The four gospels

One story, four witnesses
    It is rare for us to have more than one record of any person in the ancient world; to have four biographies written by contemporaries or almost contemporaries is unparalleled. But this unusual wealth of information about Jesus has not always been welcomed in the Christian church. It has even been regarded as an embarrassment!
    We noted above the attempt by Tatian in the second century to produce a single ‘harmony’ of the gospels, and the same task has been undertaken frequently since his time. This desire may be due to discomfort over the differences between the gospels, since these are sometimes used as a basis for questioning the truth of the gospel records. Or some may feel that the present situation is too untidy, with four personal portraits rather than one ‘authorized biography’. But the fact is that we have four, not one, and they are not all the same.
    Recent trends in gospel scholarship have encouraged us to take this diversity seriously. ‘Redaction–criticism’ has been concerned with discovering the individual perspective and theological message of each of the four gospel writers. It has taught us to view them not as faceless compilers of tradition, but as men with their own clear viewpoint and purpose in writing, each concerned to put across a slightly different perception of Jesus, and each angling his gospel to the special needs of the church for which he wrote it.
    More recently emphasis has been laid on the fact that each of the gospels is an independent literary work, intended not for analytical comparison with the others, but to be read and appreciated in its own right as a whole. This has resulted in a clearer perception of the dramatic power of each of the gospels, as each in subtly different ways brings Jesus and his ministry to life, and enables the reader to become part of the story from which Christianity began.
    This is not to suggest that it is wrong to make a comparative study of the gospels, and to try to gain from them, taken together, an understanding of Jesus himself. They are, after all, first and foremost books about Jesus, not about their authors’ special theological ideas. But our understanding of Jesus and his message is greatly enriched when we take seriously also the individual contribution of each of the writers. The result is not just a single ‘authorized biography’, but the multiple witness of several of those who knew and followed Jesus in the formative early days of Christianity.

John—the odd man out
    It is wrong, however, to speak of four ‘independent’ witnesses, since it is clear that Matthew, Mark and Luke share a common overall outline, and in many ways a common perspective, and most scholars agree that they were not written in isolation from each other. They have therefore been traditionally regarded as the three ‘synoptic’ (from the same point of view) gospels, over against John, whose book is strikingly different. We shall consider the relationship between Matthew, Mark and Luke shortly, but first it will be useful to consider why John is felt to stand apart from them.
    The opening of John’s gospel, with its mysterious but thrilling language about Jesus as the ‘Word made flesh’, immediately signals a different perspective. At the beginning of the [p. 898] third century, Clement of Alexandria suggested that John wrote a ‘spiritual’ gospel to supplement the ‘bodily’ information supplied by the other three. While this betrays a very superficial understanding of the nature of the synoptic gospels, it does appropriately express the different ‘atmosphere’ that most readers perceive in John’s book, with its profound reflection on faith and salvation, and its more daring presentation of Jesus as God incarnate (including the famous ‘I am’ sayings).
    John offers none of the homely parables of the synoptic teaching. Indeed, very little of what Jesus says in John’s gospel finds any echo in the other three. The ‘kingdom of God’, so prominent in Jesus’ teaching in the synoptic gospels, appears only once in John. John’s gospel (like his first letter) makes vivid use of symbolic opposites, light and darkness, life and death. Through long discourses and theological dialogues John’s Jesus confronts the reader directly with issues of knowledge and belief, and of the basis of eternal life, and with himself as the only solution to them. He talks, it has been said, with a distinctly ‘Johannine accent’!
    Apart from the outline of the last week in Jerusalem (which John tells at greater length than the others), there is little overlap in the narrative part of the gospel either. Some stories are shared (though usually in a quite different form), but most are new. Of the several miracles John records, most are not mentioned in the synoptic gospels, and John introduces them distinctively as ‘signs’, which point to theological truths about Jesus’ ministry.
    Even the basic outline of the story before the final week in Jerusalem is quite different. In the synoptic gospels Jesus’ earlier ministry is focused entirely in and around Galilee, and the journey to Jerusalem for the final Passover forms the dramatic background to the central part of the story. But in John Jesus appears as a relatively frequent visitor to Jerusalem, and has become a familiar figure in his dialogue with the Jewish leaders there long before the final confrontation.
    It seems clear then that John’s gospel stands apart from the others. What is not so clear is whether it is therefore totally independent. There are several places where John seems to assume that his readers already know aspects of the story of Jesus. His omission of such central features as Jesus’ birth, baptism and temptation, the transfiguration, or the institution of the Lord’s Supper (despite a very long account of other aspects of the Last Supper) may be because he assumes these are already well known. Occasional echoes of synoptic language have been taken to suggest that John knew one or more of the other gospels (or at least the tradition on which they were based), even though he chose generally not to draw on them.


Matthew, Mark and Luke: the ‘synoptic problem’
    As mentioned above, there is a basic similarity in the plot of each of the synoptic gospels (to which Matthew and Luke have each added a section on Jesus’ birth and childhood, though quite independently of each other). Most of Mark’s story is paralleled in one or both of the other synoptic gospels, though sometimes (especially in Matthew) in a drastically abbreviated form. Then there is a substantial amount (more than 200 verses) of material, mainly sayings of Jesus, where Matthew and Luke run parallel even though it is not found in Mark.
    The nature of the ‘parallels’ varies from exact agreement (especially in some of the sayings of Jesus) to quite loose similarity, so that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether it is the same incident which two gospels are relating (cf. e.g., the anointing story in Mt. 26:6-13 = Mk. 14:3-9 with that in Lk. 7:36-50). Even where stories are clearly parallel, there is quite a lot of variation in the way they are told, and in the elements included and excluded.
    About a third of Matthew’s gospel consists of material to which the others have no parallel, some of it included in the five lengthy discourses of Jesus which are a distinctive feature of that gospel. In the case of Luke (the longest of the synoptic gospels), just over half of his gospel has no parallel in the others; much of this is found in Luke’s long account of the journey of Jesus towards Jerusalem (Lk. 9:51-19:10).
    These are the basic data which make up ‘the synoptic problem’. This title has traditionally been given to the attempt to explain how three books came to be written with such a puzzling mixture of similarities and distinctiveness. It certainly is a ‘problem’, as the following outlines of attempted solutions will show. It is a pity, however, if this forbidding title discourages the reader from thinking positively about the important and intriguing question of how these three gospels came to be written.
    Most people have assumed that the similarities are not accidental, and that there was some sort of literary contact between these three writings, rather than their simply sharing in a common oral tradition. The question has usually been put in terms of the ‘use’ of one book by the author of another, or, to put it more simply, ‘Who copied whom?’. The key to that question must lie in deciding which was written first, and here there have been two main contenders, Matthew and Mark.
    Until the nineteenth century it was almost [p. 899] universally agreed that Matthew was written first (hence its place at the beginning of the NT). Then a rapid swing in scholarly opinion occurred, and by the latter part of the nineteenth century most were agreed that Mark,
the shortest and in some ways the least sophisticated of the three, was the earliest. This view has been the basis of most modern scholarship, but since the 1960s a significant minority of opinion has developed which wishes to reinstate Matthew as the first gospel. While this remains a minority view, the priority of Mark can no longer be taken for granted in the way it was up to the middle of this century.
    If Mark came first, what was the source of the other material which Matthew and Luke have in common but which is not in Mark? While it is possible that either Luke derived it from Matthew or Matthew from Luke, most scholars have preferred to speak of a second source document alongside Mark, to which both Matthew and Luke had access. This source (which remains, of course, a product of scholarly speculation, rather than a document which anyone has ever seen!) has traditionally been known as Q (from German Quelle, ‘source’). Some envisage Q as a single document, from which most or all of the common material in Matthew and Luke was derived; others prefer to speak of ‘Q material’, without committing themselves as to whether it was found in one or more sources, written or oral.
    In modern scholarship, then, the most common approach to the synoptic problem has been, and remains, the ‘two–source theory’, which sees Mark and Q as the two sources on which Matthew and Luke based their work. (Matthew and Luke also include other material of their own, traditionally labelled as M and L respectively. There has, however, not been much enthusiasm for the view that either M or L represents the contents of a single documentary source.)
    If Matthew, not Mark, came first, there are two options. The first theory sees Mark’s gospel as a ‘reduced’ version of Matthew. (This was the view of the early Christians and Augustine spoke of Mark as Matthew’s ‘camp–follower and abbreviator’.) Luke subsequently used both the other gospels as the basis of his own work. The alternative, strongly promoted by some scholars today, is the ‘Griesbach hypothesis’ (named after an eighteenth–century German scholar who formulated it). This views Luke’s gospel as based on Matthew alone (together with his own special sources) and suggests Mark then made a deliberate attempt to mediate between his two predecessors by producing a shorter gospel which drew on both, and attempted to reconcile their differences of approach. Either of these theories dispenses with the need for Q, since Luke is understood to have derived the shared material directly from Matthew. Both, however, remain minority views.
    The solutions mentioned so far assume that the synoptic gospels owe their similarities to direct literary ‘borrowing’. The only problem in that case is to decide who came before whom in the process. Others suspect, however, that the image of a gospel writer sitting at his study desk compiling his work by weaving together pieces from other scrolls unrolled in front of him is based more on modern editorial methods than on any realistic understanding of the first–century Christian scene. The range of different degrees of ‘parallel’, with many passages far from verbally identical even though they are clearly reporting the same story or saying, suggests something less simple than straightfoward ‘copying’.
    It seems likely that none of the gospels was compiled simply in a single concentrated editorial effort of a few days or weeks. As memories of Jesus’ life and teaching were shared, whether in written or oral form, they were collected together in different churches, and it is quite likely that the process of compiling what eventually became our four gospels was taking place simultaneously in a number of centres, and over an extended period. During this time there was ample opportunity for ‘cross–fertilization’ to take place as Christians travelled around,

so that it is not necessary to see the links between, say, Mark and Matthew as entirely in one direction.
    If this is a more realistic scenario, while no–one need doubt that at least some of the synoptic material is the result of direct literary contact, it is not likely that these contacts can be formulated in terms of a simple ‘x–copied–y’ scheme, and the ‘borrowing’ may sometimes have happened quite informally, even unconsciously, rather than by deliberately drawing on an already completed book.
    My own view is that some such more fluid understanding of the gospel–writing process is more likely, and that therefore a tidy ‘solution’ to the synoptic problem is not likely to be found. This conclusion does not worry me. After all, what we have to deal with is the gospel texts as we have them, not the various stages of the process which led to those texts. For what it is worth, I think it likely that Mark was the earliest gospel to be completed, and that where it is appropriate to speak of direct literary ‘borrowing’ it is generally more likely to be Matthew or Luke who derived the material from Mark than the other way. But I am wary of concluding that therefore when Matthew or Luke differs from Mark this must always be understood as a [p. 900] deliberate ‘alteration’ of a finished text which they had in front of them.

    No doubt the synoptic problem will always remain a ‘problem’. But while scholars continue to debate it with vigour, the ordinary reader of the gospels may with profit notice and learn from the different ways in which Matthew, Mark and Luke have told their stories, even if the process by which they did so remains obscure.