The desire to harmonize the differences between the canonical
Gospels can be traced back to the second century, when Tatian (a
second-century apologist) combined the four Gospels into one document
known as the Diatessaron (Greek for “out of four”). This
combined Gospel was used in the Syrian churches in the third and
fourth centuries until it was replaced by the four canonical Gospels
in the fifth century.
Material
Common to More than One Gospel
All
four Gospels portray Jesus as leading a group of disciples,
preaching, healing, performing miracles, being crucified, and being
raised from the dead. Matthew was written for a Jewish or Jewish
Christian audience, reminding them that Jesus fulfills the Hebrew
Scriptures. Mark was written for a Gentile audience, focusing more on
narrative than on teaching and portraying Jesus as a man of
miraculous, powerful action. Luke shows Jesus as one who is
especially concerned for the poor and those on the fringes of
society. John explains that Jesus, the eternal Word of God, is not a
second god, but rather the one true God, sent by the Father to renew
Israel.
People
who are familiar with the content of the Gospel stories often confuse
the information from different accounts. For example, there is
actually no single story in the Bible about a “rich young
ruler”: only Matthew describes the man as young (Matt. 19:20),
and only Luke mentions that the man was a ruler (Luke 18:18).
Some
material is found in all four Gospels, including information about
John the Baptist, the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand,
and the story of the crucifixion and the resurrection (although the
individual accounts of the resurrection differ). Some material
appears in three Gospels, especially in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
These three Gospels have therefore been labeled the “Synoptic
Gospels” (syn = together, optic = view). Stories
found in all three Synoptic Gospels include the transfiguration
(Matt. 17:1–13; Mark 9:2–13; Luke 9:28–36); the
healing of Jairus’s daughter and of a woman with a flow of
blood (Matt. 9:18–26; Mark 5:21–43; Luke 8:41–56);
and the rich young ruler (Matt. 19:16–30; Mark 10:17–31;
Luke 18:18–30). The details do not agree in every respect in
each account, but clearly they represent the same story and exhibit
linguistic dependence on the same source(s).
A
significant amount of material appears in two of the four canonical
Gospels. Matthew and Mark have the story of a Syrophoenician woman
(Matt. 15:21–28; Mark 7:24–30), and both Mark and Luke
tell the story of a widow’s offering to the temple treasury
(Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4). The most significant body
of teachings and sayings found in two Gospels is the material shared
by Matthew and Luke. Each of the Gospels contains material that does
not appear in any other Gospel. Mark has the smallest amount of such
material, John the largest.
The
Gospel of John and the Synoptic Gospels
Based
on a study of the material common to more than one Gospel, and the
material unique to one Gospel, John’s Gospel usually is seen as
distinct from the other three. The most likely explanation for this
is that John was written later, with knowledge of the other Gospels,
and therefore the author saw no need to repeat most of this material
(except what was central to his purposes). Some of the distinctive
features of John’s Gospel are the use of terminology such as
“love,” “light,” “life,” “truth,”
“abide,” “knowledge,” “world,”
and the “I am” statements. Furthermore, certain Synoptic
terms are either rare or absent—for example, “kingdom,”
“demons,” “power,” “pity,”
“gospel,” “preach,” “repent,”
“parable,” “tax collector.” More so than the
Synoptics, John is written from the vantage point of the resurrection
and with the aid of hindsight as well as the Spirit. This is why the
author of John’s Gospel does not refrain from adding commentary
to Jesus’ words (e.g., 2:21–22; 7:39; 11:51–52;
12:16).
The
Synoptic Gospels are more interrelated. In passages that appear in
these three Gospels, there is often very close verbal agreement
between them (e.g., the healing of the leper [Matt. 8:2; Mark
1:40–44; Luke 5:12–14]; the question of Jesus’
authority [Matt. 21:23–27; Mark 11:27–33; Luke 20:1–8]),
implying a common source. In many sections that are found in all
three Synoptic Gospels, two agree extensively and the third diverges
(e.g., Matt. 20:24–28 and Mark 10:41–45 against Luke
22:24–27). When two Gospels agree and one disagrees, Matthew
and Mark often agree against Luke, and Luke and Mark often agree
against Matthew; but Matthew and Luke do not often agree against Mark
and never do so in regard to the order of material. At other points,
the Gospel accounts diverge quite significantly when referring to the
same events. The infancy narratives in Matthew are quite different
from those in Luke. The two accounts of the parable of the wedding
banquet (Matt. 22:2–14; Luke 14:16–24) differ so
significantly that it is difficult to decide whether they are two
versions of the same parable or two different stories. Reports on the
resurrection diverge across all four Gospels.
It
is possible that these similarities and differences can be traced
back to the oral presentation of the gospel. Apostolic preaching
would have formed itself into set ways of retelling the events of
Jesus’ ministry through repetition. These accounts may have
been told originally in Aramaic before being translated into Greek to
facilitate the Gentile mission. The authors of Matthew, Mark, and
Luke could have been drawing from this common tradition in writing
their Gospels. There is probably a degree of truth to this theory,
but it cannot explain all the data. The theory does not account for
similarities and differences in the order of events, nor does it
explain why Matthew and Luke always return to Mark’s order
after they deviate from it. A common oral tradition does not
adequately explain similar editorial comments (e.g., cf. Matt. 24:15
with Mark 13:14), which suggest a common written source.
Some
have argued that the apostles or others wrote records of the words of
Jesus (memorabilia), which were collected and written down topically,
from which the Synoptic Gospels were composed. As the church grew
numerically and geographically, various collections of these
memorabilia were made. Again, this is not beyond the realm of
possibility; however, working against this theory is the complete
absence of any reference to such records. Furthermore, as with the
oral theory, it does not explain agreement in the order of material.
It does, however, highlight the probability that the evangelists were
using written sources.
Markan
Priority and Q
On
the assumption that the writers of the Synoptic Gospels employed a
written source(s), several scholars have tried to reconstruct this
original written Gospel from the material in the Synoptic Gospels.
This document, which scholars call the Urevangelium (German for
“original Gospel”), ended up bearing very close
similarities with the Gospel of Mark. This is not surprising, since
nearly all of Mark is repeated in Matthew and Luke. This led to the
belief that Mark was the most primitive Synoptic Gospel, and that it
was a common source for Matthew and Luke.
This
belief in Markan priority, which has gained increasing popularity
since the nineteenth century, has helped explain the similarities
among the Synoptic Gospels. Traditionally, Matthew was thought to be
the first Gospel to be written, hence the order of the Gospels in our
NT. This belief in Matthean priority was upheld by several early
church writers such as Augustine, who saw Mark as an abridgement of
Matthew (Cons. 1.2). Augustine may have been more influenced by the
traditional ordering of the Gospels than by an analysis of the
Gospels themselves. Mark’s Gospel does not read like an
abridgement; it is the shortest Gospel, but individual sections of it
typically are longer and more detailed than in Matthew.
There
are many reasons why the priority of Mark is probable. It is the
shortest Gospel, containing 661 verses, whereas Matthew contains
1,068 and Luke contains 1,149. When their content is compared,
97.2 percent of Mark is paralleled in Matthew, and 88.4 percent
of Mark is paralleled in Luke. It is easier to understand Matthew and
Luke as using Mark and choosing to add additional material to it than
to think of Mark as using Matthew, Luke, or both and deciding to omit
material such as the birth narratives and the Sermon on the Mount.
Mark has simpler Greek, which includes an extensive use of the
present tense, redundancies (e.g., Mark 1:32: “that evening
after sunset”; cf. Matt. 8:16: “when evening came”;
Luke 4:40: “at sunset”), and various colloquialisms
(e.g., the word for “mat” in Mark 2:4). Mark alone among
the Gospels uses Aramaic terms such as abba (14:36), talitha koum
(5:41), and ephphatha (7:34), although Matthew also mentions Eloi,
Eloi, lama sabachthani (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). It is easier to see
how Luke and Matthew would have “improved” Mark than the
reverse.
If
we accept the priority of Mark, and Luke and Matthew’s
dependence upon it, there are still the sections of Matthew and Luke
that bear strong similarities with each other. From an analysis of
the text of Matthew and Luke, it appears that these two evangelists
did not know each other’s works. If one knew of the other’s
work, why the divergence in some material such as the birth
narratives? Alongside this, however, there are close similarities in
other material: Matthew has 4,290 words that have parallels in Luke
but not in Mark, and Luke has 3,559 words that have parallels in
Matthew but not in Mark. The solution appears to be that Matthew and
Luke were dealing with some material that they held in common, and
that each of them also had other material that he drew on
independently. The material held in common is commonly called “Q”
(from the German word Quelle, meaning “source”); the
material unique to Matthew is called “M” and that which
is unique to Luke, “L.” Whether Q was a document is
unknown, although it is more likely to be a collection of sources, as
is also the case with M and L.
Many
scholars argue that Q was a written rather than an oral source, based
on the exact word parallels in the Greek text (e.g., Matt. 6:24 and
Luke 16:13, where 27 of the 28 words are exactly the same). The
presence of doublets (double accounts of the same incident) in
Matthew and Luke may show dependence by the respective evangelists on
both a Markan and a Q source (e.g., Luke 8:16; cf. Mark 4:21; Luke
11:33; cf. Matt. 5:15). Some scholars have tried to explain the
sources geographically: Markan material originated in Rome, Q
material in Antioch, M in Jerusalem, and L in Caesarea, but such
speculations are far from proven.
Summary
Within
all of this, in seeking to understand the harmony of the Gospels, it
is important to be aware of what we do not know. Many of the
solutions focus on a history behind the text to which we do not have
access. Modern literary critics have tended to focus more on the text
itself than its prehistory. There is merit in this because it affirms
the priority of the text and allows the reader to understand how a
part of the text functions within the larger literary unit. It also
allows the evangelists to be more than collectors of sources, to have
written distinctive theological accounts. Their different emphases
may explain some of the differences between the Gospels. This
approach, however, also has its dangers. Some who focus on the text
over its original intent distance the text from the author’s
purpose and therefore open the door for subjective interpretations
that deny the difference between a correct and an incorrect reading
of the text. It also raises the danger of reading an ancient text
through modern eyes, losing sight of the original context.
The
church has been well served by four Gospel traditions. The fact that
esteem for the text has stopped overharmonization has been of great
benefit, as the readers of the Gospels can appreciate various hues
and emphases between the different accounts of the ministry of Jesus.
