It has been said that the two most important questions for religion are those of the rational foundations of theism and of the trustworthiness of the Four Gospels.[277] The Gospel records have always been regarded as the citadel of the Christian Faith. Not only do they contain the record of works of power and words of grace, and of a transcendent Personality, but they have always been considered to have been themselves supernatural in origin and character. They have been regarded as "a house not made with hands" (Robertson Nicoll), "a miracle of the Holy Ghost" (Stier), "the heaven-drawn picture of Christ, the living Word." The criticism of the past century, in its quest for the historical Jesus, has taken a very different attitude towards the Evangelical records. By many critics they have been regarded as a patchwork of traditions, a work of pious but credulous men, whose idealization and exaggeration, in the supposed interest of faith, it is necessary to discount in order to reach the bed-rock of historical fact.
The literary relation of the Synoptic Gospels to one another has furnished to the New Testament student a problem of great intricacy and singular fascination. Its importance for our present purpose is in its bearing upon the trustworthiness of our canonical Gospels. The school of Baur, under the influence of the Hegelian dialectic, saw in Matthew, the Jewish Gospel, the thesis; in Luke, the Gentile Gospel, the antithesis; and lastly in Mark, the neutral Gospel, the synthesis or last term of the development. Criticism since the time of Baur has, with much unanimity, seen in Mark not the latest but the first of the Gospels, and has made Matthew and Luke dependent upon Mark.
The theory which has for some years held the field is the so-called "two-document" theory. According to this Matthew and Luke, usually regarded as independent of each other, are both dependent, for much of their narrative portion and for the framework of their history, upon Mark, and, for the non-Markan discourse material which they have in common, upon a collection of the sayings of Jesus, formerly designated as "the Logia" but now usually called by the letter "Q." The importance of the Synoptic Problem, for our present purpose, is in its historical rather than its literary features. Assuming the priority of Mark, and assuming that Matthew and Luke were dependent upon him alone in those parts of their narratives which have Markan parallels, it is clear that we must regard all deviations made by the other Synoptists from the Markan narrative as of only secondary value. Variations from Mark, if Mark be the sole source, whether these consist of additions, omissions or modifications in the narrative, obviously add nothing to our knowledge of the facts, but simply represent changes which the later writers have made in their source from subjective reasons. It is important, then, to ask whether, in the present state of opinion upon the inter-Synoptic relations, there is reason to believe that Matthew and Luke are following Mark as their sole authority for the narratives which have Markan parallels.
There is now a quite general recognition of the fact that the literary problem presented by the Synoptic Gospels is exceedingly intricate, and that the "two-document" hypothesis in its simplicity has not solved all the difficulties. It is recognized that it must be modified in one of three directions.
(1) There may be said to be a growing appreciation of the part which oral transmission has played in the composition of the Gospels. This is shown for example in the volume of Oxford "Studies in the Synoptic Problem" (1911),[278] and by the statement of Sir John Hawkins, who, in the second edition of his "Horæ Synopticæ" (1909), expresses the strong opinion "that at least the Second and Third Evangelists had provided themselves with written documents as their main sources, but that they often omitted to refer closely to them, partly because of the physical difficulties which there must have been in consulting manuscripts, and partly because of the oral knowledge of the life and sayings of Jesus Christ which they had previously acquired as learners and used as teachers, and upon which therefore it would be natural for them to fall back very frequently."[279] It is natural to suppose, with Schmiedel, that oral tradition continued for a considerable time after the first documents were written.[280]
(2) A considerable number of scholars, finding that Mark condenses his account of such incidents as the Baptism and Temptation of Jesus and the discourse concerning Beelzebub, and that Matthew and Luke are parallel in matter which they add at these points to the Markan account, have concluded that Mark must have used Q, the assumed source of the Matthew-Luke agreements. A moderate statement is that of Dr. Sanday: "I do not think that Q was used by Mark regularly and systematically, as the later Evangelists use his own narrative; but he must have known of its existence, and reminiscences of it seem to have clung to him and from time to time made their way into his text." [281]
(3) Another group of scholars, basing their view on the agreement of Matthew and Luke against Mark in matter with Markan parallels, and on the difficulty of accounting for some omissions from Mark in the later Evangelists (such as the omission in Luke, where it would be most appropriate, of the story about the Syro-Phœnician woman), have framed a theory of different recensions in Mark, one being used by Matthew, a different one by Luke, and a final recension, whether the work of the Evangelist himself or of an editor, representing our canonical Mark. This theory in different forms has been advocated by Stanton in his "Gospels as Historical Documents," Part II (1909), and more recently by Holdsworth in his "Gospel Origins" (1913). When the two-document theory is held in this form, the priority of Mark belongs only to the assumed earlier editions, for whose extent and contents there is no objective evidence except the assumed dependence, while our canonical Mark is later than either Matthew or Luke.
There is a growing tendency to find secondary elements in Mark as well as in Matthew or Luke. Hawkins, it will be recalled, gives a list of passages in Mark "which may have been omitted or altered (by the other Evangelists) as being liable to be misunderstood, or to give offense, or to suggest difficulties."[282] Of the passages which seem (a) to limit the power of Jesus, or (b) to be otherwise derogatory to, or unworthy of Him, the more noteworthy of the twenty-two instances given by Hawkins are as follows: under (a),
1. Mark i. 32-34, "He healed many that were sick." Matthew viii. 16, "He healed all"; cf. Luke iv. 40, "Every one of them."