ost certain that St. Luke
sometimes altered words in St. Mark's narrative simply because he
preferred a more elegant and less homely form of Greek. The textual
criticism of the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament also points to
the fact that for a few generations, when reminiscences of our Lord and
His apostles were still handed down, writers occasionally tried to make
room for these reminiscences when they copied the books of the New
Testament. A famous instance of this is John vii. 53-viii. 11, which
was almost certainly not written by St. John, and is almost certainly a
genuine story which the apostle knew, and which Christians afterwards
inserted in his Gospel. We believe, then, that _all the Synoptic
Gospels are influenced by oral tradition_. This is the second
important conclusion.

Thirdly, it seems that _Matt. and Luke, and perhaps Mark, made use of
written collections of Logia, or sayings of our Lord_. Evidence of one
such collection comes to us on the high authority of Papias. He says--

Matthew then composed the Logia in the Hebrew tongue, and every one
interpreted them as he was able.

{25}

An equally important statement which Papias makes with regard to the
composition of Mark, is made on the authority of John the Presbyter who
had been a personal follower of the Lord and was an elder contemporary
of Papias. It is at least possible that Papias derived his information
about Matt. from the same authority. It is almost inconceivable that
between the time of Papias and that of Irenaeus, whose life probably
overlapped that of Papias, the name of Matthew became wrongly affixed
to our first Gospel. We may therefore regard it as certain that in our
first Gospel is contained the book of sayings, which St. Matthew
himself wrote. In our third Gospel we find that St. Luke has inserted
much information with regard to our Lord's teaching which is apparently
derived from a version of the Logia. The order of the sayings is more
original in Luke than in Matt. The reason for this assertion is the
following:--

The two evangelists arrange the sayings of our Lord differently. In
more than two-thirds of the instances in which they seem to employ some
collection of _Logia_, they place their materials in a different
setting. It has often been remarked that St. Matthew places the
discourses of our Lord together in large blocks, while St. Luke records
them separately, and in many cases records the circums