Saturday, January 17, 2015

NT: Gospel Parallels

There’s probably no better time to introduce the term “Synoptic Gospels” than right now, having dipped our toes into the waters of Mark.

Bible scholars have long recognized the similarity between the first three Gospels in the New Testament - Matthew, Mark and Luke. Obviously, this implies that the Book of John is substantially different, which will be a topic for another time. The similarity between the first three gives rise to the term Synoptic Gospels, in that they agree to a large part. That leads to a related "synoptic problem":

The "synoptic problem" is the question of the specific literary relationship among the three synoptic gospels–that is, the question as to the source upon which gospel depended when it was written.

I’ll leave the question of which source hypothesis is the most compelling as an exercise for the reader. My point is to make use of the copious amounts of comparison and analysis in our further reading of the first three Gospels. The most immediately interesting tools are “Gospel Parallels” - tables which list the common elements of Matthew, Mark and Luke to illustrate where and how they agree, and conversely, where they disagree or omit stories about Jesus.

None of this is new to anyone who has ever looked at the NT critically, but I want to list possible parallels that a reader might use:
  • The Synoptic Gospel Parallels - an in-depth treatment that also includes a comparison of John to the Synoptics
  • Gospel Parallels - listing 367 points of comparison among all four Gospels
  • The Synoptic Gospels Compared - a Mark-centric comparison between the first three Gospels only
  • Wikipedia - The Synoptic Gospels
  • An Introduction To Triple-Tradition Comparisons - possibly more in-depth than the others, showing seven comparisons:
    • one that designates identical words in all three Gospels,
    • one that designates agreements of inclusion by Matthew and Mark against Luke,
    • one that designates agreements of inclusion by Matthew and Luke against Mark,
    • one that designates agreements of inclusion by Luke and Marks against Matthew,
    • one that designates agreements of omission by Matthew and Mark against Luke,
    • one that designates agreements of omission by Matthew and Luke against Mark, and
    • one that designates agreements of omission by Luke and Mark against Matthew.
The first things that jump out at me are:
  1. the nicely delineated sermons in Matthew are not, for the most part, found in the other Gospels. The Olivet Discourse regarding the end times is found (in part or whole) in the three Synoptics, the Sermon on the Mount appears to be very similar to Luke's Sermon on the Plain (this is not a criticism, just a point of interest), but the other three are not apparent in the other Synoptics as written in Matthew
  2. the term “parallel" is really a misnomer. Nothing of Matthew Chapters 1 & 2 is “paralleled” in Mark; passages from Matt 3 and 4 seem to be found in Mark 1 (and to a lesser extent Mark 3); and beginning with Matt 5, the parallels to Mark become even less linear and more disjointed.
I’ll return to my very-high-level overview of Mark soon.

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