Argument Summary: Matthew shows a redactional tendency to improve Mark by improving his grammar. For example, he changes Mark's "historical present" (as in "he says") to past tense ("he said"). Mark has 151 such uses; Matthew, 93. It is more believable that Matthew corrected Mark than that Mark made Matthew less colloquial. There are also a number of examples of unusual words or constructions or poor grammar [Hawk.HS, 131ff] that we can believe Matt and Luke changed from Mark, but not vice-versa.

Aside from the point made by Sanders in our hub essay about the shakiness of assuming that a Mark would not "colloquialize" good language, several points can be made about particular arguments of this sort. Farmer notes nine examples of this sort of argument, of claimed grammatical miscues (plus two "barbarisms") in Mark corrected by Matthew [Farm,SP, 120ff]. First some general notes:

• Of the nine particulars, "only one is not used by at least one other New Testament author," including John, Paul, and Luke in Acts; seven are used by either Matthew or Luke-Acts. John has 162 uses of historical present, though these are overwhelmingly in discourse portions. Mark, again, has 151. Luke-Acts has 22. [135]
• There is no canon in literary criticism for using grammar as an indication of literary dependence, which reflects Sanders' comments.

Now these points in reply:

• The two "barbarisms" are also found in commonly in the Acts of Pilate and are said to perhaps indicate a Latin influence. This of course concurs with the idea that Mark wrote in Rome and was exposed to Latin. The Acts of Pilate are also clearly dependent on the earlier Gospels, which defuses the claim that bad grammar means earlier composition.
• Some of the nine issues similarly may be attributed to Mark introducing a "Latinizing order" to his Greek (just as Jerome introduced a "Grecianizing order" to the Latin Vulgate). The historic present for example is a "fairly common idiom in Latin" and would explain Mark's additional uses of it. Of course this also fits with Matt and Mark as independent products.
• Related to this, it is argued usually that the historic present comes of a Semitism adjusted to Greek, but this makes Matt and Luke grossly inconsistent in their removal of Semitisms. By this argument, Matt somewhat and Luke moreso "fixed" this Semitism in Mark, but also jointly kept or added another Semitism -- the use of the word "Behold!" to begin a story or sentence -- which Mark possesses only once in narrative (i.e., where he is not quoting someone)! Matt uses "behold" 60 times and many times in narrative; Luke, 52 times plus 24 in Acts; Mark, only 13.)
• That Matthew retains so many instances of the historical present when he is supposedly "correcting" Mark leads to the conclusion that if anything, he was NOT using Mark because he obviously had no desire (under this assumption) to "correct" Mark with any consistency! Moreover, Matthew has 40 instances of historical present in his own work that has no parallel to Mark. As Farmer this puts it, "There is no reason to think that Matthew would correct a particular 'colloquialism' in Mark 20 times which he uses elsewhere twice as often."

More generally, against Hawkins, it is just as well to say that rather than Matt correcting Mark, the two of them worked independently from a common Aramaic core.

Our conclusion is that this "historical present" evidence just as well is explained by Matt and Mark working independently; with the historical present in all of them explicable in some cases to Semitisms in sources, but in Mark by the influence of Latin on Peter and/or Mark in the heart of the Latin empire.