[Greek: mellei], in the paragraph about
offences, [Greek: elthein ta skandala ...ouai...di hou erchetai].
These points might be easily multiplied as we go on; suffice it to
say that in the aggregate they seem to prove that the second
Gospel, in spite of its superior originality and adhesion to the
normal type, still does not entirely adhere to it or maintain its
primary character throughout. The theory that we have in the
second Gospel one of the primitive Synoptic documents is not
tenable.

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 tw