A more general reason against the assumption of an Ur-Marcus in the hands of Matthew and Luke is the comparatively small number and importance of their agreements against Mark, as compared with the very large number of the deviations in which they do not agree, and as compared also with the vastly greater number of instances in which both Matthew and Luke follow Mark faithfully. In other words, if Ur-Marcus differed from our Mark only in those words and phrases in which Matthew and Luke agree against our Mark, then Ur-Marcus was at the most not a different Mark from ours, but only a different copy or text of our Mark. The assumption of an Ur-Marcus was a natural one for the explanation of the phenomena in question; but it is a cumbersome hypothesis, and insecure; further study seems to discredit it. Matthew and Luke used our Mark, not another.
It has often been suggested that the Marcan material covered by the "great omission" of Luke (Mk vi, 45-viii, 26) was absent from the copy of Mark used by Luke, tho present in that used by Matthew. Reasons for Luke's omission of this long Marcan section have been given, and seem sufficient without the assumption of its absence from Luke's copy of Mark. But the theory of its absence has also important items directly against it. The section has the general Marcan characteristics. Mark has one hundred and forty-one historic presents; eighteen of them are in this section. He uses [Greek: euthys] thirty-four times, five in this section; [Greek: palin] twenty-six times, five in this section. He is partial to the imperfects [Greek: elegen] and [Greek: elegon], which he uses fifty times (against Matthew's twenty-three and Luke's nine), six times in this section. The same habit of duplicate expression which occurs in other parts of his Gospel appears here. [Greek: ho estin] in the sense of "i.e.," peculiar to Mark among the evangelists, appears here twice (four times elsewhere in the Gospel). Seven out of the nine sections begin with [Greek: kai]. The section seems to be too homogeneous with the rest of the book to be from a different hand.[68]
The foregoing considerations seem to render the hypothesis of Ur-Marcus superfluous. The phenomena for which it was designed to account are more easily and naturally explained by other suppositions.