Even if Wendling’s analysis had been capable of substantiation on linguistic grounds, his division of our Gospel of Mark into three strands from three different authors would not help us toward an Ur-Marcus lying behind our Gospels of Matthew and Luke. For Matthew or Luke or both of them follow Mark in all the transpositions, dislocations, and other misarrangements of his Gospel. Whether these features stood in the original Mark or not, they evidently stood in the Mark used by Matthew and Luke.
Matthew and Luke also used a Mark which contained the story of Jesus in the same order given by our present Mark. Tho both of them deviate from this order for assignable reasons, one or the other of them is found following it all the time. If these deviations go back to an Ur-Marcus, there must have been one Ur-Marcus in the hands of Matthew and another in the hands of Luke.
THE HYPOTHESIS OF A PRIMITIVE MARK SUPERFLUOUS; SIMPLER EXPLANATIONS
Can the verbal agreements of Matthew and Luke as against Mark, or their deviations from him without apparent reason, be explained upon any simpler hypothesis than that of Ur-Marcus? It appears to the writer that they can.
A certain number (tho no one can say exactly what proportion of the whole) of the agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark may be allowed to be accidental. Many of them, like the substitution of εἶπεν for λέγει, or of an occasional δέ for Mark’s invariable and monotonous καί or the substitution of a common for an uncommon word (like κλίνη for κράβαττος) require no explanation.
Agreements of Matthew and Luke in their omissions from the Marcan narrative do not stand upon the same plane with the agreements in substitutions, and may all be accounted for on the ground of accident, or by the same desire on the part of both writers to be more concise, or to avoid anything derogatory to Jesus or the apostles; or by some other similar motive at work separately in the minds of the two later evangelists. It is only the agreements in corrections and substitutions that require accounting for. I believe these can be explained chiefly on two grounds:
1. It is not necessary to assume that Matthew and Luke both worked upon the same identical copy of our Mark. If they used two copies, these two would not be expected to agree absolutely with each other in the wording of every passage. This would account for some of the slight deviations in the wording of either Matthew or Luke where the other agrees with our present Mark. These two copies that Matthew and Luke used may neither of them have been the original (since in both of them the conclusion at least was gone); or at least not the original in its original form. One of them may have been a copy of the original, and the other a copy of this copy. Or they may both, as Sanday argues, have belonged to a type later, and not earlier, than our present Mark. This would account for the agreements, and for such deviations as have not already been accounted for, or cannot be accounted for, by the known literary peculiarities of Matthew and Luke. Since the text of Mark that has come down to us is more corrupt than that of either Matthew or Luke, various words in which Matthew and Luke now agree against Mark may have stood in the text which both of them used, and may later have dropped out, before the copy was made to which our present texts go back. Or the two copies of Mark, assumed above, may both have been made from the original copy which Mark made with his own hand. Upon this supposition even, they would not always agree, and so deviations in Matthew and Luke from Mark, and occasional agreements in such deviations, would be explained. Or these agreements may be explained, as is obvious in many instances, by the working of similar motives in the minds of Matthew and Luke, even assuming them to have made their extracts from one and the same copy, or from two practically identical copies, of Mark.
Dr. E. A. Abbott, in his Corrections of Mark (London, 1901) gives an exhaustive list of the deviations from Mark in which Matthew and Luke agree. Many of these are such as to suggest that Matthew and Luke used not an Ur-Marcus, but a text of Mark later than the one that has come down to us. E.g., in twelve instances Matthew and Luke agree in supplying the subject or object which our Mark omits. In fifteen, they agree in correcting abrupt constructions, supplying a connecting word. In thirteen (exclusive of λέγει) they agree in correcting Mark’s historic present. In twelve they agree in replacing Mark’s relative clause or his subjunctive by a participle. In twenty-three they agree in substituting εἶπεν for λέγει. In thirty they agree in the use of δέ for καί. It is not impossible that Matthew and Luke, independently bent on improving Mark’s style, have accidentally agreed in making these same improvements in the same places (especially since there are other improvements of the same sort in which they do not agree). But it is a much simpler and more adequate hypothesis, that they both used a text of Mark in which these corrections had already been made.
Yet even of this text they probably did not use the same identical copy. And as the copy used by one or both of them may have been two or three removes from the text from which it started, many changes may have crept into the copy used by one of them, not contained in the copy used by the other. This would account alike for the agreements in deviations from our present Mark, and for the fact that these corrections are not all of them found in both Matthew and Luke. This last item is further accounted for by the freedom of Matthew and Luke in making their own corrections in the copy that lay before them.[66] Allowance should also be made for the fact that we cannot be sure that we have yet recovered the true text of either Matthew or Luke.[67]
2. The agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark can further be accounted for by the hypothesis of assimilation. Matthew made certain changes of his own in the wording of Mark; Luke apparently made many more. The various texts still extant show many efforts of copyists to bring the deviations of Matthew and Luke in small verbal items into an agreement. If this same process went on during the period covered by our earliest manuscripts, it is probable that it went on to a much greater extent at an earlier date, before our Gospels had acquired the sacredness which they later came to possess. A fine illustration of this process and its results is to be seen in the Matthean and Lucan versions of the Lord’s Prayer, in which the probably original “Let thy Holy Spirit come upon us and purify us,” of Luke, has been assimilated to “Thy kingdom come,” and in many manuscripts also to “Thy will be done as in heaven so upon earth,” of Matthew. The extent of this sort of assimilation can never be determined; but it seems quite sufficient to account for agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark not easily accounted for on other grounds.