No doubt this is an embarrassing result.  The question is easy to ask and difficult to answer—­If our St. Mark does not represent the original form of the document, what does represent it?  The original document, if not quite like our Mark, must have been very nearly like it; but how did any writer come to reproduce a previous work with so little variation?  If he had simply copied or reproduced it without change, that would have been intelligible; if he had added freely to it, that also would have been intelligible:  but, as it is, he seems to have put in a touch here and made an erasure there on principles that it is difficult for us now to follow.  We are indeed here at the very crux of Synoptic criticism.

For our present purpose however it is not necessary that the question should be solved.  We have already obtained an answer on the two points raised by Papias.  The second Gospel is written in order; it is not an original document.  These two characteristics make it improbable that it is in its present shape the document to which Papias alludes.

Does his statement accord any better with the phenomena of the first Gospel?  He asserts that it was originally written in Hebrew, and that the large majority of modern critics deny to have been the case with our present Gospel.  Many of the quotations in it from the Old Testament are made directly from the Septuagint and not from the Hebrew.  There are turns of language which have the stamp of an original Greek idiom and could not have come in through translation.  But, without going into this question as to the original language of the first Gospel, a shorter method will be to ask whether it can have been an original document at all?  The work to which Papias referred clearly was such, but the very same investigation which shows that our present St. Mark was not original, tells with increased force against St. Matthew.  When a document exists dealing with the same subject-matter as two other documents, and those two other documents agree together and differ from it on as many as 944 separate points, there can be little doubt that in the great majority of those points it has deviated from the original, and that it is therefore secondary in character.  It is both secondary and secondary on a lower stage than St. Mark:  it has preserved the features of the original with a less amount of accuracy.  The points of the triple synopsis on which Matthew fails to receive verification are in all 944; those on which Mark fails to receive verification 334; or, in other words, the inaccuracies of Matthew are to those of Mark nearly as three to one.  In the case of Luke the proportion is still greater—­ as much as five to one.