Was Matthew Trying to Replace Mark? (Mark Allan Powell)

Mark Allan Powell writes this regarding Matthew’s redaction of and improvement on Mark:

Matthew appears to have regarded Mark’s Gospel as theologically inadequate in at least three ways: (1) Mark does not present Christ as currently present among his followers, and thus the locus of God’s continuing presence in the world is ambiguous; (2) Mark offers little insight with regard to the discernment of God’s will for contemporary situations; and (3) Mark’s portrait of discipleship does not address the possibility of progress and so provides little hope or incentive for improvement. All three of these points may be gathered under one umbrella observation: from Matthew’s perspective, the Gospel of Mark contains no effective doctrine of the church. Addressing this concern may have been Matthew’s major incentive for producing a replacement Gospel. (Fortress Introduction to the Gospels, p. 45)