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 conception 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 from 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 with Mark, not in those which are common to them, but not to Mark also. 2. In those parts which the three Gospels have in common, the “agreement” of the other two is mediated through Mark. 3. In those sections which the First and Third Gospels have, but Mark has not, the agreement consists in the language and incidents, not in the order. Their common source, therefore, the “Logia” of Matthew, did not contain any type of tradition which gave an order of narration different from that of Mark. 4. The divergences of wording between the two other Synoptists is in general greater in the parts where both have drawn on the Logia document than where Mark is their source. 5. The first Evangelist reproduces this Logia‐document more faithfully than Luke does; but his Gospel seems to have been of later origin. This historical argument for the priority of Mark was confirmed in the year in which it appeared by Wilke’s work, “The Earliest Gospel,”(83) which treated the problem more from the literary side, and, to take an illustration from astronomy, supplied the mathematical confirmation of the hypothesis.