SUMMARY ON MATTHEW'S AND LUKE'S TREATMENT OF THE MARCAN NARRATIVE
The manner in which Matthew and Luke have treated the Gospel of Mark has been brought out in the concrete and detailed examples that have been considered. No single motive, especially no one so-called "tendency" of either writer explains all his modifications of his Marcan source. Both Matthew and Luke omitted what seemed to them superfluous, as well as whatever appeared to them to conflict with the higher veneration for Jesus which had developed in their times. Luke especially omitted what would have no significance or interest for his Greek readers--disputes with the Pharisees, questions of Jewish law, and other Judaistic features. Both Matthew and Luke treated the actual words of Jesus, as recorded in Mark, with great respect. But the narrative, and in a less degree the parables, they felt free to work over as they would. Matthew shows much greater fidelity to his source than Luke. But both of them reconstructed sentences or whole stories, changed bad constructions into good ones, added what material they would, Matthew combining this with his Marcan material while Luke kept it for the most part distinct. Not every change which they made suggests its explanation to us, and we cannot be certain that in most of them we have the actual motive operating in the mind of the evangelist. But the method of their procedure, the kind of motives that influenced them, the degree of freedom which they took in the re-working of their material from Mark, and their habits with reference to the relation of this Marcan material to the other matter which they wished to combine with it, have been sufficiently established.[49]
HAVE WE THE GOSPEL OF MARK IN ITS ORIGINAL FORM?
The number of instances in which Matthew and Luke agree in their changes of Mark has given rise to the theory that Matthew and Luke did not use our Mark but an earlier form. A certain number of such agreements might be passed over as merely accidental. A certain number more might be assigned to assimilation. But if the agreements of Matthew and Luke in their corrections of Mark are so numerous and so striking as to be quite beyond accounting for in these ways, the assumption would be justified that Matthew and Luke used, not our copy of Mark, but one in which the text ran as it now does in those passages where Matthew and Luke agree against Mark.