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External Evidence Matthew is almost unanimously testified as the oldest gospel by the church fathers. Clement of Alexandria even supported both Matthew and Luke as before Mark. This is significant because Mark is said to have founded the Coptic branch of Christianity in Alexandria, Egypt. If any place were to argue for Markan priority, Egypt would be ...

Abstract The primary argument for Markian priority is the strong evidence that both Luke and Matthew redacted Mark's material. If Mark were a summary of Matthew, we would expect it to smooth out any rough edges. However the reverse is true. In the triple tradition, it's invariably Mark that has the rough edges that are smoothed out by Luke and Matthew. ...

Off the top of my head, the biggest three that I can remember are: Length: Mark is the shortest of all of the Synoptic Gospels. As the theory goes, future authors would be more likely to add information that was omitted by Mark Overlap: Mark overlaps with both Matthew and Luke more significantly than Matthew and Luke overlap with each other. Detail: The ...

I am less fluent in this one (since I lean toward Markan priority) but this one does have a couple of strengths: It has a substantial amount of tradition behind it. Many early Church fathers subscribed to Matthean priority It does not rely on a theoretical, as-of-yet-undiscovered Q document.

Abstract Q is an entirely theoretical document that nevertheless seems likely to have existed if Mark was the the first written Gospel. It's long been known that Matthew, Mark, and Luke share significant material and we know from internal evidence that Luke incorporated a variety of sources: Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of ...

Markan priority is an answer to the question what is the precise literary relationship between Matthew, Mark and Luke, also known as the Synoptic problem. A close comparison of the first three gospels suggests that one or more of these writers had one or more of the other gospels before them as they wrote. This is more than a common oral tradition. ...

The Synoptics are very similar to each other, and it's almost universally agreed that this similarity is such that there had to be a literary relationship between them. That is, in many places the authors had access to one of the other Gospels, or that the authors of two gospels had a common written source. There are two basic patterns which any solution ...