History
Before the 18th century, the belief of many, including the Church Fathers Papias (c. 60-130), Irenaeus (c. 130-200), Origen (c. 185-254), Eusebius (c. 260-340) Jerome (c. 340-420), and Augustine of Hippo (c. 354-430), had been that Matthew was the first gospel to be written. Therefore, Matthew is the first gospel to appear in the chronological order of the four gospels in the Second, or New Testament. This traditional view of gospel origins, however, began to be challenged in the late 18th century, when Gottlob Christian Storr (1786) proposed that Mark was the first to be written.
Storr's idea met with little acceptance at the time, with most scholars favoring either Matthean priority, under the traditional Augustinian hypothesis, or the Griesbach hypothesis, or a fragmentary theory. In the fragmentary theory, it was believed that stories about Jesus were recorded in several smaller documents and notebooks and combined by the evangelists to create the synoptic gospels.
Working within the fragmentary theory, Karl Lachmann (1835) compared the synoptic gospels in pairs and noted that while Matthew frequently agreed with Mark against Luke in the order of passages and Luke agreed frequently with Mark against Matthew, Matthew and Luke rarely agreed with each other against Mark. Lachmann inferred from this that Mark best preserved a relatively fixed order of episodes in Jesus's ministry.
In 1838, two theologians, Christian Gottlob Wilke and Christian Hermann Weisse, independently extended Lachmann's reasoning to conclude that Mark not only best represented Matthew and Luke's source but also that Mark was Matthew and Luke's source. Their ideas were not immediately accepted, but Heinrich Julius Holtzmann's endorsement in 1863 of a qualified form of Markan priority won general favor and is still the dominant hypothesis today.
Nevertheless, this line of reasoning is now widely seen as inconclusive. In particular, it is now accepted that although the contents of Mark lie logically between Matthew and Luke, this fact on its own has no definite chronological consequences, although combined with other facts could still support Markan priority.
Read more about this topic: Markan Priority
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