History[edit]

Gottlob Christian Storr

The tradition handed down by the Church Fathers regarded Matthew as the first Gospel written
in Hebrew, which was later used as a source by Mark and Luke. [3] Augustine of Hippo wrote in the
5th century: "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." And: "Of these four, it is
true, only Matthew is reckoned to have written in the Hebrew language; the others in Greek. And
however they may appear to have kept each of them a certain order of narration proper to himself,
this certainly is not to be taken as if each individual writer chose to write in ignorance of what his
predecessor had done...".[4]
This view of Gospel origins, however, began to be challenged in the late 18th century, when Gottlob
Christian Storr proposed in 1786 that Mark was the first to be written. [5][6]
Storr's idea met with little acceptance at first, with most scholars favoring either Matthaean priority,
under the traditional Augustinian hypothesis or the Griesbach hypothesis, or a fragmentary theory
(according to which, stories about Jesus were recorded in several smaller documents and notebooks
and combined by the evangelists to create the Synoptic Gospels). Working within the fragmentary
theory, Karl Lachmann in 1835 compared the Synoptic Gospels in pairs and noted that, while
Matthew frequently agreed with Mark against Luke in the order of passages and Luke agreed
frequently with Mark against Matthew, Matthew and Luke rarely agreed with each other against
Mark. Lachmann inferred from this that Mark best preserved a relatively fixed order of episodes in
Jesus's ministry.[7]
In 1838, two theologians, Christian Gottlob Wilke[8] and Christian Hermann Weisse,[9] independently
extended Lachmann's reasoning to conclude that Mark not only best represented Matthew and
Luke's source but also that Mark was Matthew and Luke's source. Their ideas were not immediately
accepted, but Heinrich Julius Holtzmann's endorsement in 1863 of a qualified form of Marcan
priority[10] won general favor.
There was much debate at the time over whether Matthew and Luke used Mark itself or some Proto-
Mark (Ur-Mark).[11] In 1899 J. C. Hawkins took up the question with a careful statistical analysis and
argued for Marcan priority without Proto-Mark,[12] and other British scholars[13][14] soon followed to
strengthen the argument, which then received wide acceptance.
Most scholars in the twentieth century regarded Marcan priority as no longer just a hypothesis, but
an established fact.[15] Still, fresh challenges from B. C. Butler[16] and William R. Farmer[17] proved
influential in reviving the rival hypothesis of Matthaean priority, and recent decades have seen
scholars less certain about Marcan priority and more eager to explore all the alternatives. [15]