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the synoptic problem |
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Imagine the following scenario: On the same weekend, three students from the same school go to see the same movie. Each of the students is from a different grade level; one is a sophomore, one a junior, and one a senior. All three students go to see the film Ali, about the life and career of boxer Mohammad Ali. On the following Monday, the three students each go to their Spanish class. All three students have the same teacher but at different class periods, and each student is at a different level in language competence. On that day, however, the teacher gives the same assignment to all of her classes: Write an essay in Spanish about a recent film that you have seen. Now suppose each of the three students decides to write his essay about Ali. Consider the following:
Hopefully you guessed "slim to none" for the first three questions above, and for the fourth you probably guessed that the teacher would suspect cheating- that one student had given the other students a copy of his essay (for the sake of this discussion, though, we won't call it cheating, we'll call it a "literary relationship"). If so you have at least a glimmer of an understanding of what scholars call the "Synoptic Problem." Three of the four New Testament gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, tell the story of Jesus' life so similarly that it is as if they had all seen the events with the same eye, or "syn-optically," hence the name given to these books: The Synoptic Gospels. So why is this similarity a problem? Christian churches have long considered the NT gospels to be independent accounts of Jesus' life and ministry, based on the reliable testimony of eyewitnesses who knew Jesus personally and who recounted their recollections both faithfully and under the guidance of the holy Spirit, or based on the testimony of followers who knew the eyewitnesses personally. In fact, Christians have traditionally believed that both Matthew and John were each written by one of Jesus' 12 apostles (Matthew by the tax collector of the same name, and John by the son of Zebedee), and Mark and Luke were written by close personal acquaintances to some of Jesus' apostles (Mark by a traveling companion of Paul and interpreter of Peter, and Luke by the "beloved physician" who was known to and apparently traveled with Paul-although Paul never knew the pre-Easter Jesus personally as far as we know). The common material between the Synoptic gospels was simply assumed to be material from a common apostolic witness, shaped by each author to fit into his own personal recollection. As it turns out, this may be partially true, but the key word is partially. Let's go back to our students at the movie. If we consider the film to be our "common apostolic witness" to the life of Muhammad Ali, we should acknowledge that each person who views the film will interpret the film's content according to his or her own values and assumptions. Suppose, for example, that one of our students is a Muslim. For him, the most significant and meaningful aspect of Ali's life might be his conversion to Islam, a conversion that resulted in a change in identity symbolized by his change in name, from Cassius Clay to Mohammad Ali. Another student might be African American, and he might find the struggle that Ali fought outside of the ring to be respected as a black athlete to be more meaningful and interesting. Another student might have a close family member or friend who has suffered from Parkinson's disease, and he might find Ali's struggle with the disease in later life and his efforts to bring attention to the disease or to advocate research for a cure more meaningful. One student might be a sports fan more interested in Ali's record as a fighter, and so on. The values of each viewer will shape the act of interpretation- ultimately what counts as "relevant facts" will be shaped by individual values and preferences (and remember, the film itself is already an interpretation). They will still be facts, but facts selectively filtered for reasons that will vary from person to person. So again I ask, how likely is it that anything our hypothetical students wrote, if they wrote independently of each other, would be word-for- word the same, both in the same order and written in the same style? The same question must be asked of the New Testament gospels, particularly the Synoptics. It is highly unlikely that Matthew, Mark, and Luke, each independently influenced by the same apostolic eyewitness, would sit down to record their own account and wind up writing nearly verbatim identical gospels (in the places where they tell the same story). There must be some literary relationship between these gospels. They could all be copying from the same written source or collection of sources, but this is a highly speculative assumption. It is better and safer to explain the relationship in terms of what we know, and when we compare these three gospels, we can see by the way they used the material at their disposal how they were probably composed. What is at stake, and why does it matter? As you will see, the various proposed solutions to the Synoptic Problem result in divergent pictures of the "historical Jesus" and they present challenges to the assumptions made about the authorship of the gospels. Now let's look more specifically at the nature of the relationship between the Synoptics.
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the background |
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The church has been uncomfortable with the presence of four gospels in the New Testament for nearly as long as there has been a church. If the gospels are divinely inspired, as most Christians assume, then why did God inspire four different and, in some cases, apparently contradictory versions of Jesus' life? The answer depends on one's definition of divine inspiration, and we will return to that subject a bit later. But from very early on, Christian leaders and writers sought to find a way to reconcile the differences between the gospels. This led to the production of gospel harmonies, narratives that attempt to combine the unique information in each gospel into one coherent account, resolving any contradictions along the way. The earliest of these was probably Tatian's Diatessaron, produced in the late second century. Harmonies may be useful for prayer and reflection on Jesus' life, but for scholarly study, harmonies take us further away from understanding Jesus as a historical figure and the gospels as a reflection of the early church, as they are inevitably influenced by the views of the harmonizer who must decide how the material is arranged and what can be edited out. After the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, scholars began to approach the gospels in a more "scientific" (i.e. "objective") way. The scientific approach sought to distinguish "factual" material in the gospels from the mythical or symbolic elements, in an effort to get closer to a picture of the "real" Jesus- as opposed to the Jesus of the Christian churches, which naively took the gospels as historical documents. This approach opened the door for more skeptical criticism of the Bible, and it wasn't long before the apparent inconsistencies of the different gospels were subjected to particular scrutiny. In the late eighteenth century, the German scholar J. J. Griesbach produces a synopsis of the gospels, placing the material from the gospels in parallel columns so that different versions of the same story could be compared. A synopsis is quite different from a harmony, as it seeks to highlight differences rather than reconcile them. Griesbach noticed that three of the four NT gospels seem to tell similar (but certainly not the same) versions of the story of Jesus' life- Matthew, Mark, and Luke. These three are commonly referred to as the "Synoptic Gospels" because of this similarity. He also noticed a "problem"- these gospels, where they tell the same story, often agree word-for-word. In other words, they have a literary relationship. But if they come from independent apostolic witnesses, how can this be? This is the "Synoptic Problem": What is the literary relationship between these three gospels?
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basic observations |
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We can make the following observations with regard to the composition of the Synoptic Gospels:
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mark as common term |
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How do we account for the above observations? Can we hypothesize a model for the development of the gospel tradition that accounts for the similarities and differences between the Synoptics? Scholars have proposed an almost endless variety of proposals to resolve this problem, and we will consider the three most significant proposals below. Whatever these proposals attempt to say about the order in which the gospels were written, clearly each must account for the fact that Mark appears to be the common term between the two others. First, let us consider some more specific definitions and statistics:
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statistical overview |
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the dominant theories |
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There have been proposed solutions to the Synoptic Problem about as long as the problem has been recognized. The first significant theory was put forth by Augustine of Hippo, an early church bishop, theologian and Biblical scholar in the late fourth/early fifth century AD. Augustine's solution proposed a relationship between the Synoptics that followed the order in which the gospels are found in the New Testament canon (see Figure 5). According to Augustine, Matthew, the most Jewish of the New Testament gospels was written first, when Christianity was still strongly Jewish and Palestinian in nature. Mark copied his gospel from Matthew at a later point in history, and, later still, Luke wrote his own gospel incorporating material from Matthew and Mark and from his own recollections. Augustine's theory for the development of the gospels has been largely rejected by modern scholarship, for reasons we will consider at a later point. |
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The German scholar J.J. Griesbach proposed an alternative solution to the Synoptic Problem, called the Griesbach Hypothesis (see Figure 6). He agreed with Augustine that Matthew was written first, but suggested that Luke had copied from Matthew only and that Mark's gospel had been written last, recording only those traditions that appeared in the other two gospels. Both the Augustinian and Griesbach Hypotheses suffer from similar difficulties:
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Figure 7: The Two Source Theory. This theory assumes that Mt and Lk wrote independently of each other, but each copied material from Mk and from an unknown source designated as "Q" (for Quelle, German for "source") by scholars. Adherents to this theory assume that the unique material in Mt and Lk is the author's own contribution, and not borrowed from another source. | ||||||||
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the Q source |
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sample synopses |
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Biblical scholars use a "synopsis" to study the Synoptic Gospels, which prints the parallel passages from each gospel in columns next to each other so that the similarities and differences between gospel versions of the same story are readily apparent. Below, there are several online "synopses" that you can scroll through, to see how the same story is told differently by each gospel author. If the parallel passages do not appear, it is probably because of your browser version. Click on the passages listed under the title of each story and the NAB Online will open in at the correct book and chapter in a separate window. The material in each story is marked according to the key below: |
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conclusions & consequences |
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related links |
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The
Narrow Gate |
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