The Catholic Church has always held that the four Gospels are the most important part of the written tradition handed on by the twelve apostles in virtue of their personal knowledge of Jesus acquired during their instruction by him in the course of his earthly mission.
How and why the Gospels came to be written has been a matter of controversy during the past two hundred years. Nevertheless the patient investigations of eminent scholars enable us today to formulate a hypothesis that does justice both to critical scholarship and to the integrity of the ancient Fathers of the Church, who first recorded for us the fundamental facts.
In the history of the apostolic Church there were four main phases, four turning points, at each of which a suitable Gospel statement was found to be necessary for its proper growth:
- The Jerusalem phase (Acts 1-12) under the presidency of Peter
- The Pauline mission phase Acts 13-28)
- The Roman phase requiring joint action by Peter and Paul
- The Johannine supplement
Jerusalem Phase A.D. 30-42 (Acts 1-13)
According to the divine plan of salvation, the Messiah was not to appear until the time and circumstances were right. Among the prerequisites were: (a) the existence of the Septuagint, an excellent Greek version of the sacred books of the Jews (the Old Testament), including what we now call the deuterocanonical books. After the Resurrection the Septuagint became the Bible of the Christian Church and a powerful instrument for conveying to the whole world the knowledge of the true God that had already been given to the Jews; (b)the wide dispersion of the Jews, with their synagogues in all the main centers of the Roman Empire, which had Greek as its common language, making the spread of knowledge of the Jewish religion and way of life easily available to all educated and interested persons; (c) the Pax Romana, which gave Christianity the opportunity to take firm root during the working lifetime of the twelve apostles, whose function it was, as the principal witnesses of the Lord’s life, death, and Resurrection, to proclaim all that he had taught them.
The first thing for us to realize is that the Gospels presume the existence of the Christian Church and its organization as we find it described in the Acts of the Apostles. Let us take a closer look at it.
The descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and the 120 in the Upper Room gave them the confidence and vision to go forth and preach all they had learned from Jesus. Their first task, under the presidency of Peter, was to agree on the minimum organization necessary to undertake their world mission, and the Acts of the Apostles reveals to us that from the very beginning the Church of God enjoyed the good order that came from a right understanding of the mind of Jesus.
The twelve apostles were the supreme authority in virtue of being the eyewitnesses specially selected by Jesus to control the development of the Church. Their Church was a living organism entirely independent of the theocratic state of Judaism and responsible to no one but God himself. While reverencing the Temple of God on account of its past associations, they were obliged to set up their own house churches (for example, the church in the house of John Mark’s mother), where they were able to celebrate the Eucharistic rite of “the breaking of the bread” bequeathed to them by Jesus.
This, as well as their insistence on exact adherence to their teaching about him, led to the immediate emergence of a fellowship (based on baptism into Christ) that distinguished them from all other citizens of Jerusalem. Jesus himself, together with his Father and his Holy Spirit–the one Trinitarian God–was now the object of worship in the apostolic community of the Church of Jerusalem. But this “foreign body” of followers of Jesus had to justify its existence in the face of the fierce hostility of the unconverted high priests, Sadducees, Pharisees, Levites, and priests.
As soon as the first wave of converts had been baptized and their instruction organized by the twelve–no mean achievement because they had no precedent to go by–their thoughts returned to the practical question of how to unify and consolidate their teaching about Jesus. The apostles realized that they had somehow to promulgate those passages of the Holy Scriptures “of Moses and all the prophets concerning himself” which Jesus had explained to Cleopas on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:27). It also became clear to them that their main apologetical task would be to demonstrate to the Jewish authorities that Jesus had quite literally fulfilled all the prophecies about the Messiah. These considerations were the original motivation for the composition of the Gospel of Matthew.
We are very fortunate to possess the Acts of the Apostles, which provides us with the necessary background information to enable us to see that the Gospel of Matthew was the ideal instrument to refute the calumnies about Jesus that the high priests were circulating.
It met all the apologetical needs of the Jerusalem Church in the years immediately following the Resurrection, when its doctrines were under attack–namely, that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, proved by his ancestry as a Son of David, his being born of a virgin, his birth in Bethlehem, his commendation by the holy Baptist John, his miracles (raising the dead, healing the sick, curing the lepers, controlling the sea and the winds), his “teaching with authority” in the Temple, his coming to fulfill the Law of Moses and not to destroy it, and above all by his suffering like the Servant of Isaiah, and finally by his rejection by his own nation and Resurrection from the dead.
All the above facts had long been foretold or foreshadowed in the sacred writings of the Jews. How then was all this and a great deal more to be reduced to the compass of one commercial roll of ten meters, the standard length of a book, if they were to travel “light” in compliance with their Master’s explicit instructions? The help of the Holy Spirit was indeed necessary if the essentials of the life and teaching of a man of Jesus’ eminence were ever to be competently sketched.
The universal tradition tells us that the twelve entrusted this important work to the apostle Matthew, and so, not long after the Resurrection, Matthew set to work. His brief seems to have been to compile schematically the Master’s teachings without special regard to their chronological order, as it was meant to be a handbook for teaching and administration in the Church. Perhaps the greatest problem that he faced was that of reducing the immense mass of material available to the twelve in the form of their personal reminiscences of the Lord into a manageable quantity by deciding which stories to include and which to omit, before editing and setting forth those to be included.
Matthew did not take this challenge lightly and to produce a work worthy of proclaiming the Lord’s glory made skillful use of all five of the literary forms that were then the hallmark of good writing in the Hellenistic world: the proverb or maxim, the narrative, the parable, the anecdote (known as the chreia or short story), the reminiscence (the apo-mnemoneuma or longer story).
The use of these Greek literary forms is an important indication that Matthew composed his work in Greek. In any case, since Greek was the common language of communication throughout the Roman Empire and beyond, and with the Septuagint as the successful precedent, the Greek tongue was the obvious medium for the effective presentation of the Gospel message. Though highly educated, Matthew shared the difficulties of anybody expressing himself in a foreign language and so betrayed his Palestinian origin in the style of the original Greek text, which contains many signs of his Semitic mother tongue and thinking.
With the help of the Holy Spirit and the rest of the twelve Matthew then arranged the selected material in three main sections: (1) the origin of Jesus down to the opening of his public ministry in Galilee (1:1-4:17); (2) the Galilean ministry (4:18-18:35)–containing the bulk of his teaching–to which is attached a brief interlude in Transjordan (ch. 19-20); (3) all the Jerusalem events of his public mission, including the passion, death, and Resurrection narratives (ch. 21-28).
Matthew’s account of the infancy of Jesus is mostly apologetical, its aim being to prove that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, was born of the Virgin Mary, and was Son of David by legitimate adoption by Joseph. The main part of the teaching of Jesus is given in a series of carefully edited sermons masterly compiled from his words (a literary technique widely used and fully accepted at the time) and designed to give the reader the clearest possible idea of the way in which the Messiah, depicted as the Redeemer of the world, set out his implementation and supplementation of the Old Law.
Thus the great Sermon on the Mount (ch. 5-7) is constructed to give the reader the full power and beauty of the new spirit infused by Jesus into the letter of the Old Law of Moses.
Further teachings are arranged in a series of five other discourses: (1) the missionary discourse (Matt. 10), (2) parables discourse (Matt. 13), (3) the discourse on the Church community (Matt. 18), (4) the discourse exposing the wickedness of the opposition to him (Matt. 23), (5) the eschatological discourse (Matt. 24-25).
This Gospel of Matthew was the manifesto of the Mother Church of Jerusalem, and it is therefore the fundamental document of the Christian faith. It was the document that each of the apostles needed to take with him to his own distant field of evangelization and also the one which Paul was to take with him on his own missionary journeys and from which he appears to quote in 1 Thessalonians 4-5.
A savage persecution of the Church, begun by Herod Agrippa I in A.D. 42, was the signal for the dispersion of the apostles now possessing in the Gospel of Matthew the necessary tool to support and confirm their preaching, while at the same time preserving their theological unity. The first phase was completed, and the second phase of the Church’s expansion was about to begin with the mission of Paul.
Pauline Mission Phase, A.D. 42-62 (Acts 13-28)
At the very beginning the apostles and their disciples had been content to preach only to Jews and to “God Fearers” (pagans who believed in the truth of Judaism), but three events that occurred during the first phase were portents that laid the foundation for the expansion that was soon to follow: (1) the dispersion of the faithful during the persecution and martyrdom of Stephen, which first brought to Antioch (Acts 11) missionaries who converted a number of pagans in that wealthy city; (2) the conversion on the road to Damascus of Paul, God’s chosen vessel for the conversion of the Gentiles (Acts 9); (3) the reception of the centurion Cornelius and his family into the Church by Peter with the approval of the Jerusalem Church (Acts 10-11), without the obligation to be circumcised or to keep the food and marriage regulations that prevented Jews from mixing with Gentiles.
Understandably, in the first phase the apostles were far too busy with the problems of the nascent Church of Jerusalem to initiate a concerted drive to win over to Christ the Greek-speaking world of the Roman Empire; their immediate concern was quite properly their fellow Jews. The rapidly increasing number of converts at Antioch finally persuaded the Jerusalem apostles to send Barnabas there to check the new development, and he in turn decided to invite Paul to join him in instructing these new followers of Jesus who were soon labeled “Christians” by the general public.
A severe famine (A.D.45-46) led the Christians of Antioch to send Barnabas and Paul on their famine relief visit to Jerusalem with a large sum to relieve the brethren’s distress (Acts 11:25-30, 12:24f, Gal. 2:1-10). The Holy Spirit had intimated to Paul to use the opportunity to compare privately his teaching with that of the twelve on the requirements of the Church regarding the admission of Gentile converts. This was an urgent matter as there was a powerful group of Pharisaic Christians in the Mother Church who wanted all converts to be compelled to submit to the full rigor of the Old Law of Moses. Paul’s meeting with Peter, James, and John is recorded in his Letter to the Galatians (2:1-10), and its outcome was a comprehensive understanding between him and those whom he calls the “Three Pillars,” and it included an agreement to observe their respective fields of apostolate and a decision not to ask Gentile converts to take on the obligations of the Mosaic Law.
Shortly after Paul’s return to Antioch the Holy Spirit called him and Barnabas to set out on their first missionary journey to the districts of southern Galatia. His astounding success (Acts 14-15) quickly aroused the hostility of the strict Pharisees of Jerusalem, who sent a delegation to remonstrate with him. A fierce debate then took place at Antioch, and since neither side would give way, Paul had no option but to go up to Jerusalem and argue for the freedom of the Gentiles before the “Three Pillars” (Acts 15:16). He was of course certain about the outcome since previously they had already acknowledged his complete orthodoxy. The recognition of Gentile freedom from the Law of Moses at the Council of Jerusalem (A.D. 49) then marked another milestone in the progress of the Church (Acts 15:16-35).
Above all Paul saw the paramount need to integrate into one harmonious body the Jewish Christians, with their Mosaic/Pharisaic traditions, and the Greek and Roman converts. In his great letter to the Church of the Romans he had, in fact, already produced the necessary theological synthesis (Rom. 9-11). His missionary experience had proved that the Gospel of Matthew, which he was faithfully using as a follow-up to his oral teaching, did not answer all the questions of his Asian and Greek converts. This made him aware of the need for a presentation of the Gospel nuanced to suit the mentality of the Hellenistic world.
He now was faced with a two-fold task, firstly to produce a version of Matthew’s Gospel that would meet the spiritual needs of the Greek world and secondly to make sure that the modified version would be acceptable to Peter and the other “Pillars.” Before he came to the end of his third missionary journey Paul had chosen the man he needed for this difficult and delicate undertaking, his friend Luke, a physician, who joined him on the latter stages of his voyage back to Jerusalem. While there Paul found himself disenchanted by the reserved attitude of James and his elders, who looked askance at what they regarded as the too-easy terms on which Paul was admitting Greeks into the Church. The Holy Spirit was now urging him insistently to look toward Rome, and so he was longing to go there (Acts 19:21f).
As it so happened, Paul’s hope did not materialize immediately, because of his fortuitous detention by the Romans for more than two years in their headquarters in Caesarea. Nevertheless this enforced stay in Palestine turned out to be a blessing inasmuch as it provided Luke with sufficient time to check the details in Matthew’s account of the life and ministry of Jesus, to interrogate many of those who had known him some thirty years before, and to prepare a new Gospel document modeled on Matthew’s.
Through hindsight we can determine the brief that Luke had received from Paul, by comparing the Gospels of Luke and Matthew and noting Luke’s deviations. In the first place, Luke carefully followed the main structure of Matthew throughout, as well as generally adhering to the order of its various sections and anecdotes, but he also made highly interesting changes. For example, his story of the birth of Jesus is totally different from Matthew’s, which, as we have noted, was almost entirely apologetical in tone and content. Luke provided a straightforward narrative that stems either directly or indirectly from Mary herself. When he came to the Galilean ministry he added certain details to each of those stories from Matthew’s Gospel that he decided to adopt.
Indeed in one way or another he absorbed nearly everything that Matthew had written and yet managed to add a good deal of extra material. This Luke did in two ways, by omitting a number of stories that he regarded as duplicates (e.g. the famous Lucan omission of Matt. 14:22-16:12) and by inserting into the heart of the Matthean text at the end of the Galilean ministry (Matt. 19:12) a section of no less than nine long chapters, 9:52-18:14 (his central section) comprising the excerpts which he had withdrawn from Matthew’s six great discourses in order to lighten the content of his own version of them and additional sayings and parables which he had collected.
It is perhaps worth noting here that the contents of Luke’s central section roughly correspond with the conjectural document known as “Q,” which many modern exegetes consider to be one of the sources of Matthew and Luke.)
All the time he was composing Luke was mindful to keep his eye on the audience and readership for which Paul needed this Gospel, in particular on the Greeks’ scientific bent, their desire to know names and dates and times, and their interest in the emancipation of women. Moreover he made it his aim to reveal an.aspect of Jesus that would impress the Gentile reader, namely by exhibiting him as a hero blessed by God, one too good for this world, yet one who after his apotheosis was still bringing blessings to the world which he had saved by his sacrificial death.
Luke completed his task in time to accompany Paul on the journey by sea to Rome, but there were two reasons for holding up the publication of his Gospel. In the first place, it was not an eyewitness account, since neither Luke nor Paul had been eyewitnesses of the ministry of Jesus, but was in the main a work of historical investigation, and if it was to have credibility it would need the support of some eyewitness such as Peter. Even more serious was the possibility that the publication of this manifesto for Paul’s Gentile converts would result in another explosion from the circumcision party, which was still very active and was to remain so until the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70. Therefore Luke’s Gospel could not be published until this danger had been defused.
Roman Phase
The situation was then as follows: The Gospel according to Matthew had been in circulation for some twenty years throughout the Christian world, both inside and beyond the Roman Empire, and Paul was due to arrive in Rome as a prisoner of Caesar some time in 61 or 62 (Acts 28:30). Luke accompanied Paul, bringing with him a document which he had been compiling during Paul’s detention in Caesarea, in fact a substantial reworking of the Gospel of Matthew.
Paul’s former disciple Mark, who had left him early in his first missionary journey at Perga and had later gone with Barnabas to Cyprus, had since become Peter’s devoted assistant (1 Pet. 5:12-13, written at Rome some time between 61 and 63). Nevertheless the letters of Paul to the Colossians and to Philemon, traditionally said to have been written from Rome during Paul’s detention (which ended not later than 63), reveal that he remained in intimate contact with both Mark and Luke (Col. 4:10, 14, Philem. 24).
Paul was well aware of the importance attached by the secular Greek and Roman world to the testimony of actual eyewitnesses, but whereas the Gospel of Matthew had emanated from the Jerusalem community, many of whom had known Jesus personally and could corroborate the witness of the twelve preserved in that Gospel, neither he nor Luke had known Jesus while he walked on earth. Of course, Paul had been given a vision of the resurrected and glorified Christ, but he was still dependent on the twelve for information about his earthly life.
As far as Luke was concerned, he too had to rely entirely on the tradition he had received from the apostles and from the Gospel of Matthew, to which he added his own personal researches into the events of the life of Jesus, gleaned from material supplied to him by many surviving eyewitnesses whom he had succeeded in interrogating. In order to get Luke’s work recognized as a true account and one worthy to be read in the Christian assembly either alongside or in place of Matthew’s Gospel, Paul needed to get it ratified by an apostolic eyewitness.
Furthermore, although Paul’s primary concern was to secure the publication of Luke’s Gospel in the region of the churches he himself had founded, he was also aware that once published it would inevitably find its way into the churches of the other apostles. Therefore it was necessary for him now well in advance to establish the fact that Luke had not erred in any particular and to avoid any discourtesy to the apostles affected.
At the time of Paul’s captivity in Rome, Peter happened to be there as well, and of course he was the prime eyewitness of the public ministry of Jesus. So Paul approached Peter to ask his advice about the best procedure. Peter realized that Paul needed the public assurance that Luke’s book was in complete conformity with his (Peter’s) own recollections of Jesus and was happy to compare Luke’s treatment of the events at which he himself had been a participant or witness with Matthew’s parallel account.
Peter’s plan then was to give a series of discourses in the atrium of the Roman mansion which he had designated for his weekly Eucharistic celebration. His secretary, Mark, helped him to prepare these talks, which were bound to excite the interest of the most influential Christians in Rome, including members of the Praetorium, the headquarters of the Roman Army. The news that Peter was going to give a series of lectures on the life of Jesus drew a great crowd. Since it was the custom for public men to have their speeches recorded by shorthand writers, Mark arranged for shorthand writers of Greek to take down Peter’s words just as he uttered them, Greek being the common language of the inhabitants of Rome in that period.
On the appointed days Peter, with Mark in attendance, went to the rostrum armed with the scroll of Matthew and the new scroll prepared by Luke. That these two Gospels were originally inscribed on scrolls and not on codices is certain because they are each just about the length of an ordinary commercial scroll, about ten meters in length. A scroll was written on the inner side in narrow columns at right angles to its length. When rolled up it was tied with a cord and put into one of a series of pigeonholes that constituted the bookcase of a learned man. To handle such a scroll required both hands, the right hand unrolling and the left rolling up until the reader arrived at the particular column he wanted to refer to.
Peter’s intention was to refer only to those incidents in the life of Jesus of which he had been an eyewitness or could personally vouch for, and therefore he would say nothing about the birth and Resurrection narratives nor about the central section, in which Luke had gathered a collection of Jesus’ sayings. The simple fact that Peter was prepared to devote so much attention to this new work of Luke shows that he believed it to be worthy of adoption in its entirety by the Church.
My own Synopsis of the Four Gospels reveals (what is not clear in Huck-Greeven’s Synopsis or in Kurt Aland’s Synopsis Quattuor Evangelorium) that Peter, aided by Mark, saw his way to divide for his own immediate purpose the Gospels of Matthew and Luke lying before him into five parts, i.e. into five discourses (didaskalias) of 25/40 minutes each, as shown in the table above.
Further study of the text of Mark indicates that Peter delivered his reminiscences to his audience by word of mouth, checking with each Gospel in turn as he went along. By conscious prearrangement his disciple and secretary, Mark, handed him the scroll first of Matthew and then at the appropriate point exchanged it for the scroll of Luke, thus alternately following the text first of the one and then of the other, as it were “zigzagging” from one Gospel to the other.
Peter of course would have known the Gospel of Matthew almost, if not entirely, by heart, and therefore he tended to follow it more closely, but adding Luke’s extra details wherever he could. He also adopted Luke’s rearrangement of the early part of Matthew’s Galilean ministry (ch. 5-13). His treatment is also noteworthy for the introduction of many vivid little details which reveal him to be an eyewitness, such as Jesus’ being asleep on the cushion in the stern of the boat (Mark 4:38) and the figure of two thousand swine who drowned themselves in the lake (Mark 5:13).
At the end of his fifth discourse Peter had covered all the main stories Matthew and Luke had in common (except the centurion’s slave) from the baptism of John to his personal discovery of the empty tomb. There, at the conclusion of the earthly ministry of Jesus, he ended his discourses having exhausted his reminiscences, since Paul had had his own personal visions of the risen Christ and did not require Peter’s corroboration in this respect.
Those who had listened to Peter were delighted with everything they had heard and demanded from Mark copies of what he had said. The tradition relates that when Peter was shown the transcript of his discourses he “exerted no pressure either to forbid it or to promote it” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6:14:57). This indicates that Peter saw no particular advantage in promoting his own lectures since in Matthew there was already a complete Gospel available to his listeners. In the light of this public commendation Paul was able to publish the text of Luke’s Gospel in the churches of Achaia and Asia Minor without further delay or question.
From the above it is clear that Peter was personally responsible for the text of our Mark and that it was composed not only after the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but also with their aid. Despite the fact that it was highly prized by the Church as the personal reminiscences of Peter, it did not enjoy a universal circulation because it was not intended to supersede either Matthew or Luke. Indeed, it is rarely quoted by the early Fathers, and the first commentary on it dates only from the fifth century. We have seen that its process of composition was quite unlike that of Matthew or Luke and that Peter had no intention of making it into a third Gospel. Proof of this lies in the fact that he did not go on to describe the Resurrection, the key doctrine of the Christian faith. How then does one explain how the last twelve verses (Mark 16:9-20), which describe the Resurrection, got tacked onto the Gospel? The fact is, while about one-half of the best manuscripts record these verses, the other half either omit them altogether or give a much shorter ending. The most plausible explanation is that after Mark had satisfied the immediate demand of those who wanted copies of the five discourses, which ended at Mark 16:8, the matter rested there until after the martyrdom of Peter and Mark’s decision to go off to found the See of Alexandria (A.D 67-69).
As an act of piety to the memory of Peter, his father in God (1 Cor. 4:15), Mark then decided to publish an edition of the text that would include the necessary sequel to the passion and death of the Master. The attentive reader will discover for himself that these verses form a summary catalogue of references to the Resurrection stories of both Matthew and Luke and were most likely added by Mark himself to round off the final discourse. But as the private edition of Mark, which lacked these verses, had already been in circulation for some years, the textual tradition has remained divided to this day. The Council of Trent decided, though, that these last twelve verses are both authentic and part of the inspired text of the Gospel of Mark.
Johannine Supplement
The tradition of the Christian Church names John the son of Zebedee, the apostle and beloved disciple, as the fourth Evangelist, and there is no solid reason to reject it. John wrote in Greek like the other Evangelists and, in fact, knew all three synoptic Gospels, making use especially of Luke. Although the final chapter (ch. 21) seems to be an afterthought, the manuscript tradition shows that the author published the whole Gospel as one work. As to its date the first twenty chapters may have been written quite soon after the appearance of Luke and Mark, about 62-63, but the final chapter was not written until after the martyrdom of Peter in 65-67. The date of publication, probably from Ephesus, may have been at any time between then and the death of John at the end of the century.
The purpose of John was to supplement in several ways the account about the ministry of Jesus provided by the synoptic Gospels:
1. John thought it right to set his Gospel in an eternal perspective by commencing with the heavenly preexistence of the Son of God (John 1:1-18).
2. While Matthew assumes Jesus to be the Messiah (Matt. 1:1), he does not explain that Jesus asserted his claim at the commencement of his ministry at the cleansing of the Temple, because his plan was to place all the Jerusalem activities of Jesus in the last section of his Gospel (Matt. 21:28). John makes it clear that Jesus staked his claim in categorical terms (John 2:1-25) at the beginning.
3. John alone makes it clear that the public ministry of Jesus extended over two years (three Passovers) and possibly longer and that only part of it was spent in Galilee. The Galilean ministry was really an interlude forced upon Jesus by the hostility of the high priests. Nonetheless, John records that he made some four major visits to the Holy City to bring about the recognition of his Messiahship before the final visit that resulted in his passion and death.
4. John alone records that during those visits there took place a number of intimate dialogues that uniquely reveal the mind and heart of Jesus and his relationship to his Father and to the Holy Spirit.
To sum up, the author of the fourth Gospel reveals a knowledge of the milieu of Palestine at that time which none but a contemporary Jew could describe. Without the Gospel of John our knowledge of Jesus would have been greatly and irretrievably impoverished.
Conclusion
Matthew is the fundamental Gospel and the most important, but each was written and published in response to a particular need of the Church in a particular historical situation. The real importance of Mark lies in the fact that it was Peter’s guarantee that Luke was fit to be read beside Matthew in the churches of both Peter and Paul. Mark is therefore to be viewed as the bridge between Matthew and Luke, as an enabling document for Luke to be freely used in all the churches to which the authority of Peter, the chief eyewitness, extended. It stands furthermore as a recognition of the equality of the Gentiles in all the Churches. It can also be seen as incidentally harmonizing the various minor discrepancies between Matthew and Luke. It may also be looked on as judging Luke in relation to Matthew, e.g., it suggests by restoring the passage that Luke would have done well not to omit what is known to us as the Great Lucan Omission of Matthew 14:22-16:12.
We are now also able to see why the Universal Church from a very early date, perhaps as early as the beginning of the second century, placed Mark’s Gospel between those of Matthew and Luke. By doing so it signaled the Church’s acceptance of the tradition that the principal function of Mark was to introduce Luke to the Christian public and to confirm its equality with Matthew; the middle position of Mark had nothing to do with the chronological order of the Gospels. Luke was written before Mark was even thought of, but its publication was delayed until its merits had been approved by Peter, who actually spoke the words that Mark recorded for him and for the Church.
We may sum up the relationships between the Gospels as follows:
- Matthew was composed to meet the urgent needs of the primitive Church of Jerusalem (the Church set up by Peter), which needed a manifesto defending its integrity and its right to exist in the earliest days.
- Luke was written at the behest of Paul to meet the urgent need of his churches to have their own manifesto to prove their full equality with Jewish Christians.
- Mark was the result of the collaboration of Peter and Paul to make sure that the spiritual and doctrinal unity of the Universal Church was not impaired as a result of the appearance of Luke beside Matthew in the churches of both.
- The Gospel of John made it clear that the primary objective of Jesus throughout his public ministry was the winning over of the spiritual authorities in Jerusalem; at the same time it had the further purpose of re-adjusting the chronological sequence of his ministry which had been somewhat distorted by the literary sequence of the three synoptic Gospels.