14 November 2026

For a long time now, people have thought Mark’s Gospel was the first one to be written. Although Matthew is the first gospel to appear in the New Testament, there is a good argument to suggest that it wasn’t the first to be written.

If you were to write out the words of the first three gospels in separate columns, you would notice that there were a lot of similarities. It raises interesting questions. Why should Matthew, Mark and  Luke be so similar? And how can we explain the differences?

This has been called the Synoptic Problem. The term ‘synoptic’ comes from ‘synopsis’, a summary or a general view. Because they are so similar, scholars have thought that they were inter-related in some way.

Examining the similarities more closely, they discovered that where Matthew and Luke arrange their material is the same order, they are actually following the same sequence to be found in Mark! Furthermore, they each reproduce 50% of the actual words used by Mark.

They explain this in a theory. The authors of Matthew and Luke were both familiar with the content of Mark. In addition, there are 200 verses common to Matthew and Luke which are not in Mark. They suggest that Matthew and Luke had access to another source. It has never been found. It is cryptically referred to as Q!

Whilst this is only a theory, it is a plausible way to  explain striking similarities and differences among the first three gospels. If this theory was proved to be true, it would imply that Mark was the first gospel to be written. But who wrote it?