Rethinking the Synoptic Problem

Black, David Alan, Beck, David R.

• Editorial: Baker Academic
• Año: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781441206428
• Categoría: Theologie & Religion
• Categoría: Biblische Studien

The problematic literary relationship among the Synoptic Gospels has given rise to numerous theories of authorship and priority. The primary objective of Rethinking the Synoptic Problem is to familiarize students with the main positions held by New Testament scholars in this much-debated area of research. The contributors to this volume, all leading biblical scholars, highlight current academic trends within New Testament scholarship and updates evangelical understandings of the Synoptic Problem.

1

THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM

Where We Stand at the Start
of a New Century

CRAIG L. BLOMBERG

In the early 1960s, a history of modern biblical scholarship claimed that the solution to the Synoptic problem was one of the few settled issues of recent criticism: Matthew and Luke each used Mark, along with a second, shorter source designated Q (from the German Quelle for “source”) for the non-Markan material they shared.[1] Toward the end of the 1990s, some scholars virtually claimed that this two-source hypothesis had been disproved![2] In fact, neither claim was warranted, but there is today considerably greater diversity of scholarly opinion than there was forty years ago. This paper surveys the landscape; subsequent presentations argue, in turn, for three different, specific solutions.

I begin with three disclaimers. First, I am not the most obvious choice of the four speakers on this topic to provide the broad overview. Three of us—Scot McKnight, Darrell Bock, and I—are peers. I had the privilege of going to seminary with Scot and to graduate school with Darrell. We have all studied and written widely on the Synoptic Gospels,[3] but none of us has committed an entire career to researching the Synoptic problem the way William Farmer has.[4] He could no doubt provide a far more nuanced overview of the state of the art, but I have been chosen for that task so that he can argue in detail for his preferred position, and because I may not be quite as strongly committed to any one perspective as are our other presenters.

Second, because this conference is occuring in an evangelical context, it is important to state up front that none of the major solutions to the Synoptic problem is inherently more or less compatible with historic Christian views of the inspiration and authority of Scripture. Nevertheless, certain versions of particular solutions clearly are less compatible, most notably when it is assumed, after determining directions of literary dependence among paralleled material, that unparalleled material can have come only from the Gospel writers’ imaginations. But as I try to formulate a particular approach, I do so understanding that I am trying to determine how the Gospels’ human authors wrote, in keeping with Luke’s prologue that describes him functioning as would other historians or biographers of his day—relying on previously written sources, interviewing eyewitnesses, ordering and crafting his material to support his distinctive theological emphases, all for the sake of commending the truth of the Gospel (Luke 1:1–4). I simultaneously affirm that the results of my investigation will demonstrate how God superintended the process of creating an inerrant Scripture that included exactly what he wanted it to include (2 Pet. 1:21), but that does not alter the actual contents of the texts of the Synoptics with which all interpreters, of whatever ideological perspective, must grapple. Thus, my survey must scan all major contributions to the topic, irrespective of the theological commitments of their proponents.

Third, I limit this survey to what has traditionally come under the rubric of the “Synoptic problem”—the question of the written sources of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the literary interrelationship of these three Gospels. The most recent history of the Synoptic problem, by David Dungan, casts its net far more widely, covering issues of textual criticism, canonization, and hermeneutics as well, demonstrating the interrelatedness of each of these three issues with source-critical questions.[5] It is a fascinating study that I highly commend, but I cannot hope in this short time to do anything as wide-ranging.

With this introduction, let us turn to the major solutions to the Synoptic problem. I discuss them in what I perceive to be a decreasing order of probability, which also roughly corresponds to a decreasing order of how commonly each is held. Obviously, not all of us agree that these two sequences match each other. Also I focus on the most recent and important work in each area, because the literature is voluminous and others have well documented earlier developments.[6]

The Four-Document Hypothesis

I have already alluded to the two-document hypothesis as the view that Matthew and Luke each used Mark and Q. In his classic presentation of this perspective in 1924, B. H. Streeter included two other documents: Matthew and Luke also relied on written sources, designated M and L respectively, for much of the nonparalleled material in each of their narratives.[7] We may look at each of these parts of the four-source hypothesis separately, again in decreasing order of probability and acceptance.

Markan Priority

Despite the alternatives soon to be mentioned, the vast majority of the introductions and surveys of the Gospels or of the life of Christ and the major commentaries on each of the Synoptics, along with studies more focused on individual themes or passages within those Gospels, all presuppose that Matthew and Luke each used Mark. I briefly list what I think are the nine most important reasons for this in my Jesus and the Gospels: (1) Mark frequently contains vivid touches, possibly the product of eyewitness testimony, that Matthew or Luke omit. (2) Matthew and Luke often seem to smooth out Mark’s rougher grammar. (3) Matthew and Luke often omit potentially misleading details in Mark. (4) Mark is the shortest of the Synoptics, yet within individual pericopae he is consistently longer than Matthew or Luke, an unlikely result of later abbreviation. (5) Less than 10 percent of Mark is nonparalleled; why would Mark have written at all if longer, fuller treatments were already available and he had so little new to say? (6) Comparatively, Matthew and Luke rarely differ from Mark in the same way at the same time, whereas Mark and Matthew much more frequently agree with each other against Luke, as do Luke and Mark against Matthew. (7) Mark contains the highest incidence of Aramaisms among the Synoptics. (8) There seems to be no reason for Mark’s omission of so much of Matthew and Luke that contains many of Jesus’ most precious teachings, if Mark knew of them from a source. (9) When one assumes Markan priority, coherent patterns of redactional emphases emerge in ways that are not true on alternative models.[8] More detailed evangelical treatments of these and other points may be found in works by Robert Stein, Donald Guthrie, and Scot McKnight.[9] From other theological traditions, Joseph Fitzmyer and Christopher Tuckett are particularly thorough and persuasive in their presentations.[10]

Because Markan priority is so widely accepted, there are but few detailed new works pursuing the question further. Nevertheless, we may mention six areas where progress in the last decade has been made. First, Maurice Casey has devoted an entire book to the Aramaic sources of Mark.[11] Doubtless he has overstated his case. Several of his points depend on his somewhat idiosyncratic and nontitular understanding of the Aramaic background for “Son of man” or on his evolutionary hypothesis of early Christianity that sees the historical Jesus as nothing more than a Jewish prophet.[12] Still, the Aramaic substrata Casey discerns (e.g., in Mark 2:23–3:6 and 10:35–45) do suggest sufficiently that Mark’s Greek translation often renders Jesus’ words more literally than do Matthew or Luke.

Second, the young British evangelical Peter Head has published an important dissertation on the use of the christological argument in solving the Synoptic problem. Arguing, contra standard defenses of Markan priority, that Matthew and Luke do not uniformly clear up potentially embarrassing or confusing details of Mark’s presentation of Jesus, Head nevertheless concludes that selected aspects of Matthew’s Christology, particularly his use of the titles Teacher, Lord, Christ, and Son of David, do make much more sense on the assumption that Matthew was using Mark rather than vice-versa.[13]

Third, David New has analyzed all of the quotations of the Old Testament in the Synoptics, of which Matthew by far includes the most. He compares them with Hebrew and Greek versions of the Old Testament, arguing that even Matthew’s most distinctive, nonparalleled forms may reflect lesser-known versions of the Septuagint. Still, there is a difference between Matthew’s paralleled and nonparalleled material that New believes can be accounted for only by Markan priority. If Mark depended on Matthew, why would he select only those quotations with a text-form relatively close to the standard versions of the Septuagint? Matthew, on the other hand, might be expected to go his own way in rendering Old Testament passages when he was not relying on Mark.[14]

Fourth, the minor agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark, long held to be a problem for Markan priority and the Q hypothesis, continue to be heavily studied. A symposium in Göttingen and a study by Andreas Ennulat have identified, categorized, and tried to explain these agreements in massive detail,[15] but perhaps the most helpful recent study is a short article by Robert Stein. After listing eight of the most common explanations of these minor agreements, Stein points out that a parallel phenomenon exists when comparing John with the Synoptics. At numerous points, John agrees in wording or selection of detail with one of the Synoptics over against another, but no one argues on this basis that John is prior to the Synoptics.[16] Indeed, most find John not only later but also largely if not entirely independent from the written forms of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It is much more likely that the overlaps noted reflect key aspects of the early Christian kerygma that at times were passed down orally in relatively fixed form.[17] The same hypothesis may well account for many of the minor agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark.

Fifth, substantial study continues to focus on the possible overlap between Mark and Q to account for some of the minor agreements. Despite the fact that those who reject the Q hypothesis frequently complain that postulating overlapping material between these two sources is simply a convenient way to avoid problems with the two-source hypothesis, it is surely improbable that two important early accounts of portions of Jesus’ life and teaching would never cover the same ground at any point. It is less clear, however, that we have any criteria that actually enable us to demonstrate the literary dependence of Mark on Q or their independence; careful studies of the question have arrived at opposing answers.[18]

Finally, proponents of virtually all positions in the debate agree that the key to establishing any other theory as superior to Markan priority is to demonstrate that the same kind of consistent and significant patterns of redaction—both stylistic and theological—that the two-source hypothesis has spawned emerge when one assumes that Mark is not first.[19] The only full-scale commentary on Mark that has attempted to do this, by C. S. Mann in the Anchor Bible series, contains precious few actual exegetical observations to this end, after a voluminous introduction,[20] while Sherman Johnson has produced a monograph comparing Markan priority and posteriority and showing how numerous key themes in the Synoptics would appear with each.[21] Judicious in his conclusions and recognizing that the data do not unilaterally support any one theory, Johnson nevertheless determines that, overall, Markan priority makes best sense of the data.

The Q Hypothesis

If Markan priority has generated a relatively small amount of scholarly study in the last decade or so, the same can scarcely be said of the Q hypothesis. Initially, this theory was relatively modest and noncontroversial. A source of primarily sayings material was postulated to account for material that Matthew and Luke have in common not found in Mark, once it was determined that neither Matthew nor Luke uniformly demonstrates the tendencies that would be needed to claim direct literary dependence of one upon the other.[22] More recently, however, enormous amounts of literature have churned from the presses analyzing the contents, structure, theology, tradition-history, rhetoric, sociology, and audience of this hypothetical source.[23] The International Q Project is the name given to the work of a group organized by the Society of Biblical Literature to publish a series of detailed volumes on every pericope supposed to have been in Q, complete with a thorough history of scholarly opinion on virtually every word and phrase in the text, culminating in a reconstruction of the most likely original Greek form of the passage.[24]

Among the plethora of studies by those who believe that Q existed, we may discern four broad categories. First, and probably best known, is a small and very radical group of scholars, made famous in North America by their disproportionately large representation in the Jesus Seminar. These would argue that the earliest form of Q portrays Jesus as an itinerant teacher and sage, closely parallel to the countercultural Cynics of the Greco-Roman world of his day. Within this category, pride of place goes to Burton Mack and John Dominic Crossan for their lengthy unpacking of this hypothesis.[25] Less well-known but also less overstated are the works of the British scholar F. G. Downing, who would otherwise significantly distance himself from the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar.[26] Important refutations of this position appear in an article by Christopher Tuckett and a book by Gregory Boyd.[27] Most important, perhaps, are the observations that of all the Greco-Roman philosophies Cynicism seems to have made the least inroads into Israel and that the very texts that most call to mind Cynic behavior (Mark 6:7–13 pars.) find Jesus commanding the disciples to forgo the characteristic beggar’s purse of the Cynic itinerant.

The second category of Q studies comes closest to forming a current consensus. While not explicitly arguing that Jesus resembled a Cynic philosopher, a significant number of scholars, particularly in North America, have concluded that the earliest strata of Q portray Jesus as a merely human sage, dispensing wisdom with notable parallels to Deuteronomy, playing down the apocalyptic elements that later tradition would add back in, and outlining an ethical manifesto of compassion for the social underdog and love for one’s enemies that remains a timely challenge for people today in a world filled with racism, sexism, and tribalism. John Kloppenborg from Toronto is often credited with best articulating this perspective, with whom one might compare especially Arland Jacobson and James Robinson.[28]

The third group, particularly prominent in Britain, carries on the consensus tradition of a previous generation and inverts the tradition-history of the recent North American trend. According to this position, the earliest layers of Q contain sufficient apocalyptic material for us to label Jesus a prophet operating within very Jewish...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction—David Alan Black and David R. Beck
• 1. The Synoptic Problem: Where We Stand at the Start of a New Century—Craig L. Blomberg
• 2. Questions about Q—Darrell L. Bock
• 3. A Generation Who Knew Not Streeter: The Case for Markan Priority—Scot McKnight
• 4. The Case for the Two-Gospel Hypothesis—William R. Farmer
• 5. Response—Grant R. Osborne
• Notes
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index