Concerning The Three Gospels 13

on an older written source, whose accounts of evangelic incidents are reproduced in a more faithful manner in the companion Gospels, and especially in Matthew. This source he takes to be the Logia of the apostle Matthew. It follows from this, of course, that the Logia was not a mere collection of sayings, but a book containing histories as well, such narratives, ¢.g., as those relating to the palsied man, the feeding of the 5000, and the blind man at Jericho. The pheno- mena on which Weiss rests his case are of two kinds. One group consists of minute agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark in narratives common to the three, as, 6.5., in the use of the words ἰδού and ἐπὶ κλίνης in the opening sentence of the story of the palsied man. The inference is that these phrases are taken from the Logia, implying of course that the story was there for those who chose to use it. The other group consists of sayings of Jesus found in Mark’s Gospel, and reproduced also in Matthew and Luke in nearly identical form, yet not taken, it is held, from Mark, but from the Logia. The contention is that the close similarity can be accounted for only by the assumption that Mark, as well as his brother evangelists, took the words from the Logia. An instance in point may be found in the respective accounts of the reply of Jesus to the charge of being in league with Beelzebub. Wendt dissents from the inference of Weiss in but.) classes of cases. The one group of facts he explains by assuming that Luke had access to the first canonical gospel; in the second group he sees simply accidental correspondences between independent traditions preserved respec- tively in the Logia and in Mark.}