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Why do many scholars think that the Gospel of Mark was a source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke?

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Antique book open to the frontispiece of The Iliad of Homer, showing the title and an engraved portrait of a bearded man, with old books in the background. — literature *The Iliad*, an epic of the Trojan War attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, is considered a foundational work of Western literature.

Scholars widely consider the Gospel According to Mark to be a primary source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke based on the two-source hypothesis. This conclusion is supported by several key literary observations:

Structural Priority: Matthew and Luke follow the basic chronological outline and narrative structure established in Mark.1
Content Overlap: More than 90 percent of Mark’s content appears in Matthew, and more than 50 percent appears in Luke.2
Literary Dependency: Scholars have noted that Matthew and Luke generally agree with each other only when they also agree with Mark. When they introduce material not found in Mark, it is typically inserted in different places, suggesting Mark served as the "patterning form".3
Stylistic Refinement: Mark is written in a direct, sometimes "crude" Greek style. Matthew and Luke appear to have "improved" or polished this language, which is a common indicator of literary dependency.4

These factors lead most researchers to conclude that Mark was the earliest of the Synoptic Gospels and served as a foundational document for the others.23