friend of sinners.  Moreover, we owe chiefly to Luke our knowledge of him as a man of prayer and as subject to repeated temptation.  An artificial exaltation of Christ, such as is often attributed to the later apostolic thought, would tend to reduce, not multiply, such evidences of human dependence on God.  This fact increases our confidence in the accuracy of Luke’s picture.  The gospel is very full of comfort to those under the pressure of poverty, and of rebuke to unbelieving wealth, though the parable of the Unjust Steward and story of Zacchaeus show that it does not exalt poverty for its own sake.  If our first gospel pictures Jesus as the fulfilment of God’s promises to his people, and Mark, as the man of power at work before our very eyes, astonishing the multitude while winning the few, Luke sets before us the Lord ministering with divine compassion to men subject to like temptations with himself, though, unlike them, he knew no sin.

26.  The first three gospels, differing as they do in point of view and aim, present essentially one picture of the ministry of Jesus; for they agree concerning the locality and progress of his Messianic work, and the form and contents of his teaching, showing, in fact, verbal identity in many parts of their narrative.  For this reason they are commonly known as the Synoptic Gospels.  Yet these gospels exhibit differences as remarkable as their likenesses.  They differ perplexingly in the order in which they arrange some of the events in Jesus’ life.  Which of them should be given preference in constructing a harmonious picture of his ministry?  They often agree to the letter in their report of deeds or words of Jesus, yet from beginning to end remarkable verbal differences stand side by side with remarkable verbal identities.  Some of the identities of language suggest irresistibly that the evangelists have used, at least in part, the same previously existing written record.  One of the clearest evidences of this is found in the introduction, at the same place in the parallel accounts, of the parenthesis “then saith he to the sick of the palsy” which interrupts the words of Jesus in the cure of the paralytic (Mark ii. 10; Matt. ix. 6; Luke v. 24).  When the three gospels are carefully compared it appears that Mark contains very little that is not found in Matthew and Luke, and that, with one or two exceptions, Luke presents in Mark’s order the matter that he has in common with the second gospel.  The same is also true of the relation between the latter part of the Gospel of Matthew (Matt. xiv. 1 to the end) and the parallel portion of Mark; while the comparison of Matthew’s arrangement of his earlier half with Mark suggests that the order in the first gospel has been determined by other than chronological considerations.  In a sense, therefore, we may say that the Gospel of Mark reveals the chronological framework on which all three of these gospels are constructed.  Comparison discloses further the interesting fact that the matter which Matthew and Luke have in common, after subtracting their parallels to Mark, consists almost entirely of teachings and addresses.  Each gospel, however, has some matter peculiar to itself.