Where did Matthew and Mark get their ideas?

Answer 1

If by 'get their ideas' you mean their perspective or point of view they present in their Gospels, it was probably from their family upbringing and life experiences as most all of us develop. Yet, all Scripture is inspired by God and may reflect the author's background but not his/her interpretation of Scripture - as they are led by the Holy Spirit. While it is fact that neither Gospel writer is explicitly mentioned, an open minded reader could see clues from the account that would help narrow down the individual.

Take Matthew's work, this author knew the lay of the land of Palestine well, was familiar with Jewish history, customs, ideas, and classes of people. Was well acquainted with the Old Testament and the terminology used in this work suggest the author was a Palestinian Jew. This particular Gospel contains more references to money than any of the other 3. Matthew was from Capernaum and this village is given special attention in this Gospel. There are other details when read closely that would point to Jesus' Apostle Matthew as the author. He presents the biography of Jesus and proves to the Jewish readers that Jesus is the Messiah, the promised King of Israel.

Now Mark's work, this author writes constantly in the present tense making it action packed for the reader and suggest an on the spot witness to these events. This is especially true since Mark's considerable details contain the emotional responses of Jesus and others, the size and reaction of the crowds, and the appearance of men and women like the account of the Gardarene demonaic where Mark uses 20 verses to explain the scene while Luke uses just 14 and Matthew just 7. Yet with all this detail, Mark's is the most concise of the Gospels omitting the longer discourses of Jesus. Mark presents a miracle-working Jesus, not the teaching Jesus.

The Scripture is the inspired Word of God - God Breathed - given to mankind as a guide or way of living as God designed.

Answer 2

A:

It is quite clear that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were substantially based on Mark's Gospel, with further sayings material taken from the hypothetical 'Q' document. Mark and Luke seems to have used Paul's Epistles. Mark's Gospel contains material possibly based on Greek mythology.

All the gospels, but particularly the synoptic gospels, took ideas and material from the Old Testament, with the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah being favourite sources. The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) is modelled on Hannah's Prayer (1 Samuel 2:1-10), with individual verses found in various locations in the Old Testament. Scholars say that even if Luke did not compose the Magnificat himself, he adopted it because he found its theology compatible with his own.

Answer 3

The first thing to recognise is that the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark were not eyewitnesses to the events portrayed, or even contemporaries of Jesus. The gospels were originally anonymous and were only attributed to the apostles whose names they now bear later in the second century. Mark's Gospel is believed to have been written approximately 70 CE and Matthew's Gospel in the eighties of the first century.

Scholars have demonstrated that Matthew and Luke were largely based on Mark's Gospel, with Matthew containing some 600 of the 666 verses in Mark, often in exactly the same words in the original Greek language. Matthew and Luke also relied on the hypothetical 'Q' document for further sayings attributed to Jesus, although each had to define a context for many of those sayings, as Q does not provide a context. Scholars do not know where the author of Matthew obtained the information for his nativity story, but say he was clearly drawing parallels between Moses and Jesus. In fact, Matthew's Gospel makes more use of the Old Testament than any of the other gospels, and is known to have used the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew originals. Mark's Gospel originally ended at verse 16:8, with the young man telling the women that Jesus had risen and the fled in teror, telling no one. Without any guide from Mark, the authors of the other three gospels had to write their own stories about the appearances of therisen Jesus, and Matthew's account differs markedly from that which appears in Luke and from the 'Long Ending' that was added to Mark much later.

Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament) says that Mark seems to depend on traditions (and perhaps already shaped sources) received in Greek. Parallels have been detected between Mark and Paul's letter to the Romans and 1 Corinthians, and it could be that Mark's author wove his gospel around various key people (principally James, Peter and John) and key events that he found in Paul's epistles. Dennis R. MacDonald (The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark) also sees close parallels between the Gospel and Homers epics, which he believes Mark's author used as sources for many gospel passages. That Mark's Gospel would not have been a literally true account of the life or crucifixion of Jesus can be seen by the sophisticated parallel and chiastic structures in the Gospel as a whole, with a secondary structure around the last twenty-four hours.