MARK 2:10–11:
LUKE 5:24:
“But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he then said to the paralytic—“Rise, take up your bed and go home.”
“But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic—“I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home.”
“But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the man who was paralyzed—“I say to you, rise, take up your bed and go home.”
No wonder Tatian, the author of the Diatessaron, wanted to combine the gospels into a single text. In many passages the gospels already share a single text. But why? Forty percent of Mark’s gospel appears wholesale in Matthew—the same words in the same order—which suggests that an eyewitness like Matthew copied a large part of his testimony from another source. Why?
Biblical science provides a surprising answer: he didn’t, because the gospel attributed to Matthew was not really written by him. In fact, not one of our four gospels was written by an eyewitness.
Scholars have gathered together our oldest surviving gospel manuscripts and found that, in the most ancient texts, the four gospels are not attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They’re anonymous. Only in later copies do the names of their would-be authors appear, as if tradition or guesswork has added them. A close comparison of the texts shows how they were really written. One of them—the one we call Mark’s—is raw and unrefined, presenting a Jesus who sometimes becomes angry, sometimes performs magical incantations, and is considered by his own family to be out of his mind. Two of the other gospels—the ones we call Matthew’s and Luke’s—make these embarrassing details disappear. They also correct Mark’s small lapses of grammar and vocabulary. Matthew and Luke borrow whole passages from Mark, word for word, yet they systematically fix his weaknesses. This leads strongly to the conclusion that Matthew and Luke aren’t independent accounts. They are edited versions of Mark.
The gospel of Mark, in turn, is a patchwork of individual stories that seem to come from older, fragmentary sources. This is why most scholars believe—and most Catholic priests are taught in seminary—that our four gospels are not memoirs of the men whose names they now carry. They were assembled, decades after Jesus’ ministry, from older documents that recorded an oral tradition of stories about Jesus. Only at that earliest, deepest level of testimony would it be possible to find the actual memories of the disciples.