is the more plausible. There are common elements in the healing of the deaf mute and the blind man of Bethsaida that might straightforwardly explain the omission. First, both healings involve the use of saliva. Second, both healings involve the element of secrecy that is so often standard in Mark. Furthermore, the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida clearly places some kind of limit on Jesus's ability; the healing is not instantaneous but takes time.

Goodacre approvingly cites W.D. Davies and Dale Allison as they ask, "Can one seriously envision someone rewriting Matthew and Luke so as to omit the miraculous birth of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, and the resurrection appearances, while on the other hand adding the tale of the naked young man, a healing miracle in which Jesus has trouble healing, and the remark that Jesus's family thought him mad?"

Mark's additions can be explained easily enough on the hypothesis that he was writing third. After all, according to church tradition, Mark had the Apostle Peter as his source of information. His remarks regarding the naked man, Jesus's use of saliva, and Jesus's family can all be explained by his supplementing Matthew and Luke with his recollections from Peter. Moreover, the suggestion that Jesus healing the blind man twice in Mark 8:23 implies a lack of power on Jesus's part is dubious, as we have already noted. Mark has a high Christology. More likely, this two-stage healing is intended to function as foreshadowing of Peter's partial understanding of Jesus, which only came to fullness after Jesus's death and resurrection. As David Peabody and his co-authors suggest, "the partial restoration of this man's sight may anticipate the next pericope in Mark's gospel, where Peter sees only in part. More will be required for Peter to attain clear vision."

But what about all the material which Mark leaves out? Why would Mark have failed to include the birth story, the Sermon on the Mount, or the resurrection appearances? Wouldn't Mark clearly wish to include this? The major problem with this argument lies in the gratuitous assumption that Mark is intended to be a gospel of the same type as Matthew and Luke. If that were the case, then it would indeed be unexpected that Mark would leave out these details pertaining to Jesus's birth, ministry, and resurrection, had they been available to him.

But are we really to imagine that the author of Mark didn't know about Jesus's post-resurrection appearances? This seems to me wholly implausible because, first, the author is clearly a Christian, and we know that the Christian community believed in the resurrection appearances. And second, the young man at the tomb in Mark 16:7 predicts that the appearances of Jesus are going to occur shortly. So if we instead accept that the author of Mark did know about the resurrection appearances of Jesus, as I think we must, then it is indeed puzzling as to why he does not include them in his gospel. But notice that this puzzle remains even if Mark was written first, and this in turn challenges the notion that the puzzle can be used to support Markan priority. For whether prior or posterior, the mystery of why Mark left out the resurrection appearances remains. This fact should tip us off that whatever other purposes Mark may have had in composing his gospel, one of them was not to give a complete story of the life of Jesus. This therefore undermines the central assumption which undergirds the argument from additions and omissions.

Mark is not the same type of gospel as Matthew and Luke. Matthew and Luke constitute early Christian *didache*, that is, teaching for those who were within the faith community and wanted to know more about Jesus. By contrast, the gospel of Mark is probably early Christian *kerygma*, that is, a proclamation of the gospel for unbelievers. This distinction is vital because it explains why Mark is shorter and omits so much material, in view of the fact that it was intended to be preached to non-Christians who likely wouldn't be willing to dedicate as much time to hearing about Jesus, and who would not be as curious about the details of Jesus's birth or his believer-specific teachings, such as the Sermon on the Mount.

Ward Powers argues, "Why is this significant? The conclusion we have reached regarding Mark's purpose from an examination of the material that he has chosen to include in its arrangement and wording is that Mark did not write for the church at all, that is, not as it were for the church's internal use. He produced a book for the church's external use. He put a source book for the church's *kerygma* into the hands of the church's evangelists. The gospels of Matthew and Luke contain the needed *kerygma* material, but they contain a great deal of other material as well. Moreover, each has relevant pericopes that the other does not. To make copies of both gospels is a lengthy and expensive business. To make a copy, even of one, is to copy more than is required for the *kerygma*. The church needed a book containing the *kerygma* extracted from both Matthew and Luke. This was considerably cheaper to produce and considerably easier to use. There is therefore a clear motive available for the production of Mark's gospel when the others were in existence: to provide a special-purpose gospel containing in clear, consecutive fashion the *kerygma* of the church, extracted from Matthew and Luke, for use in evangelism."

This answers the irrelevancy argument against Markan independence. In passing, it's worth noting that this explanation also pacifies the long-standing argument for Markan priority based upon Mark's more casual grammar. For if the intention of his gospel was to be preached, then it would often be read orally, and as such, it makes sense that Mark would adapt his wording to be easily read aloud. Therefore, neither Mark's unique material, nor his omissions, nor even his language support the theory of Markan priority.

Perhaps the most ingenious new argument developed for Markan priority is the "argument from editorial fatigue," spearheaded by Mark Goodacre. Goodacre defines editorial fatigue as follows: "Editorial fatigue is a phenomenon that will inevitably occur when a writer is heavily dependent on another's work. In telling the same story as his predecessor, a writer makes changes in the early stages which he is unable to sustain throughout, like continuity errors in film and television. Examples of fatigue will be unconscious mistakes, small errors of detail which naturally arise in the course of constructing a narrative. They are interesting because they can betray an author's hand, most particularly in revealing to us the identity of his sources."

So the idea is that Matthew and Luke possess continuity errors within themselves. These continuity errors, it is argued, are explained by Matthew and Luke making deliberate changes to details in Mark early on in their versions of the same story, and then forgetting that they did this. Thus, they end up copying the original details into their version of the story later on, and thereby create some level of inconsistency or confusion in the final story.

Goodacre gives the example of the cleansing of the leper in Mark. Jesus tells the leper, "See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest." In Matthew's version of the story, prior to the healing of the leper, Matthew adds the fact that crowds were following Jesus: "When Jesus came down from the mountain, large crowds followed him." Yet, after healing the leper, Matthew follows Mark's wording by having Jesus say to the leper that he has just healed, "See that you tell no one, but go, show yourself to the priest."

From this, Goodacre argues, "In Matthew's version of the story, there are two elements that are difficult to reconcile: many crowds at the beginning of the narrative and the charge, 'See that you say nothing to anyone,' at the end of it. A miracle that has been witnessed by many is apparently to be kept secret. This is in contrast to Mark, where there are no crowds; the Markan leper meets Jesus privately, and the command of silence is coherent. This odd state of affairs can be explained by the theory of Markan priority, for which it is therefore evidence." The first

A major problem with this argument is that it is debatable that the alleged examples of inconsistencies cited by Goodacre in order to motivate the argument are actually inconsistencies at all.

This particular example, we may begin by observing that Goodacre's conclusion rests completely upon the disputed idea that Matthew 8:1 constitutes the beginning of the story of Jesus cleansing the leper, as opposed to the end of the story of the Sermon on the Mount. If Matthew 8:1 is simply the end of the story from chapter 7, then there is clearly no inconsistency between Matthew 8:1 and 8:4. Consequently, Goodacre's argument cannot even get off the ground.

As David Niel argues on the basis of this observation, one might infer that Matthew's version of the story is secondary because he incorporated source material, namely the command to secrecy, that did not fit neatly into his narrative framework. However, as noted above, this judgment depends on whether one reads Matthew 8:1 as Matthew's introduction to this pericope or as part of his conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount.

But let us suppose that Goodacre is correct about Matthew 8:1 and 8:4 being part of the same pericope. Is there any reason to suppose that there is a genuine continuity error in this text? The first thing to note is that Mark's failure to mention a crowd in no way supports Goodacre's claim that the leper met Jesus privately in Mark's gospel. So there doesn't have to be any disagreement between Mark and Matthew in that regard.

And what of the supposed inconsistency Goodacre's argument wholly rests on? There being a genuine difficulty believing that a crowd was present when Jesus told the leper to tell no one that he had been healed. But a little reflection will show that there is not any difficulty here at all. In Mark 7:32-37, there is a similar story where Jesus heals a deaf and mute man in front of a multitude and tells the entire multitude not to tell anyone what he has done. Is it so difficult to imagine that something similar happened in Matthew 8? Couldn't Jesus have likewise told the crowds not to tell anyone what had happened? Clearly, according to Mark 7, Jesus himself had no problem with healing in front of crowds and then asking the entire crowd to keep the healing a secret. So unless Goodacre wants to maintain that Mark 7 is also inconsistent, then he must abandon Matthew 8 as being genuinely inconsistent and therefore he must reject it as being a genuine example of editorial fatigue.

Goodacre is also fond of the story of John the Baptist's beheading. The story in Mark is that Herodias wants to kill John because she has a grudge against him, but she could not because Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, she was greatly perplexed, and yet he liked to listen to him. In Matthew's version of the story, this element has dropped out. Now it is Herod, and not Herodias, who wants him killed. When Mark then speaks of Herod's grief at the request for John's head, it is coherent and understandable. Herodias demanded something that Herod did not want. But when Matthew and parallel speaks of the king's grief, it makes no sense at all. Matthew had told us, after all, that Herod wanted to put him to death.

The obvious explanation for the inconsistencies of Matthew's account is that he is working from a source. He has made changes in the early stages which he fails to sustain throughout, thus betraying his knowledge of Mark. This is particularly plausible when one notes that Matthew's account is considerably shorter than Mark's. Matthew has overlooked important details in the act of abbreviating. But again, there does not have to be a contradiction between Matthew and Mark here. Although Matthew does not mention Herodias in his version of the story, nothing he says precludes her from having moved Herod to kill John the Baptist.

And regarding Matthew's supposed inconsistency, there is simply no contradiction between saying that Herod wanted to kill John and that he was also sorry to do so. This is simply the well-known distinction between an antecedent and a consequent desire. An antecedent desire is that which considers a thing in and of itself, detached from its particular circumstances or consequences. A consequent desire is that which considers a thing as well as its circumstances and consequences. A familiar example of this distinction comes from the everyday experience of rising in the morning. In both wanting to go to work as well as not wanting to go to work, antecedently we do not want to go to work because we have other things that we would rather be doing. However, as a result of considering the consequences of not going to work, we consequently do want to go to work. With this distinction in mind, it seems clear to me that this is what Matthew means when he describes him as both wanting to kill John and is sad that he had to do it.

I believe that Goodacre incorrectly identifies Mark's reference to Herod enjoying John's preaching as being the reason why Herod was sad when the time came to kill John. In fact, the reason Mark gives for Herod's reluctance is fear of knowing that John was a righteous and holy man. This is fully harmonious with Matthew's account, which states that Herod was afraid to kill John because he knew that the people regarded him as a prophet. Both accounts present a consistent story. Herod arrested John at the instigation of Herodias. He antecedently wanted to execute John for speaking out against him, despite enjoying his preaching, yet he was consequently afraid to do so because he feared the people who regarded John as a prophet due to his upstanding character. I see no need to suggest that Matthew is changing things within Mark. Rather, I see both stories as being consistent, but with Mark providing some additional details which give us a fuller picture of what was going on.

Another supposed example of editorial fatigue is found in the story of Jesus calming the storm. While Goodacre does not use this example, his colleague Joel Marcus does, saying Matthew likes earthquakes. He takes over Mark's story about the stilling of the storm but changes Mark's sudden tempest into an earthquake in the sea. While meteorologically possible, the description here is in some tension with the rest of the narrative, which just speaks of Jesus rebuking the winds and of the disciples exclaiming about the effect of this rebuke on the winds and the sea, not the earth. So Marcus's contention is that Matthew is inconsistent with himself by saying that an earthquake arose in the sea, causing the water to become turbulent, but later saying that Jesus restores peace by rebuking the wind.

This inconsistency can be easily explained if we suppose that Matthew has switched out Mark's description of a windstorm for an earthquake, forgotten that he has done this by the end of the story, and consequently ends up contradicting himself. Truly, this was a conflict of Marcus's own making. In saying that the turbulence was caused by an earthquake, Matthew does not thereby deny that winds were also present. There is no tension, let alone a contradiction, entailed by saying that the turbulence was caused both by an earthquake and also by the wind. These events are mutually compatible with one another. Consequently, there is no incoherence within Matthew's narrative and therefore no reason to suppose that this is another example of editorial fatigue.

As David Niel observes, what early reader or hearer of Matthew's version of this episode would not have associated strong winds with a quake in the sea and a boat being hidden by waves? If, as suggested above, Matthew is aware of the parallels between this pericope and Jonah 1, there is no need to posit overzealous abbreviation of Mark's account to explain Matthew's failure to mention the wind in Matthew 8:24. As a result, little source critical weight can be attached to this alleged inconsistency.

While I have only offered a detailed analysis of two of Goodacre's examples and a third popular example, similar harmonizations are available for other alleged examples of editorial fatigue. The point is simply that the argument is unmotivated. For those who don't accept that there are necessarily examples of inconsistencies within and among the synoptic gospels, minimally Goodacre and his followers have not provided any reason to think that this hypothesis is more likely correct than the harmonizations which I have proposed.

The second major problem with the argument from editorial fatigue is that it assumes that the gospel authors felt free to deliberately alter the facts. But this is an assumption which is questionable and runs contrary to a prima facie reading of the Gospels, which present themselves as honest historical reportage. There is not sufficient evidence to justify the claim that the gospel authors felt free to deliberately alter the facts.

As Lydia McGrew states at the end of her lengthy study of this topic, "there is simply no good evidence that suggests that the evangelists thought of themselves as licensed to invent, and there is a wealth of evidence to the contrary." This evidence too will remain to be accounted for. Even if some new specific fictionalization theory arises, we need not and should not qualify and confuse this message by saying that the authors sometimes considered themselves licensed to change the facts.

The third problem is that even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the gospel authors were making deliberate changes to facts and creating inconsistencies, the phenomenon of inconsistencies can be interpreted the other way around. In other words, instead of viewing Matthew and Luke as creating inconsistencies by forgetting the changes which they made to Mark, one could just as easily interpret Mark as fixing inconsistencies within Matthew and Luke. This means that the phenomenon of inconsistencies cannot tell us anything about the order in which the gospels were composed. At best, it shows that Mark is the middle term between Matthew and Luke in some way.

Remember, editorial fatigue is an interpretation of the supposed phenomenon. We are considering the phenomenon itself is just alleged incongruity within the synoptics. But there is more than one way to interpret this kind of incongruity. Goodacre needs to show that his interpretation of the phenomenon of incongruity is more likely correct than any other.

In passing, it's worth pointing out that there is a certain unfalsifiability to Goodacre's arguments for Markan priority. As Power somewhat humorously observes, Goodacre compares Mark's harder readings with Matthew and Luke, since the way they smooth his roughness and correct his errors supposedly indicates that they were subsequent to Mark. Thus, when Matthew and/or Luke has something that apparently makes better sense than Mark's version, this points to Markan priority. Also, Goodacre claims that both Matthew and Luke suffer quite a bit from editorial fatigue and forget where they are and when they are copying from Mark. Goodacre believes that these elements indicate that Matthew and Luke were working from a source that is Mark. Thus, when Mark's material makes better sense than Matthew's and/or Luke's, this also points to Markan priority. So whichever way the situation goes, the explanation is Markan priority. For those attempting to prove Mark in priority and disprove Mark in posteriority, such evidence is always on their side. Heads I win, tails you lose.

In this video, we have surveyed several of the most historically prominent and currently popular arguments for the priority of Mark's gospel. The aim was to show that the case for Markan priority has been vastly overstated and that the evidential foundation of this dogma is holding inadequate. This, of course, is no proof that the gospel of Matthew is written first or that the gospel of Mark was written third. We shall explore the external and internal evidence for these conclusions in two future videos. The only conclusion we have reached here is that there is no justification to be had for the theory of Markan priority, despite the confidence with which it is widely held.

However, it is my hope that this video serves to clear away some of the bias and prejudice against the patristics and moves us to take what they have to say about the synoptic gospels more seriously. In my last two videos, I explained the nature and scope of the synoptic problem and critiqued the arguments which undergird the foundation of most modern synoptic hypotheses, the theory of Markan priority. In this video, I begin the task of building a positive case for an alternative hypothesis. In my next video, we will explore the internal evidence which strongly suggests that Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels first and that Mark was written last. But for now, I want to leave those sorts of considerations aside and examine a different category of evidence.

In this video, I want to see what sort of synoptic theory we arrive at if we only consider what our earliest witnesses have to say about the composition of the gospels. While modern scholars tend to ignore or discredit this evidence, the early church had quite a lot to say about the composition of the gospels. David Black captures the situation rather well when he says, "The patristic evidence for the authenticity and historicity of the Gospels is not normally discussed nowadays at any length, if at all, by Markan-priorists." The academic guild, both in Europe and North America, assumes that the patristic evidence is basically legendary and unreliable. Martin Moss likewise laments the situation, saying, "There appears to be a consensus that if conclusions reached from source criticism conflict with the witness of the early church, then the latter can be dismissed with the lamest of explanations, or sometimes without any explanation at all." Papias thus becomes the primary whipping boy when the early fathers' belief that Matthew wrote first is thought to conflict with the generally accepted priority of Mark. Goodacre, evidently embarrassed by this conflict, is more horrifyingly forthright than most, saying, "It will be most prudent to continue to treat the patristic witness with a pinch of salt." I doubt, however, whether the optimal approach to any historical problem is to jettison all the available ancient evidence at the outset. Discrediting the early fathers simply raises the unanswered, and indeed usually unasked, question: How did they all come to be so wrong?

This video will survey the writings of the early church fathers which have bearing on the writing of the gospels. After each quotation is supplied, I will explain what is and what is not said about the order of the gospels' composition. At the end, we will see what sort of synoptic theory emerges if we just let the early church speak without considering any internal evidence.

Papias of Hierapolis is our oldest witness to discuss the writing of the gospels. Writing in the later 1st or early 2nd century, Papias wrote: "The Elder used to say: Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord's discourses. So that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them, for he was careful of one thing: not to omit any of the things which he had heard and not to state any of them falsely. So then Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew language, and everyone interpreted them as he was able."

While Papias does supply us with valuable information regarding the circumstances in which Matthew and Mark were written, and despite attempts from both Matthean and Markan priorists to claim Papias in support of their respective synoptic theories, a careful reading of Papias will reveal that he tells us nothing regarding the order in which the gospels were written. As William Farmer concludes, "one can safely conclude little, if anything, about the sequence in which the gospels were composed from the words of Papias." However, Papias does seem to say that Matthew's gospel was originally composed in Hebrew, something which has relentlessly nagged at scholars. We will return to this question near the end of the video.

Our next witness is Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the mid-2nd century. Irenaeus wrote: "Matthew also issued a gospel written among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and laying the foundations of the church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also handed down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the gospel preached by him. Afterward, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, did himself publish a gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia."

Irenaeus tells us in no uncertain terms that Mark was written after Matthew and that John was the last gospel to have been written. While he lists Luke third, a careful reading of Irenaeus will reveal that he doesn't actually say anything about the order in which Luke was written. As Farmer correctly observes, "it seems most natural to understand Irenaeus to imply that Luke, as well as Mark, composed his gospel after the death of Peter and Paul. However, there is no indication of any sequential relationship between Mark and Luke." And once again, Irenaeus seems to agree with Papias that the gospel of Matthew was originally composed in Hebrew.

From Irenaeus's words, we can begin forming a synoptic theory: Matthew, possibly in Hebrew, was written first. Mark and Luke are both clearly later than Matthew, but Irenaeus does not tell us in which order they stand to one another. John is clearly written last.

A third witness is Clement of Alexandria, writing in the later 2nd century. He said: "The earliest written gospels were those containing the genealogies. And the Gospel according to Mark came into being in this manner: Mark, the follower of Peter, while Peter was publicly preaching the gospel at Rome in the presence of some of Caesar's knights and uttering many testimonies about Christ, on their asking him to let them have a record of the things that had been said, wrote the gospel that is called the Gospel of Mark from the things said by Peter, just as Luke is recognized as the pen that wrote the Acts of the Apostles, as the translator of the letter of Paul to the Hebrews."

Clement leaves no doubt that Matthew and Luke were written first, as these are the two gospels which contain genealogies. While Clement does not tell us whether Matthew or Luke was first, Irenaeus has already given us the answer to this question. Thus, Matthew is first, Luke emerges as being second, leaving Mark as being third.

Some have maintained that Clement contradicts Irenaeus on when the gospel of Mark was written. While Irenaeus says that Mark handed down his gospel after the departure of Peter and Paul, which is very likely a reference to their deaths, Clement says that Mark wrote his gospel while Peter was still preaching in Rome, meaning that Peter was still alive. The apparent contradiction, however, is only superficial. Upon a closer reading, it is evident that Mark's gospel was written during Peter's lifetime, specifically for the Petrine guard, as Clement says, and that it was only handed on to believers in general after Peter and Paul's death, as Irenaeus says. In fact, the two accounts are perfectly harmonious.

As Bernard Orchard concludes, "Irenaeus is not making any reference to the date of the composition of Mark and Luke; he is simply concerned with pointing out that just as the traditions of Matthew and John continue to live on in their respective gospels, so do those of Peter and Paul in the gospels of Mark and Luke. That is to say, as long as Peter and Paul lived, they preached their own gospels personally by word of mouth, but after their demise, their preaching also continued in the gospels in which their followers had already recorded their teaching." In conclusion, this text of Irenaeus, recorded by Eusebius in its original Greek, should no longer be claimed in support of the conjecture that both Mark and Luke were composed after the death of Peter and Paul, for it offers no evidence for this claim. This means that there is no contradiction or discrepancy between the testimony of Irenaeus and the large amount of witness in favor of Mark and Luke having both been written and published during the lifetime of Peter and Paul. Consequently, the evidence of Irenaeus is in harmony with the rest.

Given the clear support which Clement's statements provide for the two-gospel hypothesis, it is not surprising that some scholars, such as Helmut Merkel, have tried to explain away Clement's testimony. Merkel theorizes that Clement originally didn't know about Mark's gospel and so he later interpolated his own writings to sandwich the story of Mark's composition between his references to Matthew and Luke and his reference to John, giving the unintentional impression that Mark was the third gospel to have been written. Truly, this theory is hard to take seriously. It lacks any supporting evidence. In it, it smacks of desperation to explain away the clear evidence that Mark was written third.

As Bernard Orchard points out in response to Merkel, "these suggestions, though ingenious, are hardly convincing. We know that Papias knew of Luke and John as well as Matthew and Mark because he wrote commentaries on the former two. It is moreover incredible that the learned men whom Clement sought out, from whom he learned the apostolic tradition from the ancient elders regarding the fact that the gospels with genealogies were written before those without, would not themselves have known of the four canonical gospels. All four had long since been circulating widely in Asia as well as elsewhere." Such arguments are little more than grasping at straws.

Our fourth witness is Tertullian, writing in the very early 3rd century. He said: "I lay it down to begin with that the documents of the Gospel have the apostles for their authors, and that this task of promulgating the Gospel was imposed upon them by the Lord himself. In short, from among the apostles, John and Matthew implant in us the faith; while from among the apostolic men, Luke and Mark reaffirm it."

Many have thought that Tertullian is here claiming that Matthew and John were written first, and that Luke and Mark were written later. However, this interpretation is hardly required by Tertullian's words. A careful reading will show that Tertullian regards Matthew and John as being the primary sources of faith due to being direct apostles of Jesus, whereas Luke and Mark play a role of confirmation in light of their being followers of the apostles. Unfortunately, Tertullian just doesn't tell us anything about the order in which the gospels were written.

A fifth witness is Origen. He tells us: "Among the four Gospels, which are the only indisputable ones in the Church of God under heaven, I have learned by tradition that the first written was that according to Matthew, who was once a tax collector but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, who published it for those who from Judaism came to believe, composed as it was in the Hebrew language. Secondly, that according to Mark, who composed it in accordance with the instructions of Peter, who in the Catholic epistle acknowledges him as a son. And thirdly, that according to Luke, for those who from the Gentiles came to believe. After them all, that according to John."

Origen is quite clear that Matthew was written first and John last. At first blush, Origen seems to be saying that Mark was written second and Luke third, and it is quite possible that this is what he means. But it cannot be denied that Origen's language is less decisive in the case of Mark and Luke. He does not explicitly state that the words "secondly" and "thirdly" refer to the order of the writing with respect to Mark and Luke. Potentially, this may refer to their canonical order rather than their chronological order.

As Farmer says, "it is possible that when Origen systematically moves from first to second to third and last of all, he does not himself think of this as the historical order in which these gospels were composed." However, this is a mere possibility. It must be admitted that Origen most naturally reads as saying that Mark was written prior to Luke, in view of his definitively chronological language with respect to Matthew and John.

The sixth and final witness is St. Augustine. He writes: "Now, those four evangelists, whose names have gained the most remarkable circulation over the whole world, and whose number has been fixed as four, are believed to have written in the order which follows: First, Matthew; then Mark; thirdly, Luke; lastly, John."

Augustine agrees with the previous witnesses on the priority of Matthew and the posteriority of John. There is no question that Augustine regards Mark as second and Luke as third in this passage. However, it is possible that he depended upon Origen for this information, and that he later changed his mind about the order. For later in his life, when discussing the relationships of the gospels to one another, Augustine also wrote: "Mark either appears to be preferentially the companion of Matthew, or else he holds a course in conjunction with both." Augustine is here referring to the content of Mark's gospel as having a clear preference for Matthew's wording. However, he also says that Mark sometimes follows both. Given that Augustine is differentiating Mark from Matthew and Luke in this context, it seems reasonable to interpret his use of the word "both" as meaning both Matthew and Luke. But if this is right, then Augustine must believe that both Matthew and Luke were written prior to Mark, for in order for Mark to follow them, they must have preceded Mark. Thus, it appears that Augustine changed his mind on the order of the synoptic gospels.

As David Peabody argues, "it appears that what Augustine says about Mark's relationship to Luke, both at the personal and at the thematic levels in Book I, are different from what he says about these same relationships in Book IV." But whatever the textual evidence which Augustine may have had in mind in Book IV, it was sufficient to lead him to a new understanding of Mark which he did not have in Book I. In Book IV, it is the textual relationship among the synoptics that demonstrate that Mark unites the gospel of Matthew with the gospel of Luke at the thematic and at the symbolic levels. Thus, Augustine yields two synoptic orders. In both, he maintains the priority of Matthew, with John's gospel being written last. His earlier writings leave no doubt that he once believed Mark to have preceded Luke, but this can be easily explained by reference to Augustine's dependence upon Origen for this tradition. His later writings seem to suggest that his own analysis of the synoptic gospels led him to change his mind and place Luke before Mark.

When we lay out what all of the earliest patristic witnesses have to say, there are several unanimous agreements. All agree on the priority of Matthew, though some appear to say that it was originally written in Hebrew, and all agree on John being written last. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that there is some apparent disagreement on the order of Luke and Mark. While Irenaeus's words are inconclusive and Augustine appears to have changed his mind, Clement and Origen both seem pretty emphatic on their respective orders, and these orders are inconsistent. A good rule of historical inquiry when sources conflict is to prefer the older source when all other things stand equal between them. Since Clement was closer to the writing of the gospels than Origen, it will be most prudent to prefer his order until strong reasons are put forward for preferring Origen's later order.

When the church fathers are allowed to have a voice and we attempt to take their testimony seriously, the most consistent overall synoptic theory which emerges is as follows: Matthew 1, Luke 2, Mark 3rd. In short, the two-gospel or Griesbach hypothesis is the best supported hypothesis by the external evidence pertinent to the synoptic problem.

As noted earlier, many of the patristic witnesses seem to indicate that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew. A long-standing objection to this is that the canonical Gospel of Matthew could not have originally been translated from Hebrew. Now, first and foremost, it should be pointed out that one need not say that canonical Matthew is a word-for-word translation of a Hebrew original. After all, an early Hebrew gospel could have very easily been expanded upon and improved in a later Greek edition. So the proponent of a Hebrew Matthew is not committed to believing that our canonical Matthew is an exact translation of a Hebrew gospel. But with that being said, how strong is the case against believing that canonical Matthew could not have been translated from a Hebrew original, as Papias possibly indicates when he says that everyone translated or interpreted them as he was able?

The arguments against this are less than conclusive. Let us consider some of the arguments of J.R.C. Cousland. Cousland argues that despite scholarly efforts to detect an underlying Aramaic original from Mark or Matthew, it is probable that all the evangelists wrote in the common Greek of their day. Further, the vast majority of Hebrew Bible citations in the New Testament are taken from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, which would render this conclusion probable. He also notes that most of the citations from the Old Testament in Matthew are from the Greek Septuagint. I take his implication to be that this somehow makes it unlikely that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew, since it would be inconsistent for a Hebrew work to cite a Greek translation of scripture. If this is indeed Cousland's intended point, then it seems relatively easy to circumvent it. On the assumption that Matthew originally was a Hebrew work, then it is reasonable to assume that the Old Testament citations were originally from the Hebrew Masoretic text. When the hypothetical translation was taking place, it clearly would have been more efficient for the translator to simply adopt the Septuagint translation of Matthew's Old Testament references rather than attempting to translate these verses into Greek himself. After all, why bother translating these verses into Greek if that has already been done?

Another skeptic of a Hebrew Matthew is Dale Martin. He argues: "Papias, for example, also thought that the gospel of Matthew had originally been written in Hebrew and only later had been translated into Greek. That is wrong. It is clear to modern scholars that Matthew is written in Greek. It shows no signs of being a translation from Hebrew and, in some instances, it makes a point by using Greek words that cannot have been translations from Hebrew." Martin's only argument that it is impossible for Matthew to have been translated from Hebrew to Greek is that Matthew's gospel contains Greek words which don't have Hebrew equivalents. Unfortunately, he supplies no examples of this, so it's difficult to know exactly how to respond to Martin. Suffice to say that translation is rarely ever a direct word-for-word copying from one language into another, precisely because some words don't have exact equivalence in the other language and because things like figures of speech don't always carry over into another language. Even if Matthew's gospel contains Greek words which don't have exact Hebrew equivalents, it is very dubious to think that whatever is expressed in Greek in Matthew's gospel could not have been expressed in Hebrew at all.

It is often objected that we have no surviving manuscript evidence for a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. But this objection fails to consider that the vast majority of works written in the ancient past have not survived until the present. Given that a gospel written in Hebrew would not have been as widely used as a Greek gospel, it is not surprising that a Hebrew gospel would not have survived until the present day. Moreover, it is perfectly legitimate to postulate the existence of documents which are no longer extant when there is strong evidence that they once existed. This is exactly what the hypothetical Q source is supposed to be. If there is nothing illegitimate about postulating Q in the absence of any textual evidence for this document, as the majority of scholars do, then there cannot be anything wrong with postulating a Hebrew Matthew in the absence of any textual evidence for this document. Indeed, if we are reading Papias and Irenaeus correctly, the hypothesis that there was a Hebrew Matthew at least has testimonial evidence in its favor. The same cannot be said for the Q document, unless, of course, one wants to suppose that these are one and the same.

Beyond this, we know that plenty of documents which were originally written in Hebrew were later translated into Greek around this time. As Sang-Bok Kim argues, there are similar instances in the history of literature which might add credence to the possibility of such translation. In the 3rd century BC, the entire Old Testament was reproduced in Greek. First Maccabees was first written in Hebrew, but the original Hebrew text was lost at a very early date. There is no evidence of its use by any early writer. The earliest version is preserved only in Greek. Furthermore, it was already noted that Josephus composed the Wars of the Jews in Hebrew at first but reproduced it in a Greek edition, and today there is no trace of the original text.

With all that being said, it is also possible that we have misunderstood Papias this entire time. There is another possible interpretation of what he said with respect to Matthew's gospel. While most translations of Papias render him as saying that Matthew wrote in the Hebrew language, the word he uses is *dialekto*, and it can also be legitimately translated as "style" or "dialect." As Bernard Orchard explains, "in the first century *dialekto* meant both language and style, so that our phrase could mean either in a Jewish language or in a Jewish style, depending on the context." Under this interpretation, Papias would be saying that Matthew wrote his gospel not in the Hebrew language, but in a Hebrew style. It is certainly not controversial that Matthew's gospel is the most Jewish of the synoptics in terms of familiarity with Jewish customs and Messianic emphasis.

Robert Gundry argues that the context of Papias' quotation of the Elder favors this understanding. In his statement quoted by Papias, the Elder shows concern over Mark's style, particularly over the disorderly way the single points concerning Jesus's ministry appear in the gospel of Mark. This concern favors a similar frame of reference in the statement about Matthew, whose writing by contrast exhibits orderliness. This contrast comes out clearly in the Elder's parallelistic use of the verb "arranged" to describe what Matthew did do with the Lord's oracles and of the cognate noun "arrangement" to describe what Mark, following Peter, did not do with the Lord's oracles. Furthermore, the Elder says nothing at all about the linguistic form of Mark, which he ought to mention if it is his intention to introduce by way of contrast a different linguistic form in Matthew. Apparently, Matthew does not have a linguistic form different from Mark's Greek. A Hebrew dialect, then, does not imply that Matthew wrote in the Aramaic language.

Gundry's argument is strong, but there is still the difficulty of Papias going on to say that everyone translated or interpreted Matthew's writings as best they could, which indicates some sort of language barrier. As Jeremiah Tridle points out, "it is thus plausible that Papias believed that Matthew wrote in the Hebrew language, given that others had to translate it as they were able." It is therefore impossible to definitively say one way or the other whether or not the earliest patristic witnesses testify to a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew or not. But what is very clear is that they all agree that Matthew, in some form or another, was written first.

As even Mark Goodacre affirms, "there is something rather troubling about the case for Markan priority, a niggling difficulty that contradicts the scholarly consensus." The external evidence: all the early Christian writers who expressed an opinion from the late 2nd century onwards pronounced in favor of the priority of Matthew. There is a genuine consensus here, a consensus far stronger than the current scholarly one concerning the priority of Mark. Goodacre goes on to say that this consensus is not enough to overturn the overwhelming internal evidence for the priority of Mark. So the patristic witness must just be wrong on this point. However, as shown in my last video, the evidence for Markan priority is inconclusive at best.

Goodacre's only attempt to explain how the patristics might have gotten this detail wrong is to hypothesize that Matthew was an apostle of Jesus, and so of course the early church must have thought his gospel was written first. The fathers wanted to demonstrate that the four gospels they favored were written by the apostles or at the very least under the influence of the apostles. The relative dates given to the gospels then erode largely as a consequence of prior decisions on the identity of the authors. From the 2nd century onwards, Matthew was not only the most popular gospel, but it was also the one that bore the name of an apostle. Mark and Luke, on the other hand, did not bear the names of apostles and were thought to have been written by the companions of Peter and Paul, respectively. The priority of Matthew was a natural consequence of the belief that his gospel was the one directly written by an apostle.

Leaving aside the fact that we have no particular reason to think that any of the patristics made such an egregious leap in logic from Matthew's apostolicity to his gospel's priority, there is a serious problem with Goodacre's reasoning here. The patristics also unanimously place John's gospel last. If we are to accept Goodacre's assumption that the patristics believed that a gospel had temporal priority in virtue of having been written by an apostle, then John's gospel ought to be placed alongside Matthew's as being one of the first gospels to have been written. And yet, it is unanimously placed last. This calls into question Goodacre's idea that the patristics were so dimwitted as to assume that a gospel must have been written earlier if it was written by an apostle. And so the question remains for the proponent of Markan priority: How did each and every one of the patristics manage to get the order of the synoptic gospels so wrong?

Bernard Orchard concludes the matter rather well: "Our conclusion must be that the patristic evidence has been for too long underrated and neglected, and that properly understood, it can prove to be of the greatest value in helping us to understand the circumstances surrounding the original composition of the Gospel of Mark, as well as pointing us toward the proper solution to the synoptic question."

In this video, we have surveyed the external evidence for the priority of Matthew in general and for the two-gospel hypothesis in particular. We have seen that the early church was unanimous on Matthew having been written first. Furthermore, despite some possible disagreement with respect to the order of Mark and Luke, the external evidence also favors viewing Mark as being subsequent to Luke. This evidence for the two-gospel hypothesis is weighty and must be taken seriously. However, it is only the first leg upon which the two-gospel hypothesis stands. In my next video, I will show how the evidence within the synoptic gospels also favors the two-gospel hypothesis.

In my last video, I asked viewers to temporarily lay aside the internal evidence bearing on the synoptic problem for the sake of letting the early church have their say. We saw that while some disagreement may have existed over the exact order of Mark and Luke, there was complete agreement on the priority of Matthew. I determined that the two-gospel hypothesis accounted for the greatest amount of patristic evidence, that is, if we let the early church fathers speak for themselves. The idea that Matthew wrote first, Luke wrote second, and Mark wrote third was the most consistent with what they say. I have already argued at length in a previous video that the supposedly decisive internal evidence for Markan priority can actually be reasonably interpreted on either the hypothesis that Mark wrote first or that Mark wrote last. The under-determinative case for Markan priority on the basis of the internal evidence, I think, provides grounds for reconsidering the external evidence found in the early fathers. But that is just one leg for the two-gospel hypothesis to stand on.

There is another category of internal evidence which is equally compelling and which we will explore in this video. This evidence largely comes from apparent examples of Mark combining or conflating Matthew and Luke's narratives together. This so-called argument from conflation, if successful, decisively shows that Mark was written after Matthew and Luke, for both of these gospels would clearly have to exist in order for Mark to conflate them. We examine this argument in detail before considering some more internal facts about Mark which suggest that it was written third.

Before we move to examine specific examples of conflation in Mark, it will be worth taking some time to explore the specific characteristics of conflated documents so as to see whether or not these same characteristics can be found in the relevant passages. Thomas Longstaff, in his excellent book on the topic, surveys several known examples of conflated documents. His study yields several interesting facts which tend to arise within a document as the result of conflating other documents together.

The first and most obvious characteristic of conflation is that conflated texts exhibit alternating combinations of wording from the documents which have been conflated together. Second, documents which involve conflating two narratives together often have minute verbal agreements of one or only very few words with a source other than the one from which they have primarily been copying in any given conflated passage. As Longstaff says, "say, the conflation of two or more sources which themselves exhibit a considerable degree of verbal similarity will frequently, although not always, result in small agreements of a single word or a brief phrase with one source against the other. These agreements may interrupt the use of a single source or may occur alternately in a single section."

Third, conflating authors often display a tendency to transition between sources at junctures where there is verbal agreement between those sources. Longstaff explains: "It is significant that this phenomenon has been observed in every one of the authors whose method of conflation has been studied. It may therefore be considered another characteristic of this editorial method."

Fourth, documents which involve conflation tend to be repetitive or repetitious or redundant in the conflated passages. Again, Longstaff explains: "It may be concluded, therefore, that redundancy and duplication caused by the copying of similar words or phrases from two or more sources may be present in a conflated account. The presence of this phenomenon, however, is more probable when an author is copying everything or nearly everything found in his sources than when he is using his sources with greater freedom."

With these characteristics firmly in hand, we may now turn to assess the proposed examples of conflation within Mark's gospel to see if there is a match with known characteristics of conflated documents. It is important to remember at the outset that such examples can always be explained away through ad hoc and implausible theories. But if there are examples which display the known characteristics of conflation, then it is reasonable to suppose that conflation has occurred. Thus, while apparent conflation of Matthew and Luke is no proof of Mark's posteriority, it is indeed very strong evidence for it.

There are 17 proposed instances where Mark has conflated Matthew and Luke together. Obviously, time precludes us from exploring all 17 of them. Thus, we shall restrict ourselves to just those examples where the case for conflation is strongest, even by the lights of Markan priorists. In the following examples, I have colored the text from Matthew blue and the text from Luke red, while coloring Mark blue where he agrees with Matthew and red where he agrees with Luke. This, I hope, will provide a vivid visual illustration to viewers of the phenomenon we are dealing with in Mark.

Mark 1:29-34, the story of Jesus healing Peter's mother-in-law, is perhaps the most famous example of this sort of phenomenon of alternating agreement between Matthew's wording and Luke's wording within Mark. A careful look at this passage will reveal not only that Mark's account exhibits alternating agreement between Matthew and Luke, a phenomenon which is characteristic of conflated documents, but that verse 32 also exhibits another telltale sign of conflation: redundancy. Mark says, "Now when the evening came, after the sun had set." The phrase "now when the evening came" follows Matthew, and the phrase "after the sun had set" follows Luke. As Thomas Longstaff points out, "it may be concluded, therefore, that although this analysis does not prove that Mark's summary statement is in fact a conflation of those found in Matthew and Luke, such a hypothesis is a plausible one and one which seems better to explain the complex alteration of agreement and disagreement in this pericope." They underscore the generally accepted two-document hypothesis.

This example of conflation is even more compelling when we consider that the Greek phrase translated here as "when evening came" is a rare expression. It is used only seven times in the New Testament, six of which are in Matthew's gospel, and the other time is here in Mark. Clearly, the phrase is distinctive of Matthew's style, making it more likely that Mark is borrowing the phrase from Matthew here than the other way around. As William Farmer says, "on the Markan hypothesis, the critic is asked to imagine that Matthew copied this expression exactly as Mark had it the first time he encountered it, but thereafter, whenever he followed Mark in the use of this rare expression, he consistently deviated from Mark and rigidly restricted himself to this particular grammatical form. If Mark were secondary to Matthew, however, the critic would only be required to imagine that Mark tended to modify this Matthean expression quite freely whenever he found it in his text of Matthew. That is, the critic would simply conclude that if Mark copied Matthew, he apparently had no objection to the expression, but that is not so much a part of his regular literary usage as to have assumed for him the form of a fixed stylistic introductory formula."

Mark 1:42 is another striking example. Mark's account reads: "And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was cleansed." The parallel in Matthew...

8:3 only has the last half of the statement, and immediately his leprosy was cleansed. But the parallel in Luke 5:3 only has the first half, and immediately the leprosy left him. Once again, it certainly looks like Mark has conflated together Matthew and Luke.

Furthermore, this verse once again exhibits a sort of redundancy, which is characteristic of conflated documents. As Bernard Orchard says, though it is possible that Matthew and Luke each adapted a separate half of Mark's sentence, not knowing that the other evangelists had chosen the other part, it is a lot easier to see Mark combining the phrases of both Matthew and Luke.

Mark 3:1-6 likewise illustrates this pattern of alternating agreement with Matthew and Luke. The narrative in Mark begins by following Luke's wording very closely, yet near the middle, when Luke and Matthew's wording becomes very close, Mark appears to switch over to Matthew's wording. As we noted earlier, conflating authors have a tendency to transition between sources at just those junctures where the verbal agreements between or among their sources are very high. This looks like precisely what Mark has done with this story, making conflation a likely explanation for the pattern in Mark.

Another example is Mark 5:12: "And the demons begged him, saying, 'Send us into the pigs so that we may enter them.'" The phrase "send us into the pigs" follows Matthew's wording, whereas the phrase "so that we may enter them" follows Luke's wording. And notice how redundant Mark is. Redundancy, as we have seen, is a telltale sign of conflation. It's very unlikely that Matthew and Luke independently each chose to adopt a separate half of this sentence. It's much more plausible that Mark combined Luke and Matthew together. As Pearson Parker states, "some of Mark's most famous Goucher look like results of mixing Methan and Lucan materials. Half of the redundancy is like Matthew and the other half is like Luke."

We come across this phenomenon yet again in Mark 9:38-41. This passage is interesting because Matthew, Mark, and Luke don't have parallel stories of the strange Exorcist. Mark and Luke share this story; however, it is just absent from Matthew. Yet Mark is peculiar in that he shares wording with the very end of a completely different passage from Matthew 10:40 through 42. On the hypothesis of Mark in priority, we have to believe that Matthew just adopted the last sentence of Mark's story and completely ignored everything else. What possible reason could he have for doing that? Then Luke would have had to adopt Mark's entire story but then dropped the last sentence. What explanation can be given for this anomaly? If Mark was written first, the hypothesis that Mark was writing last makes perfect sense of this situation. Mark wanted to include Luke's story but also wanted to include this one statement from Matthew because it supported the moral of the story in Luke. Thus, he tacked on this single statement from Matthew at the end.

Thomas Longstaff argues, "it should be noted that the parallel between Mark and Matthew begins at precisely the point where the parallel between Mark and Luke ceases." An examination of these verses, taking account of the wider context in which they occur, will support the suggestion that the alteration of agreement between Mark and Luke and then between Mark and Matthew may be explained by the hypothesis that Mark has conflated the two gospels when writing this section.

As a final example, consider Mark 14:12-21. Mark's narrative begins by combining together both Matthew and Luke's introductory remarks. Mark follows Luke's wording when recounting the story of where Jesus told the disciples to find the room for the Passover, but right when Matthew and Luke's wording becomes very close when recounting what was said while they were eating, Mark suddenly switches and begins following Matthew's wording regarding Jesus's prediction of his own betrayal. As we noted earlier, this was the third telltale sign of conflation. Many more examples of this phenomenon of Mark alternately agreeing with Matthew's wording and then with Luke's wording could be brought forward, but I think I have presented enough for viewers to see that this is a pervasive phenomenon throughout Mark and that, at least on its face, it makes a strong case for Mark having been the third gospel to have been written after Matthew and Luke.

To say that Matthew and Luke depended upon Mark requires us to believe that Matthew and Luke conveniently just so happened to select opposite portions of Mark's narrative when they were using him in 17 different instances. Thomas Longstaff correctly concludes, "it is somewhat as though Matthew and Luke were free to rewrite the Mark an account only in those details where the other had substantially preserved the content and language of that Source." Such an explanation would be inconsistent with the view that Matthew and Luke are independent of one another. Furthermore, even if we suppose that they knew one another, such an editorial method would be very difficult to understand, and no examples of it are known.

While Grace Bachian scholars had long used the argument from conflation for the posteriority of Mark, Thomas Longstaff gave the most detailed presentation of this argument in his masterful 1977 book, *Evidence of Conflation in Mark*. With a top scholar like Longstaff making a rigorous argument which clearly and convincingly indicated that Mark was the last synoptic gospel to have been written, a response from the Mark and prior was desperately needed. This response came in 1979 in the form of Christopher M. Tuckett's book, *The Revival of the Grace Box Hypothesis*. Tuckett utilized the research presented in Fron nearer Nick's 1972 book, *Duality and Mark*, to argue that Mark was simply a redundant writer. Citing N. Nick's work, Tuckett argued that there were some 213 examples of redundancy in Mark's Gospel. Of these, only 17 examples could be brought forward where Matthew contained one half of the redundancy and Luke contained the other half.

From this, Tuckett argued that it is entirely expected that if Matthew and Luke were writing after Mark, then they would be motivated to reduce Mark's redundancy. And given that there were some 213 examples of this sort of redundancy, presumably Matthew and Luke would have sometimes independently opted to remove different halves of the redundant statements. Therefore, when considered against the full range of redundancies in Mark, the fact that there are 17 examples of Matthew and Luke selecting different halves of Mark's wording is not all that surprising. As Tuckett says, "On the theory of Mark and priority, there is nothing surprising here. Mark is fond of dual expressions, and Matthew and Luke regularly omit some of his redundancy. Mark's pleonastic style can only be explained by his conflating his two sources in 17 out of 2113 cases he could have taken over a dual expression from one of his sources in 49 cases, but in the remaining 147 he must have created the duplicate expression himself. Thus, the vast majority of pleonasms must on either hypothesis is be due to Mark's own style."

Tuckett further argued that the phenomenon of alternating agreement between Matthew and Luke, which Longstaff had identified in the relevant pericopes, was essentially subjective and was a predetermined result of Longstaff's methodology. He writes, "The method itself of deciding which of the other two gospels Mark is closer to is bound to produce the pattern of alternating agreement which Longstaff finds so significant. For if one goes through the Mark an text deciding at every word or phrase which of Matthew or Luke is closer to Mark's text, then one will get blocks which, since there are only two possibilities, can only alternate with each other. Thus, the pattern of alternating agreement and the phenomenon of an alleged conflat occasionally switching sources at a point of verbal agreement between his sources are both results which are predetermined by the method itself."

Tuckett's critique proved to be quite persuasive to scholars, and for over 20 years, it was considered to be the last word on the subject by many. That is until the publication of Delbert Berquist's book, *Rethinking the Gospel Sources*, published in 2004, reopened the case for conflation in Mark. Berquist pointed out several problems with Near Neck's methodology for determining cases of redundancy in Mark's Gospel and how he had artificially inflated the actual number of redundancies. The lists from Near Neck, from which Tuckett drew most of his examples, are the following: 10 double statement temporal or local, 11 double statement general and special, 12 double statement repetition of the motif, and 13 synonymous expressions. "Except for the first, these categories are either too limited or too ill-defined for our purpose. For example, N. Nick's category 11 consists of dual expressions where one is a special case of the other. This category has only 28 instances to begin with, and once we eliminate questionable instances, only five remain. Category 12 is too ill-defined. N. Nick designates this category as 'double statement repetition of the motif.' We might expect, then, instances where Mark makes the same statement twice. In fact, however, most of these instances cited by N. Nick do not fulfill this criterion. The same is true for Near Neck's category 13."

Berquist goes through the problems with Near Neck's specific examples in much more painstaking detail than I am going to do in this video, but suffice it to say that Near Neck's 213 examples of duality in Mark, which formed the basis of Tuckett's objection to the argument from conflation, is artificial. The vast majority of these alleged examples of dual expressions in Mark are not actually examples of duality at all. I would take Berquist's point even further. Berquist is willing to acknowledge 32 of Near Neck's examples of redundancy in Mark's special material as being genuine, but I am not willing to grant even these 32 examples. As I examined each and every one of them in my own research, I found that 14 of them didn't even exhibit apparent redundancy, three of them were simply clarifications, and 12 were elaborations on earlier statements rather than genuine examples of redundancy. I found that only three of the examples in Mark's unique material can plausibly be considered genuine examples of redundancies, and even these three are quite different from the sort of redundancies we looked at in the triple tradition.

Mark 5:5a says, "Constantly night and day he was screaming among the tombs." It must be admitted that if someone is constantly screaming, then this straightforwardly entails that they are screaming night and day, but this redundancy can pretty easily be seen as serving the purpose of dramatic effect, something which cannot be said for most of the redundancies within the triple tradition.

Mark 6:45 says, "And immediately Jesus had his disciples get into the boat and go ahead of him to the other side to Bethsaida, while he himself dismissed the crowd." Strictly speaking, it is true that it is redundant to say that Jesus sent his disciples ahead while he stayed behind, but there is a lot of further explanation as to why Jesus stayed behind in the second clause. This is also not the case in most of the examples of redundancy in the triple tradition.

Finally, Mark 11:11-12 says, "And Jesus entered Jerusalem and came into the temple area. And after looking around to everything, he left for for Bethany with the twelve. Since it was already late, on the next day when they had left Bethany, he became hungry." These verses are quite redundant, saying twice that Jesus left Bethany. But notice that this example is unique in that it is the only example of redundancy where the exact same phrase is being used twice, so it supplies no support for Tuckett's thesis that the kind of redundancy demonstrated in the triple tradition can be explained by recourse to Mark being a habitually redundant. Further redundancy in the triple tradition does not involve duplication of the exact same words.

To sum that up, there are only three genuine examples of redundancy in Mark's unique material. This makes it hard to sustain Tuckett's claim that Mark was a habitually redundant writer. Moreover, these three examples are relevantly different from the redundancies in the material in which Mark shares each half of his redundancy with Matthew and Luke. This raises the question very starkly: why do these redundancies only appear in the triple tradition? If, as Tuckett supposes, redundancy is just a characteristic of Mark, we might expect Mark's unique material to likewise exhibit this sort of redundancy, but we do not see this in Mark's unique material, and this seriously undermines the key premise of Tuckett's argument.

Delbert Berquist further took Tuckett to task for his failure to appreciate the genuine phenomenon which Longstaff had uncovered back in 1977. Tuckett argued that the alternating agreement found by Longstaff is only a matter of degree and depends upon a subjective judgment. Doubtless, this may be true in a few instances, but in most cases examined by Longstaff, it is clear where Mark is closer to Matthew and then when it is closer to Luke. In Mark 14:12-21, for example, when Mark agrees more closely with Matthew or Luke, the other synoptic generally either lacks the material in question or differs significantly. This alternating agreement is more than just a subjective judgment on Longstaff's part. In other words, in most of the putative examples of conflation in Mark which we have examined, the situation is not at all like Tuckett would have it, where we simply compare Mark to Matthew and Luke and determine that some places are closer to one or the other synoptic, thereby artificially creating the pattern of alternating agreement. Rather, the pattern is real because the agreement can usually be determined by reference to facts about Mark's text, whether that be his alternating verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke, Matthew or Luke lacking sentences shared between Mark and the other synoptic, or the redundancies present in Mark with only each half of the redundant statements being found in Matthew and then Luke.

I therefore conclude that Tuckett's explanation for both the phenomenon of Mark's alternating agreements between Matthew and Luke, as well as for Mark's redundancies in the triple tradition, fails. Consequently, we may safely say that Mark and prior have failed to provide a better explanation for these facts than the conflation hypothesis, for which these facts are therefore evidence. The best explanation for these facts is that Mark knew Matthew and Luke's gospels and that he combined them together.

As Longstaff concludes, "the pattern of alternating agreement between Mark and the other two gospels occurs too frequently to be only the coincidental result of the two ways in which Matthew and Luke have independently used the Mark an material and therefore constitutes a serious anomaly for the two document hypothesis. However, the analyses also show that this phenomenon may be explained by the hypothesis that Mark has conflated Matthew and Luke, a proposal which is strengthened by the observation that Mark's gospel exhibits many of the literary characteristics which are known and representative examples of conflation."

While I think that what I have already said is sufficient to pacify Tuckett's objection to the argument from conflation, we may observe that Tuckett's proposal has a number of other shortcomings. First, it fails to account for the fact that redundancy emerges as a telltale sign of conflation when known examples of conflation are analyzed. It relies on an ad hoc "just so" story about Mark's literary tendencies. Second, Tuckett fails to explain the linguistic point highlighted by Farmer about Mark's using a rare term which is characteristic of Matthew's gospel. Finally, Tuckett has difficulty explaining why Matthew and Luke choose to alter Mark to the extent that they do, whereas the conflation hypothesis easily explains why Mark combines Matthew and Luke as he does.

As Ward Powers points out in response to Tuckett, "if Mark is prior, then it seems that Matthew and Luke have virtually taken turns in excising or altering things that Mark says. The extent of these differences is exceedingly high. Of the 11,078 words in Mark, Matthew has taken over only 4,23 words in parallel passages; that is, he has omitted or changed 61.8% of Mark's words. Of these 11,078 words in Mark, Luke has taken over only 2,675 words; that is, he has omitted or changed 75.9% of the words which he had in front of him in Mark. Why in these passages Matthew or Luke should both wish to change the text of Mark to this extent and then in such different ways is hard to explain. But the Mark independent hypothesis makes it simple to see what Mark has done: he has in front of him two somewhat different accounts of an event or saying of Jesus and he blends the two by taking ideas, details, words, and grammatical structures from each."

While the phenomenon of conflation in Mark may provide the strongest internal evidence for Mark's posteriority, there are several other facts about Mark in the other synoptics which suggest that Mark was written last. One of these is the abrupt ending of Mark. Mark ends with the discovery of the empty tomb and a declaration that Jesus has been risen, but there is no record of Jesus's appearances. The suggestion that the author of Mark did not know about these appearances is plainly false, for the appearances are predicted in Mark 16:7. If Mark's gospel was the first gospel to have been written, it is scarcely conceivable that he would have failed to discuss the resurrection appearances. However, this striking absence can be explained on the hypothesis that Mark was writing later than Matthew and Luke and knew full well that these appearances had already been documented.

As Ward Powers argues, "the Risen Lord himself does not appear in Mark's gospel. There is an instruction for the women to report what they had seen, but there is no record that the women obeyed. There is a promise of a meeting in Galilee, but no record of it taking place. There is an implication in the final verse of fear and incredulity, but no record of how this became transmuted into joy and trust. All in all, this is a most unexpected way for the gospel to end. Apart from a lost ending hypothesis with its own inherent problems, there is only one explanation that can make sense of this situation: Mark had a restricted purpose in view in writing and he did not seek to fill in all the gaps or to link his pre-resurrection presentation to the post-resurrection awareness of the church because he was fully aware that the church already had gospels that did that. This means that he wrote in a situation where the church already possessed Matthew and Luke, or at least one of them, and that he took for granted the post-resurrection material and perspective that these other gospels presented."

Several of Matthew's omissions are likewise very difficult to explain on the hypothesis that he knew and used Mark's gospel. The author of Matthew has a penchant for numbers and for money. He goes out of his way to mention these sorts of details when Luke and Mark often do not. It is Matthew's gospel which features the parable of the unmerciful servant who, though forgiven a debt of 10,000 talents, refused to forgive a debt of a 100 dinari. It is Matthew's gospel which contains the parable of the landowner who agreed to pay his workers a denarius for the day. It is Matthew's gospel in which we find the story of Peter finding a shekel in a fish's mouth. The author of Matthew's gospel goes out of his way to mention the specific types of coins which he describes: kantes, assarion, dma, stater, and dinarian. It is Matthew's gospel which stresses that the disciples were not to bring gold, silver, or copper when ministering to the surrounding villages. As Michael concludes, "Money is a recurring topic in passages which are unique to the gospel of Matthew."

Despite this tendency to go out of his way to include precise numbers, references to money, and even specific types of coins, on the hypothesis that Mark wrote first, we are expected to believe that Matthew just decided to leave out Mark's reference to the ointment's worth as being 300 dinari in Mark 14:5. If Matthew was using Mark, he apparently wasn't interested in preserving Mark's precise reference to 2,000 pigs which ran over the hill in Mark 5:13, preferring instead to make a vague reference to the whole herd. If Mark wrote first, then we are expected to believe that Matthew just decided to delete Mark's story of the widow's gift, which explicitly mentions that the widow gave two small copper coins. Despite his love for including stories which make reference to money, none of this coheres with the aforementioned evidence demonstrating Matthew's interest in money. However, it can be explained very easily on the hypothesis of Methan priority. Matthew did not include these precise facts and figures because he did not have access to Mark's gospel.

As Powers points out, "in several parallel passages, Mark contains and Matthew lacks specific figures for numbers or amounts of money. There is no reason to believe that Mark was particularly interested in figures, yet his gospel contains these details. Matthew, who is trained in handling finance and keeping records, puts into his account only vague generalizations precisely at these points in the record. The alternative is that Matthew's account lacked that information because it was a detail not known to him or possibly forgotten, whereas it was a detail known to Mark through his other source, Peter's preaching, but that Matthew had this precise information in front of him in Mark and deliberately made it vague and general, impossible."

This video has surveyed the internal evidence within the synoptic gospels from Mark's dependence upon the other synoptics. We have seen that Mark frequently conflates Matthew and Luke, that Mark's omission of the post-resurrection appearances is best explained by his knowledge that the other gospels already contained these stories, and that Mark includes information absent from Matthew which Matthew certainly would have included had he been using Mark. Taken together with the external evidence presented in my last video, we have strong reason to believe that the gospel of Matthew was written first, the gospel of Luke was written second, and the gospel of Mark was written third. The two gospel hypothesis stands as being the best explanation of the external and internal evidence bearing on the synoptic problem.

I recently concluded a four-part series on the synoptic problem where I argued against the currently popular theory of Mark and priority and made a two-part case for the two gospel hypothesis as the best solution to the synoptic problem. The most controversial video in the series was my lengthy critique of the arguments for Mark and priority. As is to be expected when one challenges deeply entrenched and widely held convictions within any field of research, a critical response followed my video shortly after its release. It was released by John Dew and Ethan Bergen from Apocalypse Here, and they were joined by New Testament scholar and John's wife, Laura Robinson. The vast majority of my video went completely unaddressed. It seems that my critics were not interested in defending most of the arguments which I critiqued. This is, of course, their privilege. I do not expect them to defend arguments which they do not accept. Nevertheless, the fact that no one seems willing to defend most of the arguments for Mark and priority against criticisms is rather telling with respect to how many arguments for Mark and priority are actually defensible. My critics chose to focus upon the last two arguments for Mark and priority which I critiqued. These are the arguments from additions and omissions and the argument from editorial fatigue. Since both John and Laura studied at Duke University where Mark Goodacre teaches, and since these are his favorite arguments for Mark and priority, it is not surprising that these were the arguments which they opted to focus upon. Unfortunately, they chose to play very little of my own video in their response. This enabled them, in many instances, to make it appear as though the criticisms which I was offering were largely based upon my own speculations and were not shared by other scholars. I am always gratified when people take the arguments and perspectives presented within my videos seriously and attempt to engage with them critically. Unfortunately, despite some pretenses that this is what these particular critics were attempting to do, their criticisms quite frequently demonstrated blatant misunderstandings and misrepresentations of my perspective. As we shall see, regrettably, much of their video came off as stemming from a desire to expose the apologist's ignorance rather than critically engage the ideas. Despite this, I shall endeavor to keep the tone of this video respectful and to keep it focused upon the substance of their criticisms.

Before addressing the defenses of Goodacre's arguments, I find it necessary to clarify several points, since many of their remarks demonstrate misunderstandings with respect to both my objectives in the video as well as my personal beliefs. Several of the criticisms leveled against my video, in particular those voiced by Robinson, amount to complaints that my video does not defend an alternative hypothesis to Mark and priority.

So, I, I mean, at some point, there's this kind of like quick knocking down of a very flat reading of these arguments, this idea that like there's all these contradictions, but there's no external building of a case of gospels with literary relationships. Like, if, if you're going to make a claim about literary relationships between the Gospels, you have to account for why the gospels look the way they do. There's a lot of, um, there, there, there's a lot of material he just doesn't deal with. So, like, Mark's unique material doesn't support Mark and priority well. What is it, David? What is the Mark, Mark an unique material, and why is it secondary? You have to explain that. Why is the video called Mark? He never, he never defends an alternative literary relationship. He never gets that car.

It's as though they missed the fact that this video is only the second part of an entire video series. In later videos, I made a positive case for a rival hypothesis, but that was not the point of my critique of Mark and priority, and this fact seems to have been completely lost on them. That video was intended to clear a path for the positive argument. In epistemology, there is a well-understood distinction between undercutting defeaters and rebutting defeaters. Both involve defeating propositions, but they do so in different ways. Undercutting defeaters attempt to remove the purported justifications for a given proposition; however, they do not supply a reason to believe that the defeated proposition is untrue. Rebutting defeaters attempt to show that a proposition is false by giving reasons to believe that a contradictory proposition is true. My video, *Critique of Mark and Priority*, was intended to function as an undercutting defeater for Mark and priority. In other words, it was intended to show that Mark and priority is unjustified, not that Mark and priority is false. As far as that video was concerned, Mark and priority could be true. I only concluded that the arguments in its favor are unsuccessful. I even explicitly stated this in the video summary. Yet my critics apparently missed it, apparently thinking that I intended for the video to function as a standalone defense of the two gospel hypothesis. This just radically misunderstands my objective for that video, grossly misrepresents its purpose, and fails to acknowledge the kind of defeaters I was presenting for Mark and priority therein. One simply does not have to defend an alternative to Mark and priority in order to show that the arguments in its favor do not work. It is not as though Mark and priority is the default position.

There was also a lot of speculation on my critics' part regarding my personal beliefs about the inherency of the Bible and how I was too hyper-fixated upon the issue of contradictions between the Gospels. While the doctrine of inherency is certainly important, I do not presuppose the doctrines of biblical inspiration or inherency when discussing the synoptic problem. This is because I regard the historical veracity of the gospels as epistemically prior to biblical theology, and I regard the synoptic problem as a part of establishing the historical veracity of the gospels. That is, I take the doctrines of biblical inspiration and inherency to be based upon the historical reliability of the gospels. Consequently, one cannot assume these doctrines when discussing the synoptic problem on pain of circular reasoning. This should have been clear in the first video in my series, where I critiqued F. David Farnell's approach to the synoptic problem for precisely this reason, but as we shall see, my critics apparently couldn't be bothered to watch that video either. While I am perfectly willing to defend the legitimacy of harmonization in synoptic research, it is a mistake to assume that this can only stem from a prior commitment to biblical inherency.

On a related note, Ethan Bergen, at least, seems unaware that I both accept and defend that there is literary dependence among the synoptic gospels.

So, like, basically, what David's doing is like engaging with these arguments, like these arguments that say Mark Goodacre is making, these are down the line from the fact that like literary dependence is a thing. Like, it, it has to be, it has to be so. So by David taking these arguments and then using things like harmonization and like the historical facts to like answer these problems, yeah, you're stepping over it's not fair. Yeah, it's not fair to the argument. Like, if you're going to do that, then use, then go back to where Mark Goodacre or who are these scholars, like, where they explain why we know there's literary dependence in the first place, because it doesn't matter what the order is if there's no dependence, if they're all independent, then who cares what the order is.

I can only conclude that in his zeal to defend Mark and priority, he did not watch the first video in the series. There, I clearly argued against the thesis of complete literary independence. Once again, we see that my critics fail to appreciate that they are only discussing one part of a larger argument.

There are also some comments near the end where Robinson claims that Papias supports Mark and priority, and he was trying to make them fit with the order that is ascribed to them in the tradition of like Irenaeus and to some extent Papias, even though Papias has Mark and priority, and for some reason, uh, no one gets that, doesn't care, and I don't know why. Like Irenaeus and then you eventually Augustine, so I guess it's just the actual Matthew, and we're just going to forget the whole thing about Hebrew and all that stuff. We're Mark and priority from Papias, fine. Okay, then get out. Papias, deal with the fact that he says Mark was first. Deal with the fact that he says Matthew is in Hebrew. Go through it and like figure out what the in, like deal with Irenaeus, deal with Augustine, talk about the narratives and like how these people are using each other and citing each other.

This is incredibly misleading on her part. As I pointed out in my video on the external evidence for the priority of Matthew, Papias does not say anything about the sequence of Matthew and Mark. There is an argument that some Mark and prioris have tried to make that Papias regards Mark as prior to Matthew because in the quotations preserved by Eusebius, Papias mentions Mark first. Moreover, it depends upon a dubious interpretation of one of Papias' words. This is a far cry from Robinson's statement that Papias says flat out that Mark was first. And as W. Powers points out, "this argument, however, depends totally on the meaning of 'therefore' in Eusebius 339.16. This interpretation of 'therefore' is far from obvious and far from certain, yet Markin prior hang their conclusion on this very tenuous thread." Even Mark Goodacre, of all people, agrees with this, saying, "In the quotations given to us by the fourth-century church historian Eusebius, Papias is quoting his own source, the Elder, who apparently mentions both that Mark is an interpreter of Peter and that Matthew compiled the 'loia' in Hebrew. But in the extant passages, there is no statement of relative priority."

Lastly, Robinson, Bergen, and Dew had some derogatory comments regarding the fact that most of my citations came from old books and old authors. "Given the sources that he relies on, that David relies on, they're so dated, most of them are just dead, they're just dead guys, dead white guys. Like, I was trying..." Now, this is not really true. The overwhelming majority of my citations were from books published in the past 25 years. I quoted Ward Powers more than anyone else; his book was published in 2010. I quoted three sources by Mark Goodacre, which were published in 1998, 2001, and 2002. If Powers' work is old and outdated, then so is Goodacre's. But more importantly, arguments do not have sell-by dates. Time alone will never refute an argument. Just because arguments may go out of fashion does not mean that they are not good. If there was a flaw in the arguments from the old scholars which I cited, Dew and Company will need to actually do the legwork to expose them. Pointing out that some of them are old will not cut it.

Perhaps no one made this point more eloquently than C.S. Lewis: "Every age has its own outlook; it is specifically good at seeing certain truths and liable to make certain mistakes. We all therefore need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period, and that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook, even those like myself who seem to oppose it. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it and weaken our guard against it if we read only modern books. Where they are true, they will give us truths which we have knew already; where they are false, they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past; people were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we, but not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing, and they own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction."

Turning now to the argument from additions and omissions, by way of review, this argument holds that Mark's unique material is something that Matthew and Luke would have had reason to omit, and that the information present within the other synoptics but absent from Mark is better explained on the hypothesis that this information was unavailable or unknown to him. This would be due to the fact that Matthew and Luke were written after Mark. In reply to this argument, I contended that it is based upon the erroneous assumption that Mark was intending to include all of the information which he had available to him. But in the case of the resurrection appearances, at least, we know that this is not so. Mark demonstrates knowledge of these appearances in Mark 16:7 and yet fails to recount them. The conclusion to be drawn from this was that Mark clearly knows about information which, for some reason, he has chosen to withhold from us. Therefore, the central assumption upon which the argument from additions and omissions is based is false. This central contention of mine seems to have been completely lost on my critics. Rather than addressing this point, they chose to focus upon my own proposal as to what might explain Mark's additions and omissions.

In my video, following Ward Powers, I drew a distinction between *didache* and *kerygma*, where *didache* is understood to be literature which has believers as its intended audience, and *kerygma* has unbelievers as its intended audience. I placed Matthew and Luke in the category of *didache* and Mark in the category of *kerygma*. Robinson had a lot to say about this distinction, but before I address her criticisms, it needs to be emphasized that this distinction was not crucial to my objection to the argument from additions and omissions. All I needed for this argument to succeed was that Mark demonstrates knowledge of information pertinent to the life of Jesus which he chooses to omit. This alone is sufficient to undercut the argument from additions and omissions. However, it does raise the question as to why Mark deliberately chose to omit information. My categorizing Mark as early Christian *kerygma* was a proposal to answer that looming question. Nevertheless, the salient point is that the argument from additions and omissions is invalidated regardless of the adequacy of my own answer. With that being said, how strong are Robinson's objections to the distinction between *didache* and *kerygma*?

So, what Ward Powers is arguing is that it's not true that the gospels are existing in an established genre in Greco-Roman literature, and it doesn't even seem like he's going the Bultmann route that the gospels are their own genre. He's going with the idea that there are multiple genres within the realm of gospels, right? So, he has, uh, argued that Matthew and Luke are *didache*, while Mark is *kerygma*. Okay, so, uh, some questions. All right, *didache* is not a genre, right? *Didache* is the name of an early Christian book called *The Didache*. That is just clearly not the same genre as the gospels. The *Didache* is entirely what we call parenetic teaching, parenetic meaning teaching, right? It's meant for instruction. Uh, so there's, there's no narrative happening in the *Didache*, right? It's, um, you know, about the, the two ways of virtue and and lack of virtue, and then some details about how to, um, you know, take the Eucharist, for instance, right, or how to baptize somebody. There's this very, uh, particular instruction for what to do with the, for the form of church, right? So, *didache* is not a genre. So we already have this huge problem happening that *didache* is not a genre. Um, if it is, it seems like for, for David's argument to work, they would have to be the only texts within this genre, and that this genre is described as narratives that are primarily meant to be read by other Christians. Okay, put a pin in that. All right, so then the next thing that we're arguing is that Mark is not the same genre as these other texts, that Mark is *kerygma*. So we have three documents that are remarkably similar, but they're all in different genres. How do we distinguish between them?

Unfortunately, and by her own admission, Robinson couldn't be bothered to actually read Powers' detailed and extensive chapter on this topic in his excellent book, *The Progressive Publication of Matthew*. This results in her inevitably misunderstanding how Powers is construing this distinction. Robinson erroneously takes Powers to be demarcating between two distinct genres of literature and then, on the basis of this misunderstanding, she spends quite a lot of time arguing that there are no such genres within Greco-Roman literature. I agree with her that these are not distinct genres; clearly, all of the gospels, whatever genre one may want to place them in, are clearly within the same genre. But neither Powers nor myself have argued anything to the contrary. Rather, the distinction is being understood to apply to the intended target audiences of these respective gospels. So Robinson's primary objection is just a massive misfire. She's aiming at arguments which no one has made. As a consequence of her failure to read Powers' work, and in her defense, this section of my video was relatively brief, since as I already explained, it was not key to my objection to the argument from additions and omissions. But even so, I never once proposed that Mark was in a different genre than the other synoptics. I say now, and for the record, that I join Robinson in categorically rejecting that idea.

Robinson is not finished, however. She has a further objection to the idea that unbelievers were the intended target audience of Mark's gospel. She asks for historical evidence that such a setting would ever exist where unbelievers would come to listen to the content of Mark's gospel. What is the external setting in, in the life of a text where you would read the gospel of Mark to a group of non-Christians who have been gathered for the purpose of being converted to Christianity? What is this context? Is there any literary or historical record of a group of non-Christians gathering to hear a whole book read at them? Uh, it doesn't add up to a document that is useful for evangelism, even if you could contrive a situation where a bunch of non-Christians would hear you read a book, start to defend, which there's no situation where that would happen that I can think of. If David can find one, yatsi, I would be so excited to hear about it, but I don't think it exists. So, so here's what, here's the evidence I would want to hear from David to defend this argument. I would want to hear evidence that there is a historical setting where people will, in roughly around the first century, where people who are non-practitioners of a sectarian movement will sit down and have a document read to them front to back, uh, which I think has to be the preach to them, yeah, preach to them, which like preaching is another issue here too. What, what is the preaching? Are you expounding on the text? Are you? Because the only thing I can see that makes Mark more friendly to non-believers is the fact that it's just literally shorter as an entire text now in the first place.

I think that this demand is a little unfair. It is quite a steep and self-limiting requirement to insist that a setting in which literature would have been read must have external supporting evidence before that setting can even be considered as a candidate hypothesis. Nevertheless, as it happens, we do have a historical witness to such a setting. What's more, that same historical witness tells us that the gospel of Mark, in particular, was written as the result of such a setting. So that we don't even have to guess. Clement of Alexandria says, in no uncertain terms, "The Gospel according to Mark came into being in this manner: Mark, the follower of Peter, while Peter was publicly preaching the gospel at Rome in the presence of some of Caesar's knights and uttering many testimonies about Christ, on their asking him to let them have a record of the things that had been said, wrote the Gospel that is called the Gospel of Mark from the things said by Peter."

It appears to be something of a sticking point for both Robinson and Bergen that Mark's gospel is just too long to have been read to people aloud. Just to not gloss over that, 'cause I think it's really important, is like, you keep mentioning that it has to be the whole book read to them. There's really nothing to support this idea that people are going to sit down and hear an entire book preached to them. So let's take out the length and look at what the text has. You would not come to this conclusion that Mark is for evangelism while Matthew and Luke are for Christians. Now, while I haven't actually done this myself, I've been told by many people that it takes less than two hours to read the Gospel of Mark out loud. For example, Michael Card says, "The total time to read the Gospel of Mark is an hour and a half." And while that might seem a tad long for a sermon by modern standards, there is nothing to suggest that this would have been out of place in the ancient world. After all, Acts 20:7-12 records that Paul preached so long that a young man named Eutychus fell asleep and dropped out of a window. There is just no reason to believe that Mark is too long to have been read to people.

While there was at least a facade of professionalism and critical engagement with my position in the first portion of their review, this goes away in the latter portion of the video, and the tone becomes much more condescending and elitist. Robinson, Dew, and Bergen take it that I do not understand what the phenomenon of editorial fatigue is supposed to be. They claim that I am mistakenly concerned with historical contradictions, but editorial fatigue is concerned with literary relationships.

This is my issue with what's coming next is that David feels, David seems to me very fixated on the idea that editorial fatigue discovers contradictions between the Gospels. That's not what editorial fatigue does, right? Editorial fatigue determines literary relationships. That is the purpose of this. Um, and he gets so close to finding a really interesting example in Mark, and he doesn't go for it because he can't make himself talk about internal contradictions with the go. Ah, okay. Um, so, okay, can I just say something real quick? When we're talking about editorial fatigue, we're talking about narrative and literary inconsistencies, yeah? We're not talking about historical. We're not talking about anything to do with whether facts, yeah, are true or not. That's not what we're talking about. Yeah, that's not what historians are talking about. Yeah, at all. This is what David doesn't seem to get. Immediately pitches it into harmonization. Yeah, sorry. Every time he addresses the narrative sort of rough patches in like potentially, you know, Matthew, Jesus, and Mark, or whatever, he'll immediately step over into an entirely different apologetic discourse. Yeah, and he'll try to harmonize these things. Yeah, okay. Yeah, this is not what historians do, right? This is, this is not what they do, and it's not what they're concerned with. So here's the thing is that David makes a whole video about Mark and priority, and he doesn't actually ever engage the argument, one of the primary arguments for Mark and priority, which is editorial fatigue, because he keeps getting distracted by this idea of historical contradictions, which is actually not related to the question of Mark and priority at all. So I don't know why he wanders down this path except that he's just interested in, he's just not interested in Mark priority at the end of the day. Yeah, and, and but to posit like what Jesus did like in real life to explain the, to explain the difference, like, you're right, like now it really clicked, like that doesn't address the question at hand. Nothing to do in any way, like, yeah, it really doesn't.

Several clarifications are in order here. First and probably foremost, in their zeal to hate upon my approving citation of Lydia McRieu in

My second objection to the argument from editorial fatigue: they appear to have missed the fact that I was offering three distinct objections to the argument. My proposed harmonizations were only relevant to the first objection, namely that the putative examples of narrative inconsistency within the Synoptics, which motivate the argument, are not genuinely inconsistent.

McCru was cited to target an altogether different premise in the argument from editorial fatigue, namely that the Gospel authors felt licensed to report events in ways other than how they believed that those events had transpired. These are completely different objections to the argument. This misunderstanding is obvious in the case of Dew, and I strongly suspect that it is shared by Robinson as well as Bergen.

Robinson and Dew incorrectly think that I was offering harmonizations for purported contradictions between the Gospels, but this is just not so. Although it is true that I periodically mentioned that the Gospels were in harmony with one another in response to Goodacre's claim to the contrary, my proposed harmonizations were primarily intended to demonstrate not historical coherence among the Gospels, but rather narrative coherence within each particular Gospel.

Despite protestations from Robinson and Thew, the argument from editorial fatigue absolutely requires narrative inconsistencies within Matthew and Luke in order to work. Notice how clear Goodacre is on this point. He compares examples of fatigue to continuity errors in films. The element of discrepancy within the narrative is absolutely critical to Goodacre's argument because that is how putative examples of fatigue are supposed to be identified. The details of any particular Gospel can be contradicting the details within a different Gospel for all I care at this point. All I am maintaining is that each individual Gospel presents a coherent story.

There is no narrative tension within the relevant pericopes in Matthew and in Luke. That is all that I need for the argument from editorial fatigue to fail. Narrative coherence means that there is no place where a Gospel author has fatigued and accidentally introduced material from an earlier Gospel which contradicts his prior narrative. Changes. This is why narrative harmonization will prove fatal to any putative example of editorial fatigue, and that is why harmonization absolutely is relevant to the argument from editorial fatigue.

Notice that this holds regardless of what the historical facts of the matter might have been. Even if Matthew's story of John the Baptist's beheading, for example, is completely fabricated and does not represent the actual facts at all, so long as the story is coherent, it cannot be used to support the idea that Matthew has changed Mark's narrative early on and then lapsed back into Mark's narrative later on, causing him to contradict his earlier change. As such, much of what Robinson and Dew say during this segment is completely off base.

I am also disappointed that my critics did not make any mention of the fact that I had cited David J. Nill's work in support of some of my proposed harmonizations. Nill is an accomplished New Testament scholar who has published on the Synoptic Problem and who supports the practice of narrative harmonization as a legitimate response to the argument from editorial fatigue. Obviously, this is inconvenient for my critics, who clearly wish to depict me as a no-nothing apologist who doesn't understand what he's disputing when it comes to editorial fatigue and so should not be taken seriously. It is thus understandable why my citations of Nill are not discussed or even acknowledged in the video. Nevertheless, Nill's agreement with my approach to rebutting the argument from editorial fatigue makes it much more difficult to sustain the idea that I am barking up the wrong tree. One can, of course, dispute the legitimacy of the harmonizations which Nill and myself put forward, but it's going to be very difficult to just write me off as an apologist who doesn't understand the argument when a qualified scholar responds to the argument with exactly the same strategy that I use.

There are a lot of derogatory comments from Robinson and Dew aimed at the practice of harmonization. The modern disdain for harmonization amongst New Testament scholars is well-known, but what is the justification for this aversion to the practice? Why should we be so quick to assume that the Gospel authors readily contradicted themselves? To be sure, authors sometimes lapse and create inconsistencies within their own works, but it seems to me that we should only embrace this conclusion if we absolutely have to. It seems much more charitable to first at least attempt to find a coherent way to read an author when they seem to contradict something which they said earlier, and this is especially so in instances where seemingly inconsistent statements are in very close proximity to one another, as is the case with putative examples of editorial fatigue.

This is due to the simple fact that most human beings do not hold to blatantly contradictory beliefs and do not habitually tell blatantly inconsistent stories. A basic principle of charity when reading any author, then, is that we should not insist on contradictions or inconsistencies if there don't have to be any. This principle of charity, rather than some prior theological commitment to the doctrine of inerrancy, is what lies behind the practice of harmonization.

The only attempt at a justification for spurning the practice of harmonization which Dew attempted to offer was, "The historians just don't do it." And like, no historian is doing that. We're just trying to figure out what's going on literarily. Um, that, that's, that's it. We're not trying to figure out whether or not something is true or factual or not. Um, I don't know why that's being imposed onto this project. But so what? As my friend Jonathan mlat says, it doesn't matter to me what historians in fact do. What matters to me is what they ought to do. And so in this, in this case, I'd say this is good historical practice. I mean, a similar, um, thing in, in scholarship that I often strongly disagree with is the disdain for harmonization, which I think is a very good historical practice. And so regardless of whether scholars like to harmonize, uh, I think they should like to harmonize. Nice. And so I, I completely, it doesn't impress me to say scholars do this or don't do that. What impresses me is what an argument for what they ought to be doing. And I think that treating them in this manner is good historical practice.

By this, mlat means that we should not do what other historians are doing just because this is how they carry out their practice. Rather, we should only be following the practices of historians in so far as those practices are conducive to the objectives and goals of historical inquiry. In short, an unjustified aversion to harmonization does not become justified in lieu of the fact that the aversion happens to be widespread among historians. Dew will need to offer some justification on behalf of historians for spurning the practice if he wants to avoid an argumentum ad populum fallacy.

Dew further complains that I do not address a purported example of editorial fatigue in the Gospel of Luke. "Can I, can I show another, uh, piece of evidence for directionality here that he does? Because he's not interested in Luke here, really. He never does anything. Can you pull up Ethan? Can you pull up, uh, Mark 6:32-36? I mean, this is another great example of editorial fatigue that works in one direction and does not work in the other direction."

Okay, so in these texts, we have, yeah, it's not letting me do the two different ones, but it doesn't matter. Yeah, fine. So there is a characteristic of the way that Luke changes places from his sources. So he'll change stuff. Um, in this case, he changes the location of this situation to Bethsaida. Mark's narrative is perfectly consistent throughout. It's in a deserted place in Mark. Okay. In Luke, if it's in Bethsaida, Bethsaida is not a deserted place at all. Okay. Once you go through Luke pulls through Mark's account of this was in a deserted place here, going through, okay, Bethsaida is not a deserted place at all. So it seems clear that Mark is making a characteristic change upfront, right? Mhm. To say this is in Bethsaida now, but then pulls through Mark's, this is in a deserted place, and we, we need to go elsewhere to find food, sustenance, all that sort of stuff. Um, that seems pretty clear. It shows that Luke really is interested in kind of changing locations. He does that from time to time, right? The solution for historians is not harmonizing this stuff, like we were saying, that's not what we're doing unless you presuppose that we have to do that.

The reason I avoided discussing putative examples of fatigue in Luke is that I was criticizing the theory of Markan priority as a rival to Matthean priority. For this reason, I focused on examples of fatigue which allegedly demonstrate Matthew's dependence upon Mark. Examples of fatigue in Luke might support Luke's dependence upon Mark, but that will do little to support the theory of Markan priority in the absence of examples of Matthew depending upon Mark. Such examples would be compatible with retaining Matthean priority via the Augustinian hypothesis. This is why I didn't really discuss putative examples of editorial fatigue in Luke in my original video. However, since I have defended the two-Gospel hypothesis, which places Luke prior to Mark, I am willing to take on this supposed example of editorial fatigue in Luke 9, which Dew finds so significant.

Luke 9:1-12 reads: "And taking them with him, he withdrew privately to a city called Bethsaida. But the crowds were aware of this and followed him, and he welcomed them and began speaking to them about the kingdom of God and curing those who had need of healing. Now the day was ending, and the twelve came up and said to him, 'Dismiss the crowd so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside and find lodging and get something to eat, because we are in a secluded place.'"

After recording the same event, however, Mark says: "And immediately Jesus had his disciples get into the boat and go ahead of him to the other side to Bethsaida, while he himself dismissed the crowd." So while Luke locates the story in Bethsaida, Mark seems to have Jesus sending his disciples across the sea to Bethsaida immediately afterward, which straightforwardly implies that the event could not have happened in Bethsaida, as Mark records. But not only are Luke and Mark in conflict with each other regarding the location of the miracle, according to Dew, Luke's narrative is also inconsistent with itself because he locates the miracle in the populous town of Bethsaida in verse 10 and yet has the disciples describe it as a desolate or secluded place in verse 12. So the idea is that Luke changed Mark's narrative to locate the event within Bethsaida, but then later copied Mark's detail that the place was desolate, which betrays Luke's dependence upon Mark.

While Dew is clearly quite fond of this example, there are numerous problems with any attempt to use it as an argument for Markan priority. For example, Dew assumes without justification that the putative inconsistency must be due to Luke's dependence upon Mark. In fact, however, Luke could just as easily be dependent upon Matthew here, for Matthew also contains the statement that the event happened in a desolate or secluded place with no mention of Bethsaida. It is just as likely that Luke's supposed inconsistency is due to his redacting Matthew as to his redacting Mark. Nothing about this conflicts with the two-Gospel hypothesis. As David Peabody and company suggest, "Luke's urban setting for the feeding in Bethsaida produced internal inconsistencies with Mark's statement that this feeding took place in a desert place, which Luke adopted without change. Mark sides with Matthew in leaving the feeding of the 5000 in a desert place, but in deference to Luke's reference to Bethsaida, Mark sets the immediately following story in that city." In short, if Luke 9:10-12 represents a genuine example of editorial fatigue, it is just as likely that Luke fatigued while depending upon Matthew as upon Mark. Therefore, this example cannot support Markan priority, nor can it even falsify Markan posteriority.

Furthermore, Dew's argument depends upon a questionable translation of Mark 6:45. The preposition *pros* in Mark's account is often translated as "to" in the clause "to Bethsaida," but that is only one possible translation of that preposition. It can also be legitimately translated as "over against" or "under." Under this translation, Mark 6:45 would be saying that the disciples took a boat to the other side, which was over against or opposite of Bethsaida. This would put Mark in agreement with Luke that the miracle took place in, or at least near, Bethsaida. Furthermore, a careful reading of Mark and a little knowledge of Palestinian geography will favor this translation.

In Mark 6:53, we read: "When they had crossed over, they came to the land at Gennesaret and moored at the shore." Now, if we look at a map of the Sea of Galilee, we will see that Gennesaret is located across the sea from Bethsaida, meaning that if Jesus sent the disciples to the other side as Mark 6:45 says, then the miracle would have had to have happened on the side where Bethsaida was located. As Lydia Mcguire observes, "So when they had crossed over to the other side, they landed at Gennesaret. Look at the map. Where is Gennesaret? It's on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee. It's also within stone's throw of Capernaum. In other words, it's not on the same side as Bethsaida. It's approximately where we would expect the disciples to end up if they went away in the boat from the vicinity of Bethsaida, where Luke says that the feeding took place, going in general terms towards Capernaum, as John says, across the top of the Sea of Galilee and landed on the other side, going from the northeast to the northwest shore."

This observation alone is enough to undercut any argument for Luke using Mark from this passage. For if both Mark and Luke exhibit the same inconsistency when referring to Bethsaida as being a desolate place, then whichever author was writing later simply copied over the same inconsistency present within their predecessor, meaning that there is no way to determine which Gospel was prior to the other.

There is, of course, a much easier way to avoid the argument, as well as the idea that Mark or Luke contain an inconsistency. One can simply deny that the miracle happened within the city of Bethsaida, but only occurred in that general location. For while Luke does describe Jesus's privately withdrawing to Bethsaida in Luke 9:10, he then describes crowds as following Jesus. It's at least possible that Luke takes it for granted that before Jesus preached to them, he drew them from the city into an open and desolate place, as Thoth Marberry suggests. Luke probably mentions Bethsaida because it is the town nearest to the remote area where Jesus takes his apostles. If so, then there is just no inconsistency within the story in any case. But either way, there is no evidence of editorial fatigue here and consequently no evidence for Luke's dependence upon Mark.

In my video, I discussed three purported examples of editorial fatigue in Matthew's Gospel and explained why the alleged inconsistencies within Matthew's narrative need not be read as inconsistencies. Indeed, the claimed tensions were typically quite artificial and forced. The only example which my critics decided to address at any length was the healing of the leper in Matthew 8:1-4. To briefly review, this supposed inconsistency within Matthew's narrative is supposed to arise from Matthew adding the detail that crowds were present for the healing in verse 1, but then adopting Mark's language when saying that Jesus told the leper not to tell anyone that he had been healed in verse 4. In Mark's account, so the argument goes, the story is coherent because he does not mention crowds, but Matthew's story is allegedly internally inconsistent because it supposedly makes no sense to charge the leper not to tell anyone that he had been healed if the healing happened in front of a crowd.

I made two points by way of response. First, I pointed out that some scholars maintain that Matthew 8:1 is not even part of the same pericope as Matthew 8:4. Matthew 8:1 could be the end of the Sermon on the Mount, and then there could be an interval of time between Matthew 8:1 and 8:2. This would mean that Matthew need not be thinking of these crowds as being present for the healing of the leper, since it is possible that he does not intend for this story to immediately follow the Sermon on the Mount chronologically. Second, I argued that even if crowds were present for the healing, nothing about this is inconsistent with the command to tell no one about the healing. To give some plausibility to the idea that this is not inconsistent, I pointed out that there is a similar story in Mark 7:32-37 where Jesus heals a deaf-mute man in front of a crowd and then tells the whole crowd not to tell anyone. Admittedly, the crowd does not obey Jesus, but nevertheless, there is no narrative incoherence or inconsistency here.

In response to my first point that Matthew 8:1 and 8:4 may not be part of the same story, Robinson asks for a citation. "So the F, the first thing he does say is that the great crowds following Jesus is just the end of the Sermon on the Mount and not the beginning of the healing of the leper. Fine. However we divide, no one cares. However we divide up this text, it remains true that the leper appears after the Sermon on the Mount, right? So I, I think what David wants to be true with power ward is the idea that there is this putative time jump between the end of the Sermon on the Mount when everyone's following Jesus and then the healing of the leper, in which case citation needed, please. There's no indication that there was a time jump. There's no, like, change in the verb tenses or anything that would suggest this is happening at different times. The crowd is there. These stories follow one another. It doesn't really matter how we're trying to divide up the pericopes."

The request is rather baffling because such a citation was present within the original video. I cited David Nill, who responds to this putative example of editorial fatigue by pointing out that it depends upon the assumption that Matthew 8:1 is the introduction to the following pericope rather than the conclusion to the previous one. Robinson goes on to say that there is no indication of a time jump here. Certainly, that is true, but such unstated time jumps are not foreign to Matthew's Gospel. For example, it is very clear that there is a time jump between the end of Matthew Chapter 2 and the beginning of Matthew Chapter 3. We know this because Jesus is a young child at the end of Matthew 2, and yet he is a grown man in Chapter 3. Matthew never explicitly states that there is a time jump here, but we can nevertheless infer that there is. So Matthew can make time jumps without notifying the reader. Again, this is not to say that this necessarily is what is going on in Matthew Chapter 8. It is merely to reinforce that this is possible and that Robinson has not given us any reason to believe that Matthew 8:1 and 8:4 are part of the same pericope.

Moving on to my second contention, Robinson first misunderstands why I brought up Mark 7:32-37. "I'm going to give credit where credit is due. This is a really interesting case where a story in Mark has internal inconsistencies that don't owe to a known source. What David does with this is say, 'We can clearly see from this that Jesus is in the habit of telling entire crowds not to tell anyone about a healing.' So here are the problems with it. He just glances right over the inconsistencies which would make his point so much better than the point he's actually making is that there is a crowd imagined, I think, in this third-person verb of 'they begged him to do this,' that there must be a crowd, and then Jesus takes him away from the crowd so they're by themselves now, but then suddenly the crowd is back and Jesus says that he told them not to do this, and that this isn't even. But then none of this actually tells us anything about Matthew 8:2 and the healing of the leper. Because Jesus in that pericope doesn't tell the leper, he doesn't tell the crowds not to tell anyone. He doesn't react this. He doesn't say, 'And then Jesus told the crowds not to tell anyone,' or he said, 'Don't tell them not to tell anyone.' He tells the leper not to tell anyone. So the crowd has just vanished again. So in both of these texts, we have this vanishing crowd in this reappearing crowd, but he doesn't notice this because he's so eager to create this historical norm that Jesus would tell a crowd not to say he's been healed when that's not even what happens in Matthew 8. So he just, there's an interesting argument to be made here about the limits of editorial fatigue, and David doesn't notice it because his harmonizing impulses are so overpowering of any literary or historical argument you might make."

She claims that I was trying to make a historical argument that Jesus was habitually going around healing people in front of crowds. This was not quite my point. I was using this story to support my primary contention, namely that there is no narrative inconsistency involved in Jesus healing in front of a crowd and then requesting silence on the part of the one who was healed. Since the request for silence is addressed to the entire crowd in Mark 7, it's hard to sustain the idea that Mark saw any tension in Jesus requesting that the crowd keep quiet about the healing. If this is right, then these considerations will equally apply to Matthew 8:4, which will undercut the basic assumption of the original argument that Matthew's story is inconsistent with itself here.

Robinson makes an interesting move. She is apparently so committed to the idea that it is inconsistent to demand secrecy when healing in front of crowds that she actually doubles down and says that Mark 7:32-37 is also inconsistent, even though Mark directly has Jesus tell the crowd not to tell anyone. What's more, she thinks that Mark has a further inconsistency because he describes Jesus as taking the man aside from the crowd in verse 33 and yet having the crowd be present again in verses 36 and 37. Robinson apparently takes Mark's statement that Jesus took the man aside by himself to mean that Jesus completely removed himself in the melee from the presence of the crowd, as opposed to simply having the crowd give them some space while still being visible to them. But I would think that in view of the fact that either interpretation of Mark's statement is possible, we would let Mark's later statements in verses 36 and 37 determine the meaning of his earlier statement in verse 33. If we give Mark the benefit of the doubt that he at least has a coherent story in his own mind, it is eminently more plausible that he simply means that the crowd gave Jesus and the deaf man some space in verse 33, rather than that Mark has a crowd magically reappearing in verse 36.

It is important to see that Robinson does not actually argue for the proposition that there is something inconsistent about healing in front of a crowd and then commanding them to keep quiet about it. Rather, she assumes this from the start and instead of reconsidering this assumption in light of Mark's explicit claim that Jesus told the entire crowd to keep quiet in the case of the deaf-mute, she just bites the bullet on Mark likewise being inconsistent. While her consistency on this point is commendable, the fact remains that she has not yet provided any reason to think that the foundational assumption that there is something inconsistent about healing in front of a crowd and then commanding them to keep silent is actually true in the first place. Perhaps then, we have reached an impasse. I leave it to viewers to decide for themselves if they think that Mark's story, and by extension Matthew's story, is inconsistent. All I can say is that no inconsistency has yet been demonstrated.

Robinson makes one further point. She objects that the stories in Matthew 7 and Matthew 8 are relevantly different from one another because the command of secrecy is only directed to the man Jesus has healed in Matthew 8, whereas it is directed to the entire crowd in Mark 7. While Robinson is correct on this front, it's not clear that this difference between the stories changes anything. So long as there is a consistent way for this to happen, as I think Mark 7 demonstrates, then even though Matthew does not mention Jesus directing a command of silence to the crowd, it does not follow that he nevertheless does not take such a command for granted. The point is just that there is a coherent way to read Matthew's narrative. That is all that is needed to invalidate Matthew 8:1-4 as being a genuine example of editorial fatigue.

Again, I do appreciate Apocalypse here taking my video seriously and attempting to further the conversation. I must say that I am a bit disappointed in the frequent misrepresentation of my arguments and the misunderstanding that this video is merely a critique of the arguments for Markan priority rather than a defense of an alternative model, since that was the purpose of my third and fourth videos. Nevertheless, I am grateful for the opportunity which their response has afforded me to clarify my own position and motivations, as well as, I hope, to establish that I understand the terrain at least a little better than they think that I do.