Gottlob Christian Storr, in his 1786 argument for Marcan priority,[1] asked, if Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke, how the latter two were then related.

Storr proposed, among other possibilities, that the canonical Matthew (written in Greek) was translated from the original, which was written in either Hebrew or Aramaic (the logia spoken of by Papias) by following Mark primarily but also drawing from Luke,[2] although he later went on to oppose this.

[3] These ideas were little noticed until 1838, when Christian Gottlob Wilke[4] revived the hypothesis of Marcan priority and extensively developed the argument for Matthaean posteriority.

Wilke's hypothesis was accepted by Karl Kautsky in his Foundations of Christianity.

[6] Wilke's hypothesis received little further attention until recent decades, when it was revived in 1992 by Huggins,[7] then Hengel,[8] then independently by Blair.