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Gospel
Christ
Tradition
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
Interpretation
From ‘Notes on the Formation of the Gospels’,
by John Wijngaards;
published in Background to the Gospels
(Bangalore & Ann Arbor 1981)
and Together in My Name (London
1991).
It is crucial to understand that a Gospel like Matthew’s was not
written from first to last by some author in his or her own style, as books are
written in our own time. Rather, Matthew’s Gospel is a sequence of
traditional texts strung together according to the plan of the evangelist.
Where did these traditional texts come from? What sources were used for
writing the Gospel?
Though the final author moulded the material much more thoroughly than
Mark, like Mark Matthew relied heavily on the traditions available to himself
and, by and large, passed them on virtually untouched. Matthew relied mainly on
two traditional sources which have been reconstructed by scholars:
- Ur-Mark. A collection of traditions focussing on what Jesus
did: his miracles, disputes with Pharisees, his journeys,
and-so-on.
- Quelle (German for Source). A collection of Jesus’
sayings, known to both Matthew and Luke.
Matthew’s dependence on the two main sources of tradition can be
seen best in these comparative tables.
-
Matthew’s Gospel in the original Greek has a total of 18.513
words.
Of these words, 7.678 words ( 40% ) are in passages common to
Matthew, Mark and Luke together. That is: they are from passages that derive
from Urmark.
Further: 4.923 words (25%) are in passages which Matthew and Luke
have in parallel. They go back to Quelle. The passages proper to Matthew count
5.917 words (35%).
-
To put the same in a different way: Matthew’s Gospel has
(roughly calculated) a total of 196 distinct passages.
Parallel passages which Matthew shares with both Mark and Luke
amount to, give and take, 100 passages. These derive from Urmark.
Parallel passages Matthew shares with Luke number 49 passages. They
come from Quelle.
Proper to Matthew: about 47 passages.
John Wijngaards
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