Synoptic problem

The Synoptic Problem is the question of how Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels, came to share so much common content, wording, and order, and yet still differ from one another at so many points.¹ Proposed solutions disagree over both the means and the direction of that relationship: whether one evangelist used another’s finished Gospel, whether all three independently drew on some earlier written source, or whether their agreement instead reflects a shared oral tradition that each set down in writing in his own way.²

Historical Development

Nineteenth-century explanations

Elijah Porter Barrows surveyed three explanations current in his own day. He set aside the theory that each evangelist depended directly on an earlier one’s finished Gospel, since no version of it could explain why “the peculiarities of each writer appear more fully in the narrative than in the recitative part of his gospel,” whichever Gospel was made the source for the others.³ A second theory, that all three drew on some now-lost original document, he judged equally untenable: had “a primitive gospel existed of such compass and authority as to be the common source of our three synoptic gospels, it is inconceivable” that the early church, which so carefully preserved the three Gospels themselves, would have let “the original gospel so speedily and utterly [perish], that no traces of it remained in the days of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria.”⁴ Barrows himself preferred a third option: that the evangelists, writing independently of one another, each drew “from this common body of oral tradition such materials as suited his general plan.” He judged this account, while not explaining every detail of their agreement, “more satisfactory than any other that has been proposed.”⁵

The two-source and Griesbach hypotheses

The two proposals most discussed among scholars today are the two-source hypothesis and the Griesbach hypothesis. Michael Kruger describes them as “the two most common solutions to the Synoptic problem,” noting that both “agree that there was literary dependence between the authors of the earliest gospels; either Matthew and Luke copied Mark and Q (two-source), or Mark copied from Matthew and Luke (Griesbach).”⁶ On the two-source hypothesis specifically, “most scholars today would argue that the ‘Q’ document (or something like it) was used by Matthew and Luke and was likely a written source known from a very early time period.”⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 412: when the Synoptic Gospels’ “remarkable agreements” and “equally remarkable differences” are considered together, “we enter upon a very difficult problem, one on which the ingenuity of Biblical scholars has exhausted itself for several successive generations without reaching thus far a result that can be regarded as perfectly satisfactory.” ↩
Barrows, 413. ↩
Barrows, 413. ↩
Barrows, 414. ↩
Barrows, 415. ↩
Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), 179. ↩
Kruger, 93. ↩