Matthew and Luke also used a Mark which contained the story of Jesus in the same order given by our present Mark. Tho both of them deviate from this order for assignable reasons, one or the other of them is found following it all the time. If these deviations go back to an Ur-Marcus, there must have been one Ur-Marcus in the hands of Matthew and another in the hands of Luke. THE HYPOTHESIS OF A PRIMITIVE MARK SUPERFLUOUS; SIMPLER EXPLANATIONS Can the verbal agreements of Matthew and Luke as against Mark, or their deviations from him without apparent reason, be explained upon any simpler hypothesis than that of Ur-Marcus? It appears to the writer that they can. A certain number (tho no one can say exactly what proportion of the whole) of the agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark may be allowed to be accidental. Many of them, like the substitution of εἶπεν for λέγει, or of an occasional δέ for Mark's invariable and monotonous καί or the substitution of a common for an uncommon word (like κλίνη for κράβαττος) require no explanation. _Agreements_ of Matthew and Luke _in their omissions_ from the Marcan narrative do not stand upon the same plane with the agreements in _substitutions_, and may all be accounted for on the ground of accident, or by the same desire on the part of both writers to be more concise, or to avoid anything derogatory to Jesus or the apostles; or by some other similar motive at work separately in the minds of the two later evangelists. It is only the agreements in corrections and substitutions that require accounting for. I believe these can be explained chiefly on two grounds: