Was Mark Really Written First? The Arguments for “Markan Priority”
I've begun blogging on the "Synoptic Problem," the problem of why Matthew, Mark, and Luke are so similar in so many ways (many of the exact same stories, often told in the same sequence, and even in the very same words), and yet so different (often in wording, sometimes in sequence, etc.). The solution virtually everyone accepts is that there is some kind of copying going on. The first step is to see if one of them was copied in part by the others, and based on long examinations of all the evidence, the vast majority of scholars have come to agree Matthew and Luke had a copy of Mark that they copied as the basis for their accounts. They each changed it in places, moving a story to another place, rewording sentences either a little, or a lot, etc.. But Mark was first and the others copied most of it. I should point out that Matthew and Luke almost certainly didn't have the same *copy* of Mark. And the copies they each had may [...]