The trinitarian formula in 28'^ need not be late. St. Paul, saj-s Harnack, did not create it (op. cit. p. 108 ; cf. also The Constittition and Law of the Church, Eng. tr., London, 1910, p. 259 ft'.).
The narratives peculiar to St. Matthew are, as Harnack recognizes, of a very archaic character.
If then we are right in dating the First Gospel about A.D. 50, we have a further limit for St. Mark. His Gospel must be prior to that date, and fall between 30 and 50. Now it is clear from the early chapters of Acts that St. Peter was prominent in Jerusalem as leader of the little society of disciples of Jesus the Messiah (the First Gospel reflects this rightly). There about the year 39 St. Paul stayed with him for a fortnight. But in 44 St. Peter was obliged to leave Jerusalem (Ac 12^^), and we do not find him there again until the
* InUrpreler, viii. [1911] 3711.
t W. Sanday, in Minutes qf Evidence before Royal Com. on Divorce, iii. 241.
Council some live years later (Ac 15). During this interval the Second Gospel may well have been written. The absence of Peter from Jerusalem would suggest the writing down of his teachings to compensate for the loss of his personal presence, and no one was so htted for this work as John Mark. If written at Jerusalem, the Gospel would naturally have been composed in Aramaic, and there is much in its style and language to suggest this. But St. Mark did not stay long in Jerusalem. He left with his cousin Barnabas for Antioch, and there (c. 44-47) it may liave been found desirable to translate the Gospel into Greek. When the controversy between the Churches of Antioch and Jerusaleru broke out a little later, the writer of the First Gospel took St. jNIark's work as his basis, and wrote a longer Gospel, inserting from another source much of the Lord's teaching as preserved at Jerusalem. The Second Gospel may quite well have been re-edited at Rome ; but if so, the changes made in it cannot have been many, for it is clear that the editor of the First Gospel had St. Mark before him much as we have it.
(c) The Third Gospel is generally dated c. A.D. 80 (see Moffatt). But if Harnack is right about the date of the Acts, the Gospel must of course be earlier, i.e. it must have been written somewhere between A.D. 47 and 60.*
2. Authorship.— (a) The tradition which assigns the Second Gospel to St. Mark is so strong that it requires some boldness to set it aside. It goes back as early as Papias (c. A.D. 140), who gives it on the authority of ' the Elder' (Eus. HE iii. 39), and it is now very widely accepted (cf., e.g., Peake, [Critical Introd. to JS'T, p. 121], Harnack, Moflatt, Bacon [The MaJcing of the NT, p. 159]).
(6) The majority of modern writers are also agreed in referring the First Gospel to an unknown writer. The reasons for this are the following. (1) The earliest witness, Papias or the Elder quoted by him, speaks of a work of St. Matthew which he describes as rd Xo7ia. This term does not describe aptly such a book as our First Gospel, but would more naturally apply to a collection of utterances or sayings (see Moflatt, p. 189). (2) Moreover, this work is said by the same witness to have been written in the Hebrew dialect ( = Aramaic ?). Now our First Gospel is certainly not a translation of an Aramaic or Hebrew work. It was written in Greek by a writer who used at least one Greek source, the Second Gospel, and who used also the Greek OT (see St. Matthew^ [ICC], pp. xiii fl'. Ixii).
But the inference is a natural one that the name of St. Matthew was given to the book because it largely embodies the work of that Apostle referred to by Papias. Modern criticism has therefore been largely absorbed in an endeavour to reconstruct this Mattiisean work. Foreign scholars for the most part refuse in any way to identify the dis- course source which has been used in the First Gospel Avith Papias' Matthsean Logia (Harnack, however, admits that it may well have been an apostolic work). They prefer to give it a name which will beg no questions as to its authorship, and call it simply Q { = Quelle, 'source'). Three main views as to its contents exist: (1) that of Bernhard Weiss, t ^vho assigns to it not only material found in both Mt. and Lk., or in one of them, but also a good deal that is common to all three Gospels, because he believes that St. ^lark borrowed from Q,J which therefore lay before
* For a refutation of the argument that the Gospel presup- poses the Fall of Jerusalem see Harnack, Beitrcige, iv. 81 ff.
t Die Qttellen der synoptifchen Uberlieferung, Leipzig, 1908.
J The question whether St. Mark used Q has been much dis- cussed recently. , F. Nicolardot (Les Procedes de redaction des Irois premiers Evang^lisies, Paris, 1908) thinks that he did so largely. B. H. Streeter (in Sanday, Oxford Studies in the
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GOSPELS
Mt. and Lk. in a double form — (i.) its original form, (ii.) as reproduced in Mk. (2) Harnack,* again, assigns to it only material found both in Mt. and Lk. and not in Mk. (cf. also Hawkins and Streeter in Sanday, Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem). One serious objection to this theory is that, since it is almost incredible that Mt. and Lk. should either have both embodied the whole of Q or both have selected the same sections from it, a reconstruction on these lines must give us an incomplete Q, and possibly one so incomplete that no sure inferences can be drawn from it as to the nature and character of the whole work. (3) Finally, Allen (Oxford Studies, p. 236 ff.) be- lieves that Q is best represented in the First Gospel. He thinks that if most of the sayings and dis- courses peculiar to Mt., and those common to Mt. and Lk., are grouped together, the result forms a collection of discourses of a very primitive char- acter which may well be the Matthaean work re- ferred to by Papias. He thinks that this work was not used directly by Lk., but that many sayings drawn from it passed through intermediate stages into St. Luke s Gospel, one of these inter- mediate stages being possibly the First Gospel.