Thoughts of a Doubting Christian ✓

More About the Synoptic Gospels

As I mentioned in the last chapter, the Synoptic Gospels are the Books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They are the first books in the New Testament and record the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, since they were written almost forty years after Jesus's death, they are considerably removed from the events they tell. Their subsequent historical accuracy is a continuing debate among scholars to this day.

The fact that the Synoptic Gospels are so similar is known by scholars as the "synoptic problem." The most widely held theory to address this problem is that the authors pulled largely from older source documents that were written closer to the time of Jesus. However, currently, this is just a hypothesis, since we don't have most of the sources they might have pulled from.

The oldest of the Gospels is Mark, which Matthew and Luke used as a source. (More than two-thirds of the material in Mark's Gospel is present in the other two!) Matthew and Luke also share a considerable amount of material, taken from a hypothetical source that scholars call "Q." Then they each have material unique to them (see the graph above). In turn, Mark is thought to have gotten much of his material orally from Peter, one of Jesus's disciples.

The Book of Mark is considered by scholars as the most historically reliable of the three, not just because it is the oldest, but also because Mark gives less of his own interpretation of the events than the other authors. Mark doesn't give details of Jesus's birth or childhood and instead begins with his baptism by John. In addition, he focuses more on Jesus's miraculous works than on his parables and teachings. Unfortunately, the original ending to Mark has been lost to time. It actually stops in the middle of a sentence, so we don't know how he ended it. (The endings we have today were tacked on later, and some of them don't even agree with each other.) Scholars pinpoint the date for the writing of Mark as anywhere from 65 to 75 CE.

The Book of Matthew, though not the oldest, is first in the New Testament for several reasons. One is that it has many stories and teachings that are not present in the other Gospels. He also organized his Gospel into five distinct groups, plus an introduction and a conclusion, that follows a similar pattern to the Old Testament. Matthew emphasizes how Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies for the coming of a Messiah. He is the only one of the Gospel authors who seemed to think of Jesus's coming as a continuation of Judaism and not a break from Jewish laws or tradition. Scholars think the Book of Matthew was written around 80-85 CE.

The Book of Luke was most likely written by the same author as the Book of Acts. They are both addressed to a man named Theophilus to tell him about the life of Jesus and the work of early Christians. Though the work has a similar set-up to the previous two Gospels, Luke added and subtracted material as he saw fit. Since Luke was a Gentile (not a Jew), much of his work focuses on Jesus's inclusivity to groups other than Jews and how his salvation was for the entire world, not just God's people. Luke was probably written around 85-90 CE.

One more important point is that all four Gospels focus on a certain trait or quality of Jesus. The focus of Mark's Gospel is on Jesus's royalty; Matthew's is on his humanity; Luke's is on his servility; and John's is on his divinity. Sometimes the Gospel writers are pictured with animals that symbolize this — Mark with a lion, Matthew with a man, Luke with an ox, and John with an eagle. This symbolism comes from both Ezekiel (1:4-11) and Revelation (4:6-8).