Why is Matthews gospel first in order when Marks was cleary written before?
“Traditionally, (see Augustinian hypothesis), Matthew was seen as the first Gospel written, that Luke then expanded on Matthew, and that Mark is the conflation of both Matthew and Luke. It was believed that the Gospel of Matthew was composed by Matthew, a disciple of Jesus. However, 18th Century scholars increasingly questioned the traditional view of composition. Today, most critical scholarship agrees that Matthew did not write the Gospel which bears his name, preferring instead to describe the author as an anonymous Jewish Christian, writing towards the end of the first century. They also believe that the Gospel was originally composed in Greek (see Greek primacy) rather than being a translation from an Aramaic Matthew or the Hebrew Gospel.” “The most popular view in modern scholarship is the two-source hypothesis, which speculates that Matthew borrowed from both Mark and a hypothetical sayings collection, called Q (for the German Quelle, meaning “source”). For most scholars, the Q
Strength…Why do you say that Mark’s gospel was written before Matthew’s? As far as some critics claim that Matthew didn’t write his book, here is some information that you might like to consider before decideing whether there is any credibility to their claim. While the Gospel credited to Matthew does not name him as the writer, the overwhelming testimony of early church historians stamps him as such. Perhaps no ancient book has its writer more clearly and unanimously established than the book of Matthew. From as far back as Papias of Hierapolis (early second century C.E.) onward, we have a line of early witnesses to the fact that Matthew wrote this Gospel and that it is an authentic part of the Word of God. McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopedia states: “Passages from Matthew are quoted by Justin Martyr, by the author of the letter to Diognetus (see in Otto’s Justin Martyr, vol. ii), by Hegesippus, Irenæus, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Clement, Tertullian, and Origen. It is not mere
Mark was not “clearly” written first. The educated conjecture of Markan priority – called the Oxford Hypothesis – is the majority view among NT scholars, but it is not the only one. And it has been losing ground/popularity over the last 30 years. (If you’re interested, the shift is based on the unfolding understanding of Near Eastern sacred stories, and how many of the asumptions of earlier text critics were in fact false: e.g., Mark wouldn’t have been (told then) written if they’d had Matthew. The fact is storytellers were encouraged to come up with their own take and dramatization of a sacred story, making full use of their literary abilities to bring out the themes they wanted to highlight. All 3 of the Synoptics are snapshots: individual retellings of a an oral core, probably Petrine in origin (i.e., from the Apostle Peter). Mark’s probably most closely corresponds to the earliest Petrine oral version, which is why Mark was also known as “The Memoirs of Peter”, written down in Rome
