Markan priority

Marcan priority, the hypothesis that the Gospel of Mark was the first-written of the three Synoptic Gospels and was used as a source by the other two (Matthew and Luke) is a central element in discussion of the synoptic problem - the question of the documentary relationship among these three Gospels.

Most scholars since the late nineteenth century have accepted the concept of Marcan priority. It forms the foundation for the widely accepted two-source theory, although a number of scholars support different forms of Marcan priority or reject it altogether.

The tradition handed down by the Church Fathers regarded Matthew as the first Gospel written. 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.

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.

In 1838, two theologians, Christian Gottlob Wilke and Christian Hermann Weisse, 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 won general favor.

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