The Synoptic Question

WEBVTT
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Hello and welcome back to the Gospels and Acts.
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So in this lecture, we want to talk about the
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synoptic question. Now in most textbooks, monographs,
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scholarship on the New Testament in general,
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you'll see this referred to as the synoptic problem.
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But the synoptic problem makes it sound like
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this is some sort of, well, difficulty, right?
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And so I prefer the synoptic question. The question
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is, Why do these three look so much alike? Matthew,
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Mark, and Luke seem to have a lot of overlap
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where John does not or has less at least. Not
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no overlap by the way and for that I'm going
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to provide you with a supplemental interview
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again from the Bible and Archaeology podcast
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with Mark Goodacre who argues that John is the
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fourth synoptic gospel that indeed John is aware
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of the other synoptic gospels and Make some use
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of them and so on and so forth. I'll let you
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watch that It's a little bit outside of the scope
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of our investigation So I'm just gonna let you
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follow that as your heart desires, but we want
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to talk about these synoptic Gospels I've talked
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about this a little bit And I've even given you
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the broad outlines, but it's good to focus specifically
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on this question for just a moment Because it
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helps us to understand what it means to read
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to use a synopsis and that is your exercise for
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this module is Is reading a synopsis and observing?
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differences observing the details and drawing
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some conclusions some Preliminary at least conclusions
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from those observations. So the synoptic question.
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Synoptic, you'll remember, comes from sun and
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upsus in Greek, which means see together. So
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you can see them side by side. You can see them
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together, or they see things together, something
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like that. But they are very close to each other.
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And so the question is, what is the relationship
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between these gospels? Now there are a few different
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options. And so the first option is there's a
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lot of oral tradition out there, right? This
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oral tradition, it makes its way into written
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form in these gospels. This is what the form
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critics argued, especially, that the gospel stories
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began as individual units that were kind of brought
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together in collections and then eventually put
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down in... in print as it were on papyrus on
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on parchment and and that's why they sound familiar
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because this oral tradition is stable. This is
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especially argued by was especially argued by
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Birger Gerhardsen and some Scandinavian authors
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in the middle of the 20th century middle to late
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20th century arguing largely against the notion
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that the relationship between the Gospels has
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to be literary. But I think there's a lot of
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special pleading in there. It relies on rabbinic
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practices insofar as we can make that out from
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rabbinic literature, which is quite a bit later,
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and make some assumptions about memory and how
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memory works. And so the idea is that these Bits
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of tradition were memorized very carefully and
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therefore preserved very carefully until they
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were written down and that in the extreme form
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of this argument that that provides all the rationale
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for the overlap between them. And some scholars
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like this idea. Some people like this idea because
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it seems to validate the Jesus tradition, right?
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It seems to validate the teachings as we find
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them. especially as we find them in all three
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Gospels, but it seems highly unlikely. Much more
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likely, there's a literary relationship between
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these Gospels. Why? Because of the verbatim agreement
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between all three or sometimes just between two,
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but when the Greek is exactly in the same order
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and the same words and all that, And every once
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in a while you see how one author is so ever
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so slightly changing another just to improve
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it a little bit. We saw this with the historical
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present in Matthew and Luke does it in spades.
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Then it's pretty clear that they're using a written
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source. There's a cartoon that makes the rounds
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on social media and things once in a while where
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It's like a teacher at the front of the class
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said Matthew Mark and Luke. I want to see you
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after class because anytime I mean just from
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a Common sense sort of place if you have three
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documents if you are a teacher and you give an
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exam and you get three essays back on the exam
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that sound verbatim the same in a number of places,
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then you're going to suspect that there was some
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copying from one or the other, right? So, that's
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our assumption, and I think that's the best assumption,
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is that there is a literary relationship between
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these three Gospels. What that means is that,
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at the very least, Matthew and Luke are aware
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of other people writing, and this is interesting,
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that means that these Gospels circulated. even
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if they were written for specific communities,
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they were circulated much more broadly than simply
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that community, unless it was one community that
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produced all the gospels and that also seems
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highly unlikely. Okay. So in that case, how does
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this literary relationship work? Well, I've mentioned
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this already before, but upwards of 90 % of Mark
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is retained in Matthew or is found in Matthew.
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There's agreement between Matthew and Mark. Upwards
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of 90 % of Mark is used. And a little over 50
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% of Mark comprises Matthew. With Luke and Mark,
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that's a little bit less. It's closer to 50 %
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or maybe a little over 40 % that 40 % of Luke
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is tied to Mark. With Matthew and Luke, there's
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less agreement. There's about 25 % agreement
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between the two. So 25 % of Luke and 25 % of
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Matthew generally agree with one another. So
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they have the most agreement, Matthew and Luke
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have the most agreement when they are also in
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agreement with Mark. That's the fundamental insight
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is that Mark really is the middle term between
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the two. Now, how do we explain this? Okay, it's
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possible that Mark wrote and then Matthew wrote
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and Luke wrote and there was a lot of feedback
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between all three. So it doesn't need necessarily
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to be a kind of unidirectional sort of sort of
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thing. So it's possible that Mark revised on
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the basis of Matthew once Matthew had already
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used Mark, et cetera, et cetera. We don't know,
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but it seems like Mark, because of all of its
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eccentricities, especially at the beginning and
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the end, was probably not dependent at all on
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Matthew or Luke. B .H. Streeter, I think, no,
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B .H. Streeter mentioned, said about the gospel
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according to Mark only, so, I'm sorry, let me
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back up. There was an earlier position held by
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St. Augustine, among others, that Matthew wrote
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first, then Luke wrote, and Mark summarized Matthew
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and Luke. That's another way to come to the same
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conclusion, but it doesn't work. very easily.
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There's a lot of special pleading. It's still
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sometimes upheld. It was, uh, it's sometimes
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called the Griesbach hypothesis because it named
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after, uh, uh, JJ Griesbach, uh, from the 19th,
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sorry, 1789, Johann Jacob Griesbach. Uh, and
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he ordered, he argued that it was in that order.
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And, um, but And so that's kind of how it's come
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to us. But this theory, this hypothesis for how
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they go together ignores the fact that why in
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the world would Mark leave off the beginning
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and the end of Matthew and or Luke? One could
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argue, I suppose, that because they didn't agree,
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he left those parts off. But isn't it much more
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likely that They went their own way because Mark
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didn't have that material. B .H. Streeter, come
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back to him, B .H. Streeter in 1920 in a book
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on the Gospels said only a madman would leave
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off the birth stories or the resurrection narratives
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if he had them. So Mark is almost certainly the
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common source for Matthew and Luke. All right.
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That, I think, is pretty well established. But
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from there, things get a bit dicey. And so, let
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me give you a little bit of terminology here
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too. When we talk about the material that's common
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to Mark, Luke, and Matthew, we talk about the
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triple tradition. Now, that's not to say that
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these are three independent sources, but that
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the The three of these gospels include this tradition.
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So that's the triple tradition. And of that triple
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tradition, 76 % of Mark is common to Matthew
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and Luke. Matthew uses even a bit more of Mark.
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Luke only slightly a bit more, but not much.
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Only about 3 % of Mark is unique to Mark. So
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that's the triple tradition. When Matthew and
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Luke agree, We call that the double tradition
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and then we also have a kind of double tradition
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But we don't call it that where Matthew and Mark
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agree, but not with Luke because Luke doesn't
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have it It's missing from Luke and Mark and Luke
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agree, but that's a very and it's not in Matthew
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But that's a very small sliver and so So we we
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don't need to pay too much attention to that
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The main ones are the triple tradition the double
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tradition and those traditions that are unique
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to Luke and those traditions that are unique
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to Matthew. So let's talk about Matthew next.
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Matthew uses, as I've said, almost about 90 %
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of Mark, and that comprises somewhere in the
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neighborhood of 55 % of Matthew. And then 25
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% -ish is double tradition, so something that
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Matthew shares with Luke, so that's a big chunk,
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about a quarter, but that leaves about 20%. that's
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only found in Matthew. If we look at Luke, Luke
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has about 41 % or 40 % instead of 55 % that he
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shares with Mark. But only about half of Mark
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is really retained in Luke. The double tradition,
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Luke, I already mentioned, is about 25 % still.
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So Matthew and Luke have about the same amount
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of common material that's not in Mark. And then
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Luke also has about 35 % of Luke's gospel is
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stuff that's not in any of the other gospels.
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Unique to Luke. What do we do? I want to start
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here. What do we do with these unique traditions
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to Matthew and Luke? Scholars often put M, the
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M source on Matthew's and the L source on Luke's.
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That's just a shorthand to say it's what's unique
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to Luke and what's unique to Matthew. It's very
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possible and very likely that both Matthew and
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Luke are using multiple sources. And so we don't
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know. It's not one source each. And to some extent
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they could be composing some of these traditions
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themselves. Okay, so finally that leaves us with
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the double tradition. All right. Let me recap
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real quick because you can get real lost in the
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weeds on this. So we have Mark as the first gospel
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and now we have an arrangement where there is
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common agreement between the three. That's the
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triple tradition. There's unique stuff to Matthew
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and Luke and just a little bit to Mark. And then
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Matthew and Luke share about a quarter of the
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gospel of each of their gospels in common. What
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do we do with this double tradition? Well, again,
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some scholars have said, isn't this just oral
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tradition that's been well retained? Maybe. But
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again, the verbatim agreement, and this is fascinating
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because the verbatim agreement that's not in
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agreement with Mark. And so what do we do with
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that? It seems as though there's another common
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literary source, a document. And there are two
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ways to explore this. Then one is that Luke is
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using Matthew or Matthew is using Luke. It seems
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really unlikely that Matthew is using Luke because
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there's a whole lot in Luke that Matthew might've
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wanted to use, but didn't. And so there are scholars
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who would like to argue that Luke is using Matthew
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and Mark. So Mark wrote first, Matthew wrote
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next, Luke wrote after that and used both of
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them. This is a pretty interesting, and I think
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a viable hypothesis. This is sometimes called
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the Farragolder hypothesis, or we could say Mark
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without Q, because the other option is that there
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is some source, some written source that is now
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lost that both Matthew and Luke were drawing
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on, and we call it Q, Quella, for German for
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source. So are Matthew and Luke drawing on a
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common literary source or is one borrowing from
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the other? That's sort of the two options at
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this point. And most scholars would still hypothesize
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that Q exists. But notice this, that's a hypothetical
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document. We've never found any traces of it.
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We wouldn't accept for potentially the existence
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in Matthew and Luke. we've only found one document
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that even comes close to resembling the kind
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of document we're talking about, because the
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Q source is almost entirely sayings. And it's
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very rare, even in our early Christian Gospels,
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to find a Gospel that is primarily sayings. Interestingly
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enough, found in 1947, the Gospel of Thomas,
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as we have it in the Coptic, actually does look
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sort of like that. But the content between Q
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and Thomas are not at all the same. But it is
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the sort of document that scholars expected Q
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to be. And we didn't know about that particular
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document. We'd heard about it from early Christian
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writers who didn't like it, but we didn't actually
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know what it was like until it was found in the
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Nag Hammadi writings in the 40s. And so there's
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that. And so maybe there was a document called
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Q. There are some scholars who think, well, that's
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a lot of guesswork. Why would we go so far as
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to say there's Q when it could just be that Luke
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used Matthew? And so they make an argument just
00:17:41.349 --> 00:17:44.450
to that effect, that Luke is using Matthew. There's
00:17:44.450 --> 00:17:48.990
no need to hypothesize some document that no
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longer exists called Q. Other problems with Q
00:17:52.849 --> 00:17:58.279
include, Fairly obvious I think that is We don't
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know the extent of Q just because it's in Matthew
00:18:01.140 --> 00:18:04.640
and Luke It could also be that stuff in mark
00:18:04.640 --> 00:18:08.480
was in Q. We just don't know that because How
00:18:08.480 --> 00:18:11.839
would we know? We know that Matthew and Luke
00:18:11.839 --> 00:18:15.680
are using mark or we think we know that but what
00:18:15.680 --> 00:18:19.000
if they're actually using Q and Q also had a
00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:24.380
passion narrative, you know, and so It gets complicated
00:18:24.380 --> 00:18:28.559
real fast. That doesn't keep most scholars from
00:18:28.559 --> 00:18:30.480
thinking that there are two basic documents,
00:18:30.640 --> 00:18:32.859
Mark and Q, and that Matthew and Luke use both.
00:18:32.960 --> 00:18:37.150
It's an elegant solution, to be sure. And that's
00:18:37.150 --> 00:18:39.390
called the two -document hypothesis, or sometimes
00:18:39.390 --> 00:18:42.369
the four -source hypothesis, if we add in M and
00:18:42.369 --> 00:18:48.750
L. But this alternative, the Farrer -Golder -Goodacre
00:18:48.750 --> 00:18:52.549
hypothesis, named after the people Austin Farrer,
00:18:52.769 --> 00:19:01.890
Michael Golder, and Mark Goodacre, who have espoused
00:19:01.890 --> 00:19:05.369
this notion of dispensing with Q because it's
00:19:05.369 --> 00:19:08.589
a unnecessary hypothesis. And so they have argued
00:19:08.589 --> 00:19:14.079
that Luke is using Matthew. Okay. Now, why does
00:19:14.079 --> 00:19:18.910
any of this matter? You might be asking yourself
00:19:18.910 --> 00:19:22.000
that very question right now. 18, 19 minutes
00:19:22.000 --> 00:19:24.339
into a lecture on the synoptic question and I
00:19:24.339 --> 00:19:26.619
keep throwing percentages at you and double tradition
00:19:26.619 --> 00:19:29.859
and triple tradition and this and that. Why does
00:19:29.859 --> 00:19:32.779
any of this matter? And the answer is it tells
00:19:32.779 --> 00:19:36.799
us a great deal about how the early Christians
00:19:36.799 --> 00:19:41.180
remembered Jesus and how they saw tradition,
00:19:41.420 --> 00:19:44.559
how they saw the Jesus tradition. And what we
00:19:44.559 --> 00:19:49.740
can say from any of, any, whichever so -called
00:19:49.740 --> 00:19:52.920
solution to the synoptic question we take, and
00:19:52.920 --> 00:19:56.920
none of them are airtight, by the way. Luke's
00:19:56.920 --> 00:20:00.539
use of Matthew also requires some special pleading
00:20:00.539 --> 00:20:07.039
as to why Luke would not use some parts of Matthew
00:20:07.039 --> 00:20:15.210
and why Luke would edit it in just the way he
00:20:15.210 --> 00:20:18.950
does and so on and so forth. So, none of them
00:20:18.950 --> 00:20:23.279
are erotite, but each of them, any of those hypotheses
00:20:23.279 --> 00:20:26.579
says something about how we see early Christian
00:20:26.579 --> 00:20:29.880
literature developing and the Jesus tradition
00:20:29.880 --> 00:20:34.339
developing. Because it's clearly not the case
00:20:34.339 --> 00:20:37.740
that there was one body of tradition that was
00:20:37.740 --> 00:20:40.599
just handed down and handed down and handed down.
00:20:41.059 --> 00:20:44.400
That each of these writings has their distinctive
00:20:44.400 --> 00:20:50.589
emphasis and yet also has a common core to it,
00:20:50.609 --> 00:20:55.930
a core narrative and generally a core sense of
00:20:55.930 --> 00:20:59.049
who Jesus was. That's going to be really important
00:20:59.049 --> 00:21:02.029
when we talk about the historical Jesus, in particular,
00:21:02.269 --> 00:21:04.630
Dale Allison's take on the historical Jesus.
00:21:05.529 --> 00:21:12.369
But this synoptic question is fraught with a
00:21:12.369 --> 00:21:17.569
few anxieties. One of them is, what if they are
00:21:17.569 --> 00:21:20.650
all using, Mark's using Matthew, Luke's using,
00:21:20.650 --> 00:21:23.430
sorry, Matthew's using Mark, Luke's using Matthew
00:21:23.430 --> 00:21:26.430
and Mark, well then we don't have independent
00:21:26.430 --> 00:21:30.150
sources that verify a tradition, so doesn't that
00:21:30.150 --> 00:21:33.390
make Jesus historically suspect? Or the information
00:21:33.390 --> 00:21:35.549
we get from these gospels isn't that historically
00:21:35.549 --> 00:21:38.509
suspect? And the answer is, well yes, but not
00:21:38.509 --> 00:21:42.029
any more than it was before, in my view. And
00:21:42.029 --> 00:21:43.490
we'll talk about that when we get to the historical
00:21:43.490 --> 00:21:49.460
Jesus. But it does invite some question of, well,
00:21:49.839 --> 00:21:52.200
isn't this just telephone, the game of telephone?
00:21:52.700 --> 00:21:55.059
Except it does seem, and this is where Berger
00:21:55.059 --> 00:21:58.660
Gerhardsen was correct, it does seem that there's
00:21:58.660 --> 00:22:01.420
a bit of a control on that tradition, that there's
00:22:01.420 --> 00:22:04.700
only so far that that tradition could get bent
00:22:04.700 --> 00:22:08.339
before it was unrecognizable. And John is really
00:22:08.339 --> 00:22:11.819
pushing it. And the Synoptic Gospels show us
00:22:11.819 --> 00:22:15.589
just... just how much it seems early Christian
00:22:15.589 --> 00:22:18.829
writers wanted to stay close to this core narrative,
00:22:19.349 --> 00:22:21.670
especially as we find it oddly in Mark. I say
00:22:21.670 --> 00:22:24.970
oddly because Mark was not the most popular gospel
00:22:24.970 --> 00:22:29.319
by any means. So that's the synoptic question
00:22:29.319 --> 00:22:33.619
and a little bit of its significance. And I'm
00:22:33.619 --> 00:22:36.099
gonna round it off here because I think 22 minutes
00:22:36.099 --> 00:22:41.359
is plenty. There's plenty of information about
00:22:41.359 --> 00:22:45.309
this on the interwebs. in your, you know, Luke
00:22:45.309 --> 00:22:47.269
Johnson mentions it in the textbook. One of the
00:22:47.269 --> 00:22:52.950
reasons why I put it in a standalone lecture
00:22:52.950 --> 00:22:55.650
instead of completely going over it in another
00:22:55.650 --> 00:22:59.349
lecture is because to some extent, it's also,
00:22:59.349 --> 00:23:03.470
it's helpful, but also not determinative of our
00:23:03.470 --> 00:23:05.970
interpretation of any of these particular gospels,
00:23:06.130 --> 00:23:08.930
that they do stand on their own also as literary
00:23:08.930 --> 00:23:11.809
works. And that's more or less where Luke Johnson
00:23:11.809 --> 00:23:17.319
lingers. Okay. And with that, that rounds off
00:23:17.319 --> 00:23:21.640
our lecture for this time, and I'll see you again
00:23:21.640 --> 00:23:22.299
next time.