Ryan Leasure tells the story of how he came to suspect that Matthew used Luke

​Ryan Leasure has served as a pastor at Grace Bible Church in Moore, SC since 2015, and is a PhD student at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. 
 
"During my years of seminary training at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, I was taught by disciples of Robert Stein—a well-known proponent of the Two Document Hypothesis (2DH). After hearing their arguments for the 2DH, I embraced the theory myself. Not much changed for several years after seminary. After all, many of my favorite scholars held to the 2DH which was good enough for me. Then 2020 happened, and the world shut down because of COVID. For whatever reason, I took up Kurt Aland’s Synopsis of the Four Gospels and worked through it from beginning to end. As I did, I created a Word document for the hundreds of synopses in Aland’s book, color-coding each one to give myself a clearer picture of the similarities and differences in the Gospels. I performed this procedure in both English and Greek.
 
As I conducted this study, I made a few observations that caused me to reevaluate my position. First, I was struck by how many times Matthew and Luke agreed with each other against Mark in the Triple Tradition (TT). Prior to my study, I was not aware of the Minor Agreements. Yet, doing the synopsis opened my eyes to dozens of them—some of which seemed too “coincidental” to have happened by chance. How, for instance, could both Matthew and Luke have added the word διεστραμμένη (“twisted”) to Mark’s “O faithless generation” (Matt 17:17; Luke 9:41)? Or how could both Matthew and Luke have independently inserted the same phrase, “Who is it that struck you” during Jesus’s trial (Matt 26:68; Luke 22:64)? Changes like these ones undermined Matthew and Luke’s independence in my mind.
 
Second, I was struck by the Major Agreements between Matthew and Luke—passages that are frequently referred to as “Mark-Q overlaps.” Two in particular stood out to me. The Preaching of John the Baptist where both Matthew and Luke pick up Mark’s TT at the same place mid-sentence and finish it with the same Double Tradition (DT) material did not seem like it could have happened by mere coincidence. It looked as if one Evangelist had been influenced by the other. The Beelzebul Controversy also drew my attention. As was true with John’s preaching, both Matthew and Luke insert large chunks of DT material into Mark’s TT in the same places. Again, this seemed to undermine their independence. One such insertion is a thirty-seven-word paragraph (Matt 12:27-28; Luke 11:19-20) that is essentially word-for-word with one minor exception. Whereas Luke reports that Jesus casts out demons by the “finger of God,” Matthew claims it is by the “Spirit of God.” Having known Luke’s proclivities towards the role of the Spirit, it seemed unlikely to me that Luke would have changed Matthew’s “Spirit” to “finger.”
 
Thus, while this passage also confirmed for me that Matthew and Luke did not operate independently, it also got me thinking that perhaps Matthew made use of Luke. Only later would I discover that ancient compositional procedures support Matthew’s use of Luke in this passage rather than Luke’s use of Matthew.   
 
Third, I was struck by how Matthew appears to be the most “developed” of the three Synoptics. For instance, Matthew is the only Synoptic to make an explicit Trinitarian reference (Matt 28:19). He is the only one to give instructions to the church (Matt 18:15-20). He alone gives the exception clause with respect to divorce (Matt 19:9). Twice, he calls Jesus “Lord” when Mark calls him “Teacher” and Luke calls him “Master” (e.g., Calming of the Storm and the Transfiguration). This progressive development from “Teacher” to “Master” to “Lord” made the most sense in my mind compared to alternative orderings. And Matthew is the only one to contain explicit “fulfillment formulas,” despite the other Evangelists agreeing that Jesus fulfilled the Jewish Scriptures.
 
One clear example of Matthew’s development that jumped out at me was the Sign of Jonah pericope. In Mark 8:12, Jesus says that “no sign will be given to this generation.” In Luke 11:29-30, Jesus says “no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation.” In Matthew 12:39-40, however, Jesus remarks, “no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” As I compared these passages, it struck me that both Matthew and Luke added “except the sign of Jonah” to Mark’s text. Yet, Matthew’s explicit reference to the resurrection makes better sense if he used Luke as a source rather than Luke’s omission of the resurrection if he had used Matthew.
 
Fourth, I was struck by the comparison between Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (SoM) and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain (SoP). It was very difficult for me to see that Luke would have dismantled the SoM in the way that he did if he had used Matthew. The reverse scenario seemed far more likely to me. Matthew used Luke’s SoP as a core text, and then filled it out with other complementary materials. As I continued to study Matthew’s discourses further, I realized that he adopted a similar procedure with his other four discourses as well. In each instance, he had taken a section from Mark as his core and then filled it out with other topically-related materials.
 
After working through Aland and being persuaded that Matthew probably used both Mark and Luke, I began reading literature on the Synoptic Problem (SP). Initially, as I read through secondary and tertiary sources, I could not find anyone who agreed with my view. In fact, most did not even acknowledge it as a possibility. This omission perplexed me as it seemed like such a simple, straight-forward solution. So far as I knew, the view did not even have a name. Only later would I learn that it was known as the Matthean Posteriority Hypothesis (MPH).
 
No introduction to the Gospels that I had read acknowledged it as a possibility. Each one dealt with the 2DH, the Farrer Hypothesis (FH), the Griesbach Hypothesis (GH), and occasionally the Augustinian Hypothesis. I reread Stein’s Studying the Synoptic Gospels and found that he devoted only one sentence to the MPH. He wrote that it “is seldom argued today and will not be discussed at length” (p. 99). I found something similar in Goodacre’s The Synoptic Problem. He wrote that the MPH “is rarely put forward by sensible scholars and will not be considered here” (p. 109). I read The Synoptic Problem: Four Views edited by Porter and Dyer and, again, discovered that it was not one of the four major views. Yet that book further confirmed for me that the MPH was the best solution to the Synoptic Problem. But why was this view ignored as a viable option? After reading several books and articles, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something must be wrong with the theory since no one took the time to discuss it.
 
Eventually, I reached out to Mark Goodacre and asked him about the possibility of the MPH. That’s when he pointed me to Alan Garrow’s website. After perusing his website and watching his videos, I reached out to Alan and discovered that he and others had already been “beating the drum” for the MPH. I was introduced to other MPH scholars and received confirmation that the MPH is not an “out there” theory. It is one that sensible scholars have been engaging with for decades."

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