We have now considered the normative, situational, and personal perspec-tives on the ethics of studying the Gospels. We are almost ready to plunge into a study of particular passages and their difficulties. But two more specialized issues remain in the wings. We will consider them briefly in this and the next chapter. Our first topic is the synoptic problem. What is it, and how does it affect our interpretation of the Gospels in their details?
The Nature of the Synoptic Problem
Briefly, the “synoptic problem” is the name scholars have given to discussions about the literary relationship between the three Synoptic Gospels, namely Matthew, Mark, and Luke.1 In comparison with the Gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, and Luke show many commonalities, not only in the episodes that they include, but also in the manner in which they present the events. These three Gospels have been called synoptic because they share a common view. As we have seen, each of the three Synoptic Gospels at a finer level of analysis has its own distinctiveness. But they have many similarities.
The similarities include considerable commonality in the order of epi-sodes—though there are variations as well. And the similarities extend to the
1 See, e.g., D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 2005), 85–103; Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, rev. ed. (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity, 1990), 136–208, 1029–45; Richard T. France, Matthew: Evangelist and Teacher (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1989), 24–49; David Alan Black and David R. Beck, eds., Rethinking the Synoptic Problem (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001).
words describing the events, not merely the events themselves. The similari-ties are so extensive that many scholars have suspected that the Synoptic Gospels have a direct or indirect literary relationship to one another. The most common theory is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark. Matthew and Luke also share material that is not found in Mark, composed mostly of sayings of Jesus. Some scholars have hypothesized that in addition to Mark there once existed another source, “Q,” which contained these sayings.
Two Ways of Using a Source
Let us begin by concentrating on two pieces of this puzzle. Did Luke use Mark? And if he did, what difference does it make in how we read Luke?
First, did Luke use Mark? Would such use be consistent with God’s inspir-ing Luke and makinspir-ing the Gospel of Luke God’s writinspir-ing as well as Luke’s?
Inspiration affirms the divine authority of the product, the text of Luke. By itself, it does not specify the means that God may have used in the processes leading up to the product. Some books, like the book of Revelation, came about as a product of special visions that God gave to the human author.
Luke 1:3 indicates that Luke engaged in historical research: “It seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you.” God superintended this research. At the end of this period of research, God through his Holy Spirit empowered Luke in his writing in such a way that the Gospel of Luke, the product, was God’s speech in written form: “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit”
(2 Pet. 1:21). We can have confidence in the product without knowing all the means that God used in Luke and in his research to bring about the product.
Luke 1:2 mentions “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.” It is likely that Luke interviewed some of them. He also mentions written sources: “many have undertaken to compile a narrative” (1:1). Nothing forbade Luke from using Mark if Mark was one of these written sources available to him. In addition, nothing forbade him from using ordinary, noninspired sources as well, as long as we understand that the Holy Spirit supervised his use of all his sources and that the resulting product really is God’s writing through Luke.
How Do We Weigh the Use of a Source?
So Luke could have used Mark. Suppose he did. What difference does it make in how we read Luke? It depends on how Luke used Mark. What does Luke indicate about his use? We can consider a variety of ways in which one author uses another. Consider an ordinary human situation. Suppose Sue
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uses a writing by Donna. Sue could state explicitly that she is using Donna’s material. She could do so without directly evaluating Donna’s material, or she could express approval or disapproval of this or that piece of it. If Sue chooses to make Donna’s material an explicit subject for discussion, we obvi-ously have to consider the interaction between what Donna says and what Sue says about it, because Sue herself constrains us to do so. But Luke does not do that. He does not explicitly quote Mark or explicitly indicate that he is approving or disapproving of some source.
What if Sue uses some of Donna’s material, but makes no explicit men-tion of what she is doing and gives no special indicamen-tion of her source or sources? In our day we have expectations and social conventions about so-called intellectual property. Intellectual property is actually a debatable label and involves many issues.2 Prior to the last few centuries, in ordinary communication people like Sue freely used other people’s ideas and words without always explicitly acknowledging it. If Sue quoted from a culturally well-known source, her recipients could be expected to recognize what she was doing. If the source was regarded as authoritative, that might make a difference in reinforcing or grounding what Sue claimed. For example, the Jews regarded the Old Testament as authoritative—but many Gentiles in the Roman Empire did not. But whether or not Sue used authoritative sources as further support, she would have to take responsibility for what she said.
What happens if we assume that Luke used Mark? Luke’s use of Mark is not quite like Luke’s explicitly citing the Old Testament. An explicit cita-tion makes visible the source, and the source in the Old Testament would have been well known at the time when Luke wrote. In contrast to the Old Testament, Mark would have been a recent writing. Luke could not be sure that all his readers would be so familiar with it that they would immediately recognize what he was doing. Even if they did recognize it, Luke, by not making Mark visible to readers, made a commitment to take responsibility himself for what he was writing. He took responsibility for what he added to Mark, and for what he altered from Mark, and for what he left the same.
So-called “redaction criticism,” when it was first used, paid special atten-tion to changes that an editor made to his sources. It asked how Luke differs from Mark. Highlighting the differences can sensitize us to subtleties and nuances that we might otherwise overlook. This sensitization can in fact be valuable, whether or not Luke used Mark. Even if we assume that the two Gospels just appeared side by side, with no literary dependence, their differ-ences highlight some of the distinctive concerns both of Luke and of Mark.
2 See Vern S. Poythress, “Copyrights and Copying: Why the Laws Should Be Changed,” 2005, accessed June 7, 2010, http://www.frame-poythress.org/poythress_articles/2005Copyrights.htm.
Integrity of a Single Discourse
But there is a danger that in proceeding this way we may in fact exaggerate the differences. In fact, in the use of redaction criticism, some scholars fell into the pattern of thinking that what Luke added or changed was his, whereas what was the same as in Mark could be ignored. That is not fair to Luke. If he included a passage from Mark completely unchanged, it was because he wanted to include it unchanged. By including it he made it his own. It is what Luke says, just as much as are the things that he says that do not happen to appear in Mark. It is all his. More significant, it is all God’s: God speaks all of it. We should read it all and pay attention to all of it.
We can make a similar point by considering the procedure of a redaction critic: he reads Luke line by line, or even word by word, with Mark constantly at his side, doing line-by-line and even word-by-word comparisons. He tries to second-guess why certain changes were made. He asks himself, “What was the motivation here?” But this kind of reading is artificial. It is not really the way Luke invites us to read his writing. He wants us not to read what he wrote in a comparative way, line by line, but to read it “originally”—we are supposed to treat his book as a full-blooded writing in its own right. When Luke says the same thing that Mark says, God wants us to read it just as seriously as when he puts in something that Mark did not say. Both kinds of pieces are God’s communication through Luke.
In other words, God invites us to read Luke as a whole piece. Yes, God wrote other discourses, including the Gospel of Mark. But he wrote each as a distinct whole. We need to pay attention to what God says in all of Luke, taking the whole book together. And we pay attention to what he says in all of Mark, taken together. This attentiveness includes both what is distinctive and what is common to both. Because both books are part of a larger collec-tion—the biblical canon—God also invites us to read the two together. But when we do so, we do it in a way that also respects what each says as a whole book. That means that whether Luke used Mark or Mark used Luke or both used a common source or both wrote independently has little effect. Each writing is to be taken as having full communicative power, both according to God’s design and according to the design of the human author working under God’s power. R. T. France makes a similar point.
To approach Matthew without a firm conviction either of the priority of Mark or of that of Matthew does not prevent one from listening to his gospel as a whole, allowing it to make its own distinctive impact through its structure, its selection of themes, and its recurrent emphases. Nor does a suspension of judgement on the question of literary relationships prevent one from
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ing Matthew fruitfully with each of the other gospels, not in terms of one of them “using,” “following” or “changing” another, but in order to see where the differences lie. To be unwilling to say that at this point Matthew has altered Mark’s text (or vice versa) in a particular way does not disqualify one from noticing that they present the same story or the same teaching in different ways, and from drawing the appropriate conclusions as to their distinctive theological interests.3
We can put it another way. The meaning of a discourse, that is, of a ver-bal communication, consists in what it says, not in the history of its origin.
This principle in fact holds even when a discourse explicitly cites from and discusses an earlier source. Even in this kind of special case of citation, the author calls on us to attend to what he says. What he says invokes an earlier source, and his saying so invites us to reflect on that source as part of what he wants to communicate. The earlier source in this case becomes explicitly part of the subject matter in the communication taking place at the later time.
How the author came to know about the earlier source, or how he gradu-ally developed the views that he has fingradu-ally come to articulate—such issues are part of the history of the origin. But they are not part of the meaning, unless, of course, the author makes his sources an explicit topic and begins to discuss with us how he received his information. Then the history of his investigations becomes part of the subject matter within the contemporary discourse in its own proper moment of communication.
The upshot of all this is that whether Luke used Mark has little or no direct bearing on his meanings. Nor does it affect the fact that Luke is an inspired writing with full divine authority. We find the meanings of the Gospel of Luke by reading Luke. We do not have to solve the synoptic problem first.
The Gospels in Context
We are undertaking to interpret the Gospels. God wrote them. When God speaks or writes, he takes account of contexts. These include the context of his own character and plan, the context of the human beings whom he has chosen to convey his communication, the context of the identity of the recipients, and the context of their social and historical situation. The mean-ings of what he says cohere with these contexts. There is much to consider.
We cannot do it all in detail. Many good commentaries undertake the task.
Among these contexts are the contexts of Luke or Mark as an author. It is possible that knowing more about Luke, including whether he used Mark,
3 France, Matthew: Evangelist and Teacher, 48.
can fill in a more detailed picture of who he was. And ancient readers were being invited to read the Gospel of Luke against the background of what they could be expected to know about both the human and the divine authors.
But we should not get confused. Authors do not demand or expect that we know everything that could possibly be known about them. They have to make allowances when writing for a large audience, such as Luke was doing.
The meaning of a text does not include the biography of its author. We still have to attend to what the text says, though we do so against the background of whatever basic knowledge of the author that we have.
In dealing with apparent difficulties in the differences between the Gospels, we will therefore focus on what the Gospels themselves say and the claims that they imply. We need to recognize that the Gospels are writings inspired by God. But we do not need to know in addition to this basic fact a detailed history of their origins.
Addressing the Synoptic Problem
We may nevertheless briefly consider the most likely directions for addressing the synoptic problem. We have already mentioned that it is possible that Luke used Mark, or that Matthew used Mark, or that Mark used Matthew—there are various combinations. Is any one of these more likely than the others?
Or do we need to consider still further options, such as the possibility that all the Evangelists used oral teaching by the apostles? Did Matthew use his memory of the events?
I have found help from two sources especially. First, consider the prologue in Luke 1:1–4. Luke says that “many have undertaken to compile a narra-tive.” It has been claimed that the word “many” is conventional. But even if there are other instances of such rhetoric in Hellenistic history writing, Luke makes a positive claim by choosing to put in the word when he had other alternatives. Therefore, we can infer that there were many. Mark may have been one of the “many,” but we may infer that there were others—“many”
others. Most of these have evidently been lost (by God’s providential design).
Next, consider an article by E. Earle Ellis, “New Directions in Form Criticism.”4 In brief, Ellis observes that Jesus was an itinerant preacher, and that from fairly early in his ministry he had some following. People were interested. At the same time, many people were able to see and hear him only when he came to their town or to a town nearby. So they would have a natural desire for further information. Within this context, Ellis wonders
4 E. Earle Ellis, “New Directions in Form Criticism,” Jesus Christus in Historie und Theologie, ed. Georg Strecker (Tübingen: Mohr, 1975), 299–315.
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whether the apostles or their hearers produced some written material for these followers. We can also ask whether some people would naturally have asked relatives to tell them what Jesus said and did when he was in towns in which their relatives lived. Ellis indicates that there was considerable use of Greek in Palestine, so some of these written pieces would have been in Greek as well as Aramaic.5
We may therefore suspect that not one or two but hundreds of written materials would have been in some circulation even while Jesus was still carrying out his ministry on earth. Some of these written materials would have been small in scope. Some, perhaps partly compiled using earlier pieces, might have been more extensive.
In addition to these written materials, we would of course have oral ma-terials. In the early church the apostles had a prominent role. Their teaching and preaching would have been attended to. Others would have spoken about Jesus’s earthly ministry as they were able.
Over this entire situation God sovereignly ruled, by his providential con-trol of history. He ruled over each piece of communication, whether written or oral. Each piece came about in accordance with his comprehensive plan.
As a result of the joint presence of many factors, we confront the pos-sibility of many sources, both written and oral. We have a situation where Matthew and Luke may have used not one source (Mark) or two (Mark and
“Q”), but possibly many, most of which have now perished. This situation is a nightmare for anyone trying to construct a definitive modern “solu-tion” to the origins of the Gospels. The presence of many possible sources produces a situation far too complex for us to draw firm conclusions. Luke clearly knew about many sources and probably used some, maybe many.
We do not know what they were. We never will within this life. The same may have been the case for Matthew or Mark. As a result, I think that the synoptic problem is unsolvable.
So we have another reason to concentrate on the Gospels as we have them.
5 Ibid., 307–8.
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