Editing Gospel of Mark (section)

===Historicity===

The idea of Marcan priority first gained widespread acceptance during the 19th century. From this position, it was generally assumed that Mark's provenance meant that it was the most reliable of the four gospels as a source for facts about the [[historical Jesus]]. However, the conceit that Mark could be used to reconstruct the historical Jesus suffered two severe blows in the early 20th century. Firstly, in 1901 [[William Wrede]] put forward an argument that the "[[Messianic Secret]]" motif within Mark had actually been a creation of the early church instead of a reflection of the historical Jesus. In 1919, [[Karl Ludwig Schmidt]] argued that the links between episodes in Mark were a literary invention of the author, meaning that the text could not be used as evidence in attempts to reconstruct the chronology of Jesus' mission.{{sfn|Marcus|2000|p=859}} The latter half of the 20th century saw a consensus emerge among scholars that the author of Mark had primarily intended to announce a message rather than to report history.{{sfn|Williamson|1983|p=17}} Nonetheless, Mark is generally seen as the most reliable of the four gospels in its overall description of Jesus' life and ministry.{{sfn|Powell|1998|p=37}} Michael Patrick Barber has challenged the prevailing view, arguing that "Matthew's overall portrait presents us with a historically plausible picture..." of the [[Historical Jesus]]. [[Dale Allison]] had already argued that the [[Gospel of Matthew]] is more accurate than Mark in several regards, but was finally convinced by Barber's work to no longer regard the "uniquely Matthean" materials as ahistorical, declaring that the [[Historical Jesus]] "is not buried beneath Matthew but stares at us from its surface".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Barber |first=Michael Patrick |year=2023 |title=The Historical Jesus and the Temple: Memory, Methodology and the Gospel of Matthew |contribution=Foreword |contributor-first=Dale C. Jr. |contributor-last=Allison |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=x, 238 |isbn=978-1-009-21085-0 |contributor-link=Dale Allison}}</ref> Matthew Thiessen wholeheartedly agrees as well, finding no fault in Barber's work.<ref>{{cite journal |first= Matthew |last= Thiessen |title= The Historical Jesus and the Temple: Memory, Methodology, and the Gospel of Matthew by Michael Patrick Barber (review) |journal= The Catholic Biblical Quarterly|volume= 86-1|year= 2024 |page= 168|doi= 10.1353/cbq.2024.a918386}}</ref>{{efn|Thiessen: "Barber concludes that the Gospel of Matthew provides a historically plausible depiction of Jesus, regardless of the historical veracity of this or that precise detail. This remembered Jesus, the only Jesus we have access to [...] was a temple-pious Jew [...]it is this Jesus who makes sense of the various shapes that the early Jesus movement took"}}