We are back to Year A in the lectionary, which means that for most of the year we shall be reading from St Matthew’s Gospel on Sundays. The mainstream scholarly view these days is that Matthew wrote his Gospel after St Mark, or at least had some version of Mark’s Gospel in front of him when he wrote, and whether we believe that or not, it is certainly instructive to compare the two.
Matthew’s Gospel is, to begin with, around twice the length of Mark. It contains pretty much everything that is in Mark, although often he retells the stories more briefly – compare, for example, their versions of the Gerasene/Gadarene demoniac (Mk 5:1-20 and Mt 8:28-34). Why, then, is Matthew so much longer? Because he includes vast swathes of Jesus’s teaching that we do not find in Mark, and indeed a goodish amount that’s not in Luke either.
