1. It is not necessary to assume that Matthew and Luke both worked upon the same identical copy of our Mark. If they used two copies, these two would not be expected to agree absolutely with each other in the wording of every passage. This would account for some of the slight deviations in the wording of either Matthew or Luke where the other agrees with our present Mark. These two copies that Matthew and Luke used may neither of them have been the original (since in both of them the conclusion at least was gone); or at least not the original in its original form. One of them may have been a copy of the original, and the other a copy of this copy. Or they may both, as Sanday argues, have belonged to a type later, and not earlier, than our present Mark. This would account for the agreements, and for such deviations as have not already been accounted for, or cannot be accounted for, by the known literary peculiarities of Matthew and Luke. Since the text of Mark that has come down to us is more corrupt than that of either Matthew or Luke, various words in which Matthew and Luke now agree against Mark may have stood in the text which both of them used, and may later have dropped out, before the copy was made to which our present texts go back. Or the two copies of Mark, assumed above, may both have been made from the original copy which Mark made with his own hand. Upon this supposition even, they would not always agree, and so deviations in Matthew and Luke from Mark, and occasional agreements in such deviations, would be explained. Or these agreements may be explained, as is obvious in many instances, by the working of similar motives in the minds of Matthew and Luke, even assuming them to have made their extracts from one and the same copy, or from two practically identical copies, of Mark. Dr. E. A. Abbott, in his _Corrections of Mark_ (London, 1901) gives an exhaustive list of the deviations from Mark in which Matthew and Luke agree. Many of these are such as to suggest that Matthew and Luke used not an Ur-Marcus, but a text of Mark later than the one that has come down to us. E.g., in twelve instances Matthew and Luke agree in supplying the subject or object which our Mark omits. In fifteen, they agree in correcting abrupt constructions, supplying a connecting word. In thirteen (exclusive of λέγει) they agree in correcting Mark's historic present. In twelve they agree in replacing Mark's relative clause or his subjunctive by a participle. In twenty-three they agree in substituting εἶπεν for λέγει. In thirty they agree in the use of δέ for καί. It is not impossible that Matthew and Luke, independently bent on improving Mark's style, have accidentally agreed in making these same improvements in the same places (especially since there are other improvements of the same sort in which they do not agree). But it is a much simpler and more adequate hypothesis, that they both used a text of Mark in which these corrections had already been made.