Which Gospel was written first?

Not the order in your Bible

Open a New Testament and Matthew comes first. That order reflects an old belief that Matthew was written first; around 400, Augustine called Mark Matthew’s follower and abbreviator (Harmony of the Gospels 1.2.4). Since the nineteenth century most scholars have turned this around. They think Mark is the oldest Gospel, and that Matthew and Luke each had a copy of it as they wrote. The theory is called Markan priority. Who wrote Mark is a separate question, taken up in Who wrote the Gospel of Mark?

The Synoptic problem

Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels, from the Greek for “seen together,” because they can be printed side by side in columns, as the German scholar J. J. Griesbach did in 1776. Set out that way, they share long passages, often word for word. Someone copied someone. Three clues point to Mark as the source.

1. Length. Mark is the shortest. Matthew reproduces about 90 percent of it, Luke more than half.
2. Order. Where Matthew and Luke tell the same events, they follow Mark’s sequence. When one of them leaves it, the other almost always keeps it.
3. Polish. Matthew and Luke smooth Mark’s rough Greek and soften lines that could embarrass. In the storm on the lake, Mark’s frightened disciples wake Jesus with “Teacher, don’t you care that we are dying?” (Mark 4:38). Matthew has “Save us, Lord! We are dying!” (Matthew 8:25), and Luke “Master, Master, we are dying!” (Luke 8:24).

Or compare Jesus’s visit to his hometown.

He could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.

He didn’t do many mighty works there because of their unbelief.

Mark says he could not; Matthew says he did not, and explains why. A copyist improving Mark explains the change. The reverse is hard to imagine.

Matthew and Luke also share some 220 verses that Mark lacks, mostly sayings, such as the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Many scholars trace them to a lost collection called Q, from the German Quelle, source. Others think Luke simply read Matthew, and a minority still argues that Matthew came first.

The dates, and how they are reached

No Gospel carries a date, so scholars reason from clues.

• Mark, around 65–70. Jesus’s warning about the Temple carries an aside, “let the reader understand” (Mark 13:14), which many read as a sign that Rome’s war with Judaea, which ended with the Temple burned in AD 70, was under way or just over.
• Matthew and Luke, around 80–90. Both use Mark, and Luke makes the same warning concrete: “when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies” (Luke 21:20).
• John, around 90–100. A scrap of papyrus with a few verses of John 18, known as P52 and kept in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, is usually dated to the second century. John was being copied in Egypt within a few decades.
• Paul, before them all. His first letter to the Thessalonians, from around AD 50, is the oldest Christian writing that survives.

Not everyone agrees. In Redating the New Testament (1976), John A. T. Robinson argued that every book of the New Testament was written before 70.

Why Greek, and why four

All four were written in Greek, the common language of the eastern Roman Empire, though Jesus taught in Aramaic. Mark keeps a few of his words, such as Talitha cumi, “Girl, I tell you, get up!” (Mark 5:41). Papias, an early second-century bishop quoted by Eusebius, said that Matthew gathered the sayings in Hebrew (Church History 3.39.16), but our Matthew copies Mark’s Greek, so most scholars think it was composed in Greek. As for why they differ, each writer shaped the same memories for his own readers, and Luke admits he was not the first to try.

Since many have undertaken to set in order a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us