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Matthew's Dislocations of Mark

Matthew Alone Is Responsible for Matthew's Dislocations

With Matthew in the middle, the dislocations that Matthew is responsible for are quite obvious:

In each case, Matthew combines the piece with new material he wishes to work in and legitimize, providing a context and background. Although five sections are moved, actually only four instances of Matthew's dislocation occur, since he treats two consecutive sections as a single piece:

Synoptic Chart with Matthew's Dislocations

Here we have laid out the basic relationship in a standard synoptic chart form:

Why Do We Know Matthew Made the Changes?

One alternate interpretation offered by those who prefer to hold to the priority of Matthew is as follows:

Mark himself could have edited Matthew (or the Hebrew/Aramaic Matthew), and is responsible for the appearance of dislocations in Greek Matthew. In this scenario, Luke then copied the Greek Mark, also copying the dislocations Mark made.

The other internal evidence does not seem to support this however: For one thing, what Matthew does is understandable, in that he wants to insert supplimental material, and so moves some things out of the way to insert four parables. He does not throw the Markan sections away however, but reinserts them elsewhere, as bridges and as a way of protecting and legitimizing other new material he is adding. All of this is the normal and expected procedure of a compiler and expander of the Gospel story.

The alternative, that Mark did the moving, seems preposterous (along with a massive amount of deleting!). We can give no intelligent account of what Mark's motives would be for deleting huge blocks of important teaching of Jesus (in any early version of Matthew) and other stories, only to save a few relatively mediocre incidents and reinsert them elsewhere.

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Luke's Dislocations
of Mark

Having a basic understanding of the components in this relationship (see previous article), we can put it all together to present the overview.

If our readers have followed us so far, they should be able to look at the big picture with some real understanding of the relation between Luke and Mark:

Mark and Luke: Overview

Lukan Rearrangements of Markan Material

For similar reasons, Luke's chronological rearrangements are equally plain to us, although they are more extensive than Matthew's when it comes to Mark:

Mark and Luke: Overview

Independant Chronological Rearrangements

The basic point is, when it comes to relocating material, neither editor has copied the other. This is not to say that neither was aware of the other (one was clearly aware of the other's work, as will become apparent when we examine the NON-Markan material). It is even possible that BOTH were aware of the other's work, if they shared notes or had meetings before beginning.

There appears to be NO place where Luke and Matthew agree with each other chronologically against Mark! This is highly significant.

(We can discount the trivial case of the Nativity material agreeing chronologically, since Mark shows no knowledge or interest in it. This is not a true case of 'disagreement' of Matt/Luke against Mark.)

But if Matthew for instance followed Luke's general scheme to produce a 'super-gospel' or a supplimentary gospel, then it was only on the general planning level, and not in the specific details.

This does not necessarily imply that Mark's chronology is the most accurate, or even that Luke and Matthew viewed it as only needing a few minor changes. Nor can it reflect any opinion between Luke and Matthew of each other's chronological improvements.

On the one hand, the most likely situation is that one gospel writer wrote first, preventing him from consulting the other, or having knowledge of any chronological changes. It is then only the behaviour of ONE of the two editors that needs explaining.

Secondly, both authors seem to have had more than mere chronology in mind when rearranging and editing Mark. They both felt a freedom if not a need to 'improve' Marks' grammar and diction, and even his story-telling performance. In many cases, we see both Luke and Matthew independantly, but similarly editing Mark's stories, removing the superfluous, the confusing, the clumsy, or the irrelevant, while often expanding the explanatory and 'teaching' matter, for clarity.

Both Luke and Matthew provide supplementary material, such as the Nativity sections, not with the intent to supplant or substitute, but rather to augment the gospel and preserve important traditional material.

Similarly, while Matthew manages to retell some 606 verses of Mark out of about 661 (dropping only 10%) he also manages to swell these up to a new total of about 660 verses (Matthew totals about 1,068 verses, with 400 of them non-Markan material). That is, Matthew has added over 60 verses of extra 'explanatory' material to Mark, even though he often drastically cuts down Mark's wordy accounts!

Yet the vastly different methods of insertion and arrangements of NON-Markan material between Matthew and Luke require a separate treatment all their own.

Mark's divine inspiration seems not to have extended superstitiously to the very chronological order or the mode of expression of Mark's account, at least in the eyes of the other two evangelists. Instead, both editors felt free to 'improve' as well as suppliment Mark for the service of their new and different audiences.

That is, different groups of believers and different generations seem to have required a different form of 'gospel' than the one Mark left us, or at least the needs of the church and posterity demanded that other material not covered by Mark be preserved and presented in a new format and order.

We should keep in mind that Luke also provided a powerful and important history of the early church for us in his second book, the Book of Acts, while Matthew seems to have successfully subsumed and syncretized various strains of teaching found among the letters that the early Apostles left behind.

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