(avg. read time: 12–24 mins.)
As I have mentioned previously, I will not be arguing for a particular solution to the Synoptic Puzzle in my planned Gospel synopsis commentary, and so I am not particularly interested in supporting or undermining the most popular view among scholars that Mark was the first Gospel written. Even so, today I am examining an argument for Markan priority that is based on “editorial fatigue.” This notion was developed and popularized by (though not originated by) Mark Goodacre in his 1998 article for New Testament Studies, “Fatigue in the Synoptics.” He describes the issue in question as follows:
Editorial fatigue is a phenomenon that will inevitably occur when a writer is heavily dependent on another’s work. In telling the same story as his predecessor, a writer makes changes in the early stages which he is unable to sustain throughout. Like continuity errors in film and television, examples of fatigue will be unconscious mistakes, small errors of detail which naturally arise in the course of constructing a narrative. They are interesting because they can betray an author’s hand, most particularly in revealing to us the identity of his sources. (46)
The examples he cites that he finds to be rather clear indicators in this regard are: Matt 14:1–12 // Mark 6:14–29; Matt 8:1–4 // Mark 1:40–45; Matt 12:46–50 // Mark 3:31–35; Luke 8:4–15 // Mark 4:1–20; Luke 5:17–26 // Mark 2:1–12; Luke 9:10–17 // Mark 6:30–44. He also cites other examples that he thinks demonstrate Luke’s use of Matthew, but we will not be considering those here. As we go text-by-text, we will first provide the synopsis of the Gospel parallels derived from my commentary. Then we will evaluate what Goodacre says about each text.
I have discussed the opening verses of this story elsewhere. As one can see, there are varying levels of similarity in different sections of the text. Goodacre identifies two apparent “seams” here as requiring explanation by editorial fatigue. One, Matthew refers to Herod as “the tetrarch” in 14:1, as an apparent correction to Mark as a description that is more technically precise (46), but he does not keep consistent with this, as fatigue strikes 116 words later and he refers to Herod as “king” like Mark has done consistently (6:14, 22, 25, 26, 27). Two, Matthew supposedly drops from his source of Mark that Herodias wanted to kill John but was prevented by Herod (6:19–20), but dropping this creates an inconsistency with Matthew saying Herod wanted to kill him (14:5) and then later saying that he was grieved to be asked to behead John (14:9), as is consistent with Mark (46–47), but Matthew must have been too fatigued to notice.
As to the general claim of fatigue, I find it a curious explanation for an apparent incongruity. The way Goodacre describes what is at issue implies that when changes are made they would be expected at the start of a pericope, but that they would not be maintained as fatigue with the process sets in. But this naturally raises questions about the process of composition. Does the energy level of the author reset with each new pericope? And why is it that often? Is the imagined process that they only wrote pericope-by-pericope each day? Or if the author wrote more than one a day, why would he “reset” on the next pericope after the fatigue set in later in the previous pericope? Is that when he took a coffee break? Such an explanation might make more sense if the supposition was that editorial incongruities clustered later in the overall texts of the Gospels as one author using another source could apparently not remain consistent with editorial habits adopted earlier in the book. But that is not what is being suggested in this analysis.
Indeed, what is practically being suggested here for this text? Did Matthew have a manuscript of Mark at hand? If so, why are there so many differences, and why do they vary so much in kind, extent, and location? If one is using the other as a source, and there are so many differences, could it not be that one is working from notes and memory, and was clearly not concerned with reproduction plus edits (so that one cannot simply explain the text on such bases)? And if fatigue set in for either item, why does Matthew, on this account, continue to make edits in and after the sentence in vv. 9–10 that indicate the claims of fatigue have been exaggerated (again, according to this account)?
As to the first difference, is it a problem of incongruity that Matthew uses “the tetrarch” in 14:1 and then changes the term 116 words later, which can only be explained by fatigue? If so, why does Matthew get his energy back enough to leave out the reference to “the king” from his parallel of Mark 6:27? As a matter of fact, there appear to be a few reasons, more than one of which could account for this variation. One, unlike Mark, Matthew (as well as Luke in his parallel text) has referred to more than one Herod, so it works here to disambiguate who this Herod is, rather than refer to him as a king outright, which Matthew had used to describe Herod Antipas’s father, Herod the Great (Matt 2:1, 3, 9; cf. Luke 1:5). Two, Mark may have a particular reason for preferring to call Herod “king” other than perceived lack of accuracy (that Matthew, by this theory, sought to correct before fatigue set in), but it could just as well be that both Matthew and Mark use the term in an informal sense to refer to a ruler rather than a “client king” per se (cf. Matt 10:18; 17:25; Mark 13:9; Luke 21:12; 22:25; Acts 9:15), since kings could rule over as little as a city or as much as a nation or empire, and Herod was in between as a tetrarch. Three, for whatever reason, in no case in ancient literature where we find an individual referred to by “X the tetrarch” do we then find a person referred to more simply as “the tetrarch” as the subject of a sentence. It is, of course, used in a generic title sense in multiple texts (e.g., Asclepiodotus, Tactics 2.8; Strabo, Geography 12.5.1; Plutarch, Caesar 50; Antony 56; 58; Arrian, Tactics 10.1; Aelian, Tactics 10.4), but never in the way that Matthew would have needed to use it in 14:9 to refer in abbreviated fashion to Herod as “the tetrarch” as the subject of the sentence.
As to the second matter, is it true that Matthew’s differences in telling the story make Herod’s motivation unintelligible because he was relying on a source that had information that he did not provide in his version? No. First, while the extra commentary Mark provides about Herodias is not featured in Matthew’s version, Matthew makes quite clear that Herodias wanted to kill John and ultimately engineered his death (14:6–8). He even includes a note that is not in Mark, supposedly after the fatigue had set in, of how Herodias’s daughter herself brought the head of John to her mother after it was presented to her (14:11), in case the reader could somehow think that it was “Herod and not Herodias who wants him killed” (46). Second, Herod’s grief makes sense on either account because what gets in the way of Herodias’s or Herod’s desire to kill John is his fear, whether of John because he was a righteous and holy man (Mark 6:20), or, consequently, because the masses held him to be a prophet (Matt 14:5). The fact that Matthew does not include Mark’s additional note about Herod being perplexed by John’s speech but still liking to listen to him does not cause a problem for accounting for his motivation either, since on either account (and on Luke’s account) Herod still imprisoned him because of what he was saying against him and Herodias. It is not nonsensical for Herod himself to want to kill John and still be grieved to do it as it is not uncommon for people to have conflicting desires. On a more mundane level, consider the conflicting desires of not wanting to go to work, but also wanting to go to work because of what would happen if you did not. In this case, the conflicting desire is of wanting to carry out a personal vendetta, but also not wanting to do so because of what he feared would happen if he did, which would conflict with his desire to keep the peace in his realm and not risk being removed from power because of trouble he could cause. Third, in both cases, Herod is ultimately forced into doing what he does because of a rash promise he makes before witnesses, who could also cause trouble for him if he did not keep his word (which is to say nothing of the trouble he might have feared from other powers if he did not keep his word).
While I am not here arguing for Matthean priority, one must wonder why the claims about the features of the text here are not reversible. That is, why is it the case that Mark could not be “fixing” Matthew here? I imagine that Goodacre and others would point to broader arguments for Markan priority, but that would only illustrate the weakness of this argument from editorial fatigue on its own. As it is, this text could just as well be evidence of Mark “correcting” Matthew and being more consistent about it. Overall, where Mark parallels Matthew, his text is longer than Matthew’s (10,984 words to 10,767 words), as it is here, and in cases like this it could be argued that he is motivated to provide more detail. An incomplete list of other such examples includes: Matt 8:28–34 // Mark 5:1–20; Matt 9:1–8 // Mark 2:1–12; Matt 9:18–26 // Mark 5:21–43; Matt 14:13b–21 // Mark 6:32–44; Matt 15:32–39 // Mark 8:1–10; Matt 17:14–21 // Mark 9:14–29. And his note about Herodias’s desire to kill John while omitting reference to the same from Herod could be his attempt to make the characterization more straightforward. I do not agree with this account, but it is logically coherent with how Goodacre has argued for his view while reaching an opposite conclusion.
The Matthean text is rather highly similar to the Markan text here. Indeed, its degree of similarity to Mark would be one of the highest degrees of similarity of parallels between Matthew and Mark if 8:1 was not included in the calculation, which has zero parallel with Mark. And yet it is this verse that Goodacre insists creates a conflict with Mark: “Here, just after the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5–7), Matthew is returning to triple tradition material. He resets the scene by introducing, as often, ‘many crowds’ (8.1)” (47). That is, while both texts feature the instruction for the ex-leper not to tell anyone else but to go directly to the priest, Matthew creates a conflict by his remark about the many crowds following Jesus, as Goodacre assumes that they witnessed this miracle (47–48).
If we assume that the crowds are present for the miracle, that is not a source of conflict or incoherence that indicates editorial fatigue. Indeed, from Mark’s narration it is just as possible to infer that others (besides Jesus’s disciples) witnessed the healing of the leper, since immediately before this Mark had mentioned that Jesus was going throughout Galilee to the synagogues preaching and casting out demons (1:39). This is immediately followed by the opening here in which a leper came to Jesus. In fact, it is by no means contradictory to Mark’s account that a crowd could be present for a miracle and Jesus would still order that nothing be said about it, as one can see from the story of Mark 7:31–37.
But as a matter of fact, the text of Matthew nowhere indicates that the crowds witnessed the miracle. Unlike Mark and Luke, Matthew simply concludes the episode here, whereas the other two authors go on to speak of how the report spread and crowds came to him. But it is not clear if Matthew’s beginning is also so different from Mark’s as his ending point is. What I mean to say is that it may be that Matt 8:1 is supposed to wrap up the narration of the Sermon on the Mount or to serve as a transition away rather than to be a framing device for introducing this story. I present it here because it is so frequently included as part of the parallel, but the placement is debatable. In any case, there is no apparent conflict here that needs to be explained by Matthew introducing incoherence to a story he derives from a source and forgetting about accounting for it later in this story because he was hit with a severe case of fatigue after writing another fifty-two words that he neglected to proofread.
One other point I need to note here is this comment from Goodacre: “That Matthew is involved in docile reproduction here is all the more plausible given the little stress in his Gospel on the secrecy theme that is so prominent a feature of Mark” (48). Maybe this just illustrates how different our mindsets are, but I would think the fact that the secrecy theme is less prominent in Matthew—so that Matthew features it here and a few other places (Matt 12:16; 16:20; 17:9)—means that he is not engaged in “docile reproduction.” After all, if Mark was written first and Matthew used Mark, surely editorial fatigue would be manifest in Matthew removing this motif early and then forgetting about doing so. But that is not what we see. He retains it, and still in some structurally significant places, even if it is not so frequently present as in Mark. Docile reproduction would characterize Matthew if the motif was more frequent to an extent approximating Mark. Could this not simply be an indication that he associated this command with the memory of this story like Mark did, rather than that he is engaged in docile reproduction? And if he was engaged in docile reproduction, why has fatigue set in so quickly if his version of this short text, outside of v. 1, is not even as different from Mark as his equivalent of the Herod story was (meaning that he has done less editorial work compared to that text on this account)?
In any case, it is not clear why this could not be an example of Mark smoothing out a story derived from Matthew, while also giving it extra detail. If Mark was as perturbed by the reference to the crowds in 8:1 in combination with the command to secrecy as his namesake of the Goodacre family is, is it inconceivable that he could have excised it from his account? I ask these things rhetorically to illustrate how thin the basis for the argument is. I am not suggesting that this is what happened.
The case of fatigue identified here is apparently of the early onset variety, even more so than the previous case. While earlier Goodacre characterized such fatigue as involving, “a writer [making] changes in the early stages which he is unable to sustain throughout,” here Matthew neglects to reference the house that appears not in the directly parallel text but in the portion of the story that appears earlier in unparalleled material in Mark (3:20):
It is unlikely that Matthew has simply allowed himself to be a little loose in terminology here. He seems to be presupposing Jesus’ presence in a house that he has not previously mentioned and this is confirmed by 13.1 which follows on from this pericope, On that day, after Jesus had left the house (έξελθών ό Ίησοΰς της οικίας), he was sitting beside the sea’. Matthew has, therefore, in switching between sources at 12.46, forgotten to refer to the house that had been mentioned earlier on by Mark. By reproducing Mark faithfully at this point, Matthew has inadvertently betrayed his hand, leaving the detective a key piece of evidence. (48)
I jokingly describe this as “early onset fatigue” because it is an example that contradicts how Goodacre has described his claim to this point. Or is this unlike other pericopes, where Matthew was working on this one later in the day than others? The world may never know. As it is, Matthew (and Luke) is apparently not bothered by the lack of setup, perhaps because he expects his audience to infer the kind of setting. If he thought it needed to be specified, he could have done so without apparently needing to ignore his source in order to not think of this.
This is also yet another example where the argument for editorial fatigue can be turned around not so much to suggest Mark’s editorial fatigue (which is what Goodacre responds to as a possible objection to his argument later in the article), but to suggest Mark “cleaning up” his source(s). Mark 3:19–20 is unparalleled among the other Synoptics; no other text provides setup for either Jesus entering a house or his family deciding to come to him before they show up “outside.” If the similarities and differences of these stories are simply to be explained by one author using one or more of the others’ works, could it not be argued that Mark added these brief notes in those verses to provide a relatively smoother narration? I say “relatively” because this note from Mark is interrupted by another story of Jesus being accused of being in league with Beelzebul.
I apologize ahead of time for how the following tables are going to look. There was too much text to fit on one page, and the only way Substack currently allows for me to copy tables is through pasting screenshots.
In this case, Goodacre argues that Luke has betrayed knowledge of Mark by mentioning in his version of the interpretation details that he left out in the actual telling of the parable:
First, Mark says that the seed that fell on rocky soil sprang up quickly because it had no depth of earth (Mark 4.5; contrast Luke 8.6). Luke omits to mention this, for whatever reason, but he has the corresponding section in the Interpretation, ‘those who when they hear, with joy they receive the word . . .’ (Luke 8.13; cf. Mark 4.16).
Second, in Luke 8.6, the seed ‘withered for lack of moisture’ (δια τό μή εχειν ικμάδα). This is a different reason from the one in Mark where it withers ‘because it had no root’ (διά τό μή εχειν ρίζαν, Mark 4.6). In the Interpretation, however, Luke apparently reverts to the Marcan reason:
Mark 4.17: And they have no root in themselves (και ούκ εχουσιν ρίζαν έν έαυτοίς) but last only for a little while.
Luke 8.13: And these have no root (καί ουτοι ρίζαν ούκ εχουσιν); they believe for a while.
Third, the sun is the agent of the scorching in Mark (4.6). This is then interpreted as ‘trouble or persecution’ (θλίψις ή διωγμός). Luke does not have the sun (8.6) but he does have ‘temptation’ (πειρασμός) that interprets it (Luke 8.13). (49)
Once again, the explanation of these variations as being due to editorial fatigue is questionable, not only because, on this theory, Luke continues editing his source over the course of this parable, but he continues to have texts parallel to, yet also verbally dissimilar from Mark hereafter.
But what can be said about the three signs of fatigue that he notes? First, Luke does not mention the lack of depth of earth, but when he mentions that the plant from the seed lacked moisture, it is functionally equivalent to the same point. The moisture being referred to here is ground-based, thus it is used in similar scenarios as this parable in reference to plants extending their roots because of moisture (e.g., Jer 17:8 [LXX]; Josephus, War 4.471). That is why it is not inconsistent to say in the imagery of the parable that the seed had no moisture and in the explanation that it had no root. It should also be noted that even in this particular part of the text, Luke is showing no signs of fatigue, since, on this theory, he is still adding to or otherwise editing his source in 8:13. That addresses the first two apparent inconsistencies he notes here.
Second, Luke does not mention the sun, true, but is the parable incoherent without reference to it? Unless we are supposed to presume a complete lack of experience on Luke’s part with plants in rocky soil and/or with no real root, there is no reason to think that he is assuming in his version of the story specifically what is in the story of Mark’s text. And how is this a sign of editorial fatigue if, in this same text, Luke differs at the verbal level with Mark’s text here at a similar rate as he did in 8:6 (except that he has more words that are not in Mark here)? Rather, there is nothing to suggest that what is happened is Luke editing Mark and getting fatigue only here, from which he quickly recovered.
And once again, the argument is not so powerfully in favor of Markan priority that it could not be turned on its head. Could it not be that Mark’s text is more similar to Matthew’s version than Luke’s version because he found it to be more complete than Luke’s? I don’t think so, but following the logic of what is supposed to be entailed by the similarities and differences in Goodacre’s argument could lead in this direction as well.
This is similar to the earlier case of Matthew when Goodacre noted that Matthew did not mention a house, as Luke does not explicitly mention Jesus entering the house, although the later part of the story requires that he entered one (5:19; 50). What was said about that similar case also applies here. It is not obvious that Luke is assuming information he did not transfer from his source, as it is just as probable that he thinks it is a clear enough implication of his language. It is also odd to posit fatigue as a factor here given that Luke does the most editing around the detail of the paralytic being brought to Jesus. It is only after this that the three versions of the story become the most similar.
Finally, we reach what Goodacre calls “the best example of the phenomenon” (50) from the feeding of the 5,000. I have explored this text elsewhere, where I have already broken it down into segments. To avoid the visual atrocities caused by the screenshots of the previous texts, I will thus not reproduce those segments here. For visual reference, I refer the readers to that post, where I have gone over the variations and interesting bits of coherence between these accounts.
What Goodacre focuses on is the setting. Goodacre notes that Luke has “reset” the story to Bethsaida, but later has maintained the note about the location where Jesus and the crowd are as a “desert place” (Luke 9:12; Mark 6:35–36). He considers this a prime example of editorial fatigue because, “by relocating the Feeding of the Five Thousand, without being able to sustain the new setting with its fresh implications throughout, Luke has spoilt the story” (51).
This is an odd comment to make. Considering that Luke had to be quite intentional to include Bethsaida in the story, and this answers some questions about other versions of the story, as noted in my post, one must wonder why Luke would be so insistent on mentioning Bethsaida if it so obviously spoils the story, as Goodacre claims. Unfortunately, this explanation is not forthcoming because of Goodacre’s singular focus.
Many understand the note in v. 12 as indicating that Jesus and the crowds are no longer in Bethsaida but in the wilderness in the vicinity (that is, the uncultivated land nearby), since Luke does not say that the miracle itself happens in Bethsaida. Goodacre simply presumes that Luke is presenting them as still in the city because he assumes that Luke got the story from Mark and changed it, not because this is actually demonstrable from the story itself. He hangs much on the phrase he translates as “desert place,” but the note about the green grass in Mark, which does not appear in Luke’s version, indicates that even in his version we are not dealing with a “desert” per se. Thus, the phrase could also be translated as “lonely,” “isolated,” or something like “wilderness,” since this story clearly evokes the feeding of Israel in the wilderness. In any case, it could convey they are in an area of uncultivated land, or, as has sometimes been suggested (such as in Richard Freund’s chapter in Bethsaida: A City by the North Shore of the Sea of Galilee), it could simply refer to how relatively isolated the area of Bethsaida was.
Goodacre also makes it an issue that “if the crowd were in a city, they would not need to go to the surrounding villages and countryside to find food and lodging. Further, since in Bethsaida food and lodging ought to be close to hand, Luke’s comment that the day was drawing to a close lacks any relevance and, consequently, the feeding lacks the immediate motive that it has in Mark” (51). That would seem to support the notion that they are not in the city, and Luke never says such. But the setting he thinks Luke is conveying would not actually address the problem in any case. On the one hand, in light of the context of the story of Jesus and his followers, highlighted especially by Luke (though the placement in Mark is also indicative of the same point), the disciples were taught by their recent mission about divine benefaction (where they could not take a bag of money; 9:3), and Jesus is reinforcing that need to trust in God here. In that narrative context, it is not an incoherence in the story at all for them to be somewhere in the vicinity of a city but still to be instructed in this way.
On the other hand, on the practical level, them being in the vicinity of Bethsaida (or even in Bethsaida, as Goodacre reads it) does not present an obvious solution to the problem posed by the disciples. Most of this crowd of 5,000+ would not be able to go to Bethsaida to address these needs. It is difficult to know just how big the place was, but it had only been raised to the status of “city” fairly recently. Why would one presume that Bethsaida was basically Jerusalem on the Jordan that it could handle a crowd of 5,000+ strangers in addition to its own residents, especially with no preparation? My friends in Wilmore, KY (with a population that is supposed to be around 6,000) have good reason to question such an idea after the revival last year with the large crowds that came to town, and this is a modern town, not an ancient city recently upgraded from a fishing village. Most of the crowd would have had to travel elsewhere, and that takes time, hence the concern expressed as it was getting late in the daytime.
Overall, editorial fatigue is less of a demonstrative argument for Markan priority than it is a circular argument for the same. It is also in curious tension with another popular argument for Markan priority, which concerns perceived tendencies of Matthew and Luke to smoothen less refined Greek or other perceived rough edges in Mark. When Mark is the rougher text, that is a sign of Markan priority because it indicates that Matthew and Luke made the text smoother (and, as some say, more palatable). When Mark is the smoother text with more perceived coherence, that is also a sign of Markan priority because it indicates that Matthew and Luke edited Mark but grew fatigued with the changes they made. Either way, Mark must be first. If Markan priority is to be established, these are not the bases to do so.