study of the subject, with a view to filling up the gaps and placing each individual part in its right position, and so articulating the whole into an organic unity which should be neither merely inward, nor on the other hand merely external." Nevertheless the Evangelist was guided in his work by a just recollection of the general course of the life of Jesus. "It is precisely in Mark," Weisse explains, "that a closer study unmistabably reveals that the incidental remarks (referring for the most part to the way in which the fame of Jesus gradually extended, the way the people began to gather round Him and the sick to besiege Him), far from shutting off and separating the different narratives, tend rather to unite them with each other, and so give the impression not of a series of anecdotes fortuitously thrown together, but of a con- nected history. By means of these remarks, and by many other connecting links which he works into the narration of the individual stories, Mark has succeeded in conveying a vivid impression of the stir which Jesus made in Galileo, and from Galilee to Jerusalem, of the gradual gathering of the multitudes to Him, of the growing intensity of loyalty in the inner circle of disciples, and as the counterpart of all this, of the growing enmity of the Pharisees and Scribes — an impression which mere isolated narratives, strung together without any living connexion, would not have sufficed to produce." A connexion of this kind is less clearly present in the other Synoptists, and is wholly lacking in John. The Fourth Gospel, by itself, would give us a completely false con- ception of the relation of Jesus to the people. From the content of its narratives the reader would form the impression that the attitude of the people towards Jesus was hostile fiom the very first, and that it was only in isolated occasions, for a brief moment, that Jesus by His miraculous acts inspired the people with astonishment rather than admiration; that, surrounded by a little company of disciples he contrived for a time to defy the enmity of the multitude, and that, having repeatedly provoked it by intemperate invective, he finally succumbed to it.
The simplicity of the plan of Mark is, in Weisse's opinion, a stronger argument for his priority than the most elaborate demonstration; one only needs to compare it with the perverse design of Luke, who makes Jesus undertake a journey through Samaria. "How," asks Weisse, "in the case of a writer who does things of this kind can it be possible at this time of day to speak seriously of historical exactitude in the use of his sources?"
To come down to detail, Weisse's argument for the priority of Mark rests mainly on the following propositions:-
1. In the first and third Gospels, traces of a common plan are found only in those parts which they have in common
