A couple of days ago, I received an email through the “contact us” page on our site. The subject heading was “Correction.” The writer was offering to correct something Brian Kelly had written in the article she found online (linked below). As her claims are based upon a quaint early-twentieth-century modernist Biblical theory, and as that theory is still promoted by many professionals — not unlike the similarly quaint nineteenth-century theory of macro-evolution — I thought her objection and my reply might be of general interest.
So, here is the email I received, with minor editing in brackets for clarity:
[In Reconciling the Gospel Accounts of Mary Magdalene at the Holy Sepulcher], Mark can’t “follow Matthew’s lead” as the writer suggests because Mark wrote the first Gospel. It was short because of the early persecution of Christians. Luke and Matthew added to Mark’s Gospel to create their own. Luke and Matthew also appear to use Q (from the German word “Quelle” for “source”), a compiled list of Jesus’ quotes. The different writers stress different things, and, as a result, we get the full picture. A similar observation could be made on the Easter narratives in the Four Gospels. In the literary forms of the ancient world, events weren’t necessarily presented in chronological order, neither did they mention every person who was there like we expect nowadays. In addition, they use metaphoric language to illustrate theological concepts, such as light and darkness.
Here is my response:
Dear X,
Pax Christi. We reject the Q theory, which is a modernist conjecture not based on actual evidence (and not attested to by ancient sources).
We also follow the traditional (early) dating of the Gospels with Saint Matthew’s being the first, written around AD 42 and Saint Mark’s coming next (around 45).
This article might be helpful to you:
https://onepeterfive.com/matthew-first-dates-gospels/
God bless and Mary keep you.
The piece I linked in my email to her is by an Indian traditionalist by the name of Nishant Xavier, whose writings I have admired in the past.
I must agree with one sentence in her email, and Brian would agree with it, too: “In the literary forms of the ancient world, events weren’t necessarily presented in chronological order, neither did they mention every person who was there like we expect nowadays.” Those two claims are true and must be accepted when comparing the four Gospels.
The Four Evangelists in a stained glass window of the Cologne Cathedral. Photo by Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
