mls@dasys1.UUCP (Michael Siemon) (07/15/89)
With some time available between jobs, I have been raiding St. Mark's
Library at the General Theological Seminary to do some reading on the
"synoptic problem," and I want to present some thoughts on this, in a
group of essays, hoping each one will be of reasonable size for posting
to soc.religion.christian. I will pause after the second essay to see
if I elicit any interest; failing that I will stop :-)
I start with a sketch of what the problem is and where you can go for
more data than the tidbits I am offering. I'll then discuss what a
"solution" to the problem might look like, and what the main competing
solutions in fact say.
1. There are many parts of the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke that seem
to present the "same" incident. For example the question on fasting in
Mark 2:18-22, Matthew 9:14-17, and Luke 5:33-39. (Get out your Bibles,
kiddies; this will be far too long for me to quote everything I refer to.)
These verses do *not* look like independent eyewitness reports: they all
write that some people (Matthew says disciples of John, Luke says Pharisees,
Mark doesn't say) ask why Jesus' disciples didn't fast. Jesus replies with
the image of the wedding guests not fasting when the bridegroom is with them;
then all give the image of patching an old garment with new cloth and that
of new wine in old wineskins. The wording in all of this is almost, but not
quite identical. You can get a good idea of this from the RSV, or probably
any other reasonably literal translation. Just to emphasize the point I'll
quote one verse in Greek that has particularly high word-sharing, Mark 2:21,
I'll use underlining with '=' to imply words present in all three sources,
'-' words shared by Mark and Matthew and '^' words shared by Mark and Luke:
oudeis epible:ma rakous agnaphou epiraptei epi himation palaion;
================ --------------- === ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
ei di me:, airei to ple:ro:ma ap' autou to kainon tou palaiou kai
^^^^^^^^^ ---------------------------- ^^^^^^^^^ ---
cheiron schisma ginetai.
-----------------------
Mark's _epiraptei_ ("sews", of the patch of cloth) is unique here; Matthew
and Luke have _epiballei ("puts") instead. Matthew and Mark are very close
in word order, and interestingly, they disagree about what case should
follow _epi_ (Matthew uses dative for Mark's accusative. Both are possible;
I don't know what would be most idiomatic in Koine. But it is notable that
the other unmatched phrase, the genitive _tou palaiou_, has Luke picking up
the dative form of _palaios_ used by Matthew in his first clause while both
Matthew and Mark go over to a genitive in the second! This doesn't show up
above as a match since Matthew repeats the noun and Mark the adjective.)
Luke is more elegant in word order and construction than the others, while
using much the same vocabulary.
The detailed agreement is remarkable and leads almost all investigators to
assume that there *must* be some literary relation connecting these gospels.
The problem is that commentators immediately go over to an assumption that
A looked at a manuscript of B and/or C and chose each word in his text
accordingly. Let me warn you now that I don't buy that assumption.
2. Before this pericope, there are several (calling of Levi/Matthew, the
healing of a paralytic, cleansing of a leper) with more or less similar
degrees of agreement in the sources. But immediately afterwards, Mark and
Luke move on to the pericope of picking corn on the Sabbath, which Matthew
gives three and a half chapers later (12:1-8). Matthew, instead, continues
in his verse 9 to the episode of Jairus' daughter, which Mark and Luke put
three chapters later in their accounts. But neither do Mark and Luke agree
through those three chapters; that's where Luke's Sermon on the Plain occurs.
The point is that the ordering of events is DIFFERENT in the three synoptic
gospels. And more to the point, *when* Mark has a parallel, his order will
agree with Matthew or else with Luke. That is, the ordering of pericopes
is *not* independent, and at the same time the differences in order are
large enough not to be merely minor lapses of different eye-witnesses. The
nub of the problem is that *when* the gospels agree, the agreement is more
than we expect of different witnesses, and yet the ordering of events is
*less* consistent than is found in eye-witness reports. To state my bias
here, I think *both* characteristics are common to oral traditions.
3. The fasting pericope comes *after* the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew,
and before the "corresponding" Sermon on the Plain in Luke -- and Mark has
nothing corresponding to either sermon. There are sayings of Jesus that
Matthew and Luke both have (and the Sermons contain a fair number of these)
that do not show up in any parallel in Mark. In general, common sayings
do *not* have the same context in Luke and Matthew, in contrast to the
situation when all three evangelists have a pericope. For an example, see
Matthew 12:33 & Luke 6:43-44. There are also the very different nativity
sections of Matthew and Luke. That is, Matthew and Luke have a lot of
common material not in Mark; they also have *unique* material.
4. If one goes through Mark with underlining as I did on Mark 2:21, one
finds that almost everything substantive in Mark occurs in both the other
gospels *or* if not in both in one of them but not the other. Words not
underlined are mostly ones setting the stage for some saying or deed of
Jesus. Mark tends to be much fuller (and more vivd) in setting the scene
than the others are. Further, omitting the parts common to Mark, if one
goes through Matthew and Luke to find the other sayings of Jesus, one gets
most of the remaining ones common to both gospels, sometimes in similar
settings and sometimes not.
OK: what do we make of all of this? One can assume that all similarities
and differences are entirely due to some obscure plan of the Holy Spirit --
and thus decide that these parallels and differences cannot be explained
and cannot tell us anything. One can claim that the evangelists are not
dependent on one another and the similarities are coincidence. This is
hard to sustain; only if one then pushes the similarities back to multiple
usage of earlier traditions (which are not extant) is this possible. That
is in fact the least investigated possibility, and in my mind the likeliest
one. But I need to prepare the ground for this.
Patristic evidence is obscure and conflicting. By the time of Augustine,
it was thought that our canonical order Matthew-Mark-Luke-John was the order
in which they were composed, and Augustine thought that each one used the
works composed earlier as a (direct literary) source. I have seen the
patristic evidence used to support most proposed answers, so I don't give
it much weight (not that it's wrong; any final answer must satisfy that
evidence, but it is too vague to generate the hypotheses we need.)
The only thing we know for sure is that Luke used multiple earlier sources;
he says so in his elegant opening sentence -- the only truly polished Greek
anywhere in the New Testament. Setting John aside, Mark has to be somehow
intermediate between Luke and Matthew. There are several possibilities,
ruling out starting with Luke because of Luke's own assertions:
I. Augustinian Theory. Matthew comes first, Mark is an abbreviated version
of Matthew (but then why does he differ in order from Matthew, and why does
he leave out so much?) and Luke judiciously incorporates both predecessors
plus his own unique material (for example the Annunciation and his wonderful
canticles.) The nub of this or any other proposed solution is understanding
the changes imposed on the material as it appears in the "later" sources.
II. Griesbach Theory. Matthew comes first, Luke uses Matthew (and some
other traditions to account for his differences from the order and material
in Matthew, or else his changes follow some theological agenda of his own,
as evangelist for the gentile church where Matthew is the evangelist for a
Jewish church). Mark is a conflation of Matthew and Luke -- but again one
must ask why he chose or omitted what he did.
III. Mark came first and was used more or less independently by Matthew
and Luke. The main problem with this is that there is so much in Matthew
and Luke that is not in Mark (the opposite problem to why Mark omitted so
much if he is dependent on either of the others). If Mark is first, there
is obviously some *other* tradition that was used by Matthew. Luke may or
may not have used that tradition independently of Matthew. Thus we get:
IV. Two-document Theory. Matthew uses Mark and a second source, call it
"Q" to stand for a source (German "quelle") of sayings of Jesus that had
material not in Mark. On this hypothesis, there is some evidence that
Luke preserved the Q source better than Matthew did, so that even if he
had Matthew available, his dependency on Matthew is limited.
There is also the material (notably Nativity material) in which Matthew
and Luke record different traditions, not in Mark or Q -- or at least
one of them dissents from material in Q to follow a different tradition.
We start to see the possibility of an indefinite number of early sources
no longer extant. For in fact, the basic difficulty with IV is that
there is no external evidence for one such source as Q. Advocates of I
and II often make a great virtue of their not inventing hypothetical
sources like Q, and yet as soon as they deal with Luke they bring in such
sources with no qualms at all. They only seek methodological excuses for
*not* looking at possible multiple strands of tradition in Matthew.
This is the "synoptic problem"; explain the agreements and disagreements
of the first three gospels (which seem to demand some degree of actual
verbal copying of somebody by somebody else) without forcing the data into
a totally unbelievable shape. For the last century, the two-source theory
(IV above, with Mark and Q used by Matthew and Luke) has dominated the NT
field; 25 years ago William Farmer resurrected the Griesbach theory (II.)
I will take up Farmer's critique and the response to it in my next article.
The whole field is, I think, vitiated by its image of scriveners copying
out of documents (the Q hypothesis is almost always presented as if there
were a DOCUMENT refered to by Matthew and Luke while they had Mark open on
another table.) Scholars deal with their predecessors' written works and
cannot seem to get that model out of their heads in dealing with gospels.
If you want to pursue this matter, you will need a "synopsis" -- the most
recent is Kurt Aland's _Synopsis of the Four Gospels_ (1982, United Bible
Societies) using the RSV text, or for those with some Greek the earlier
equivalent using the UBS Greek New Testament text edited by Aland et.al.
as well as the RSV may be useful (it's $35 as opposed to the $9 of the
English only version.) The parallels are tabulated in B. Reith's book
_The Roots of the Synoptic Gospels_ (Fortress Press, 1986) but this is
mostly concerned with tracking traditions prior to the gospel writers,
so it does not give any detailed information on word agreements. These
have to be tracked in the controversial literature on the synoptic
question, and I would recommend as introductions to this (in addition to
Reith)
H. Palmer, _The Logic of Gospel Criticism_, 1968, Macmillan
which discusses "critical" (i.e. rational) techniques
used in establishing the biblical text as well as the
various hypotheses about the synoptic question.
C. M. Tuckett, _The Revival of the Griesbach Hypothesis_, 1983,
Canbridge University Press
which explores in considerable depth the arguments newly
made for II. and examines the logic of these and details
of how II works out versus IV in a large number of cases.
A. Bellinzoni, _The Two-Source Hypothesis_, 1985, Mercer University
Press
which is a collection of essays pro and con relating to
the principal contentions of IV, that Mark came before
the other synoptic gospels, and about the existence of Q.
and Wm. Walker, ed. _The Relationships Among the Gospels_, 1978,
Trinity University Press
which has a number of provocative and seminal "seminar"
papers by NON New Testament scholars and discussion about
these by major participants in the debate on the synoptics.
--
Michael L. Siemon Inflict Thy promises with each
Occasion of distress,
That from our incoherence we
May learn to put our trust in Thee