None of the synoptic evangelists, whether Matthew, Mark, or Luke, made direct use of another’s final gospel. Apart from dicta of Jesus standardized in oral catechesis, verbal overlaps occur only in small patches. In a given passage, any of the three may conserve the most primitive form of words. Each contains numerous pieces of singular content and of edits, all of which are absent from both of the others, a state of affairs that cannot be due to coincidental omission had the others used it as a source. These phenomena confirm the patristic view that the gospel writers worked independently of one another.

Canonical Matthew is a second, revised, and amplified edition of Hebrew Ur-Matthew. Though written in a clean Greek style more native than Mark’s in many places where Mark has Semitisms, it introduces scores of Semitisms of its own where Mark has none. Prepared to meet the exigencies of the exploding Christian mission to Jews in the Diaspora, it aims for encyclopedic coverage of Jesus’s teachings and actions.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke were likely written in the 60s, when leading apostles were dying off just as the expanding gentile mission urgently needed reference matter on Jesus. Luke based his account on oral histories taken with care from many eyewitnesses over decades. Most of his gospel was planned or in first draft around AD 60 before he incorporated parts of a source akin to Mark.

Eusebius preserved valuable traditions of Papias going back to St. John concerning the origins of the gospels of Mark and of Matthew. Before writing the Greek gospels we have, between AD 42 and 46, Mark made an unordered notebook of Peter’s memoirs about Jesus, and Matthew arranged Jesus’s words and deeds into an integrated narrative in Hebrew. These drafts were for private circulation among close acquaintances and were never published. Matthew’s could have served as a memory prop for the apostles’ oral deliveries in missionary situations. It probably informed the triple tradition behind the synoptic gospels.

Of the four main approaches to the synoptic problem among critics – that the evangelists tapped into oral traditions about Jesus, or drew from many written fragments, or used a common exemplar, or modified each other’s work – the first three approaches find solid support in antiquity, yet, ironically, the fourth approach dominates gospels research without producing any consensus. The solution will be complex, coordinating the first three.

In comparison with Matthew and Luke, Mark’s gospel has less supplementary matter beyond what is in the triple tradition, and its order of pericopes is virtually always paralleled in one or the other. It is rich in Semitisms and in features of translation from Hebrew or Aramaic to Greek. It is our best clue to the contents of Hebrew Ur-Matthew. Around a fifth of Mark’s material is unique and looks like reminiscences that Peter could have dashed into oral presentations about Jesus.

Testimonies about Jesus by known individuals were the raw materials of the gospels. Q consists of just over 200 verses, mostly sayings of Jesus, found in Matthew and in Luke but not in Mark, stemming from Jesus’s preaching tours around Galilee. This material manifests traits of oral transmission. It crystallized into fixed units, agglomerates, and written fragments through many retellings against the backdrop of communal memory of the outline of Jesus’s public ministry. It echoes themes of Mark.