A Beginner's Guide to New Testament Studies

Understanding Key Debates

Gupta, Nijay K.

• Editorial: Baker Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781493422203
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This accessible and balanced introduction helps readers sort out key views on the most important debated issues in New Testament studies. Well-known New Testament scholar Nijay Gupta fairly presents the spectrum of viewpoints on thirteen topics and offers reflections on why scholars disagree on these matters. Written to be accessible to students and readers without advanced training in New Testament studies, this book will serve as an excellent supplementary text for New Testament introduction courses.

ONE
The Synoptic Problem

One of my favorite stories in the Gospels is about the woman who anoints Jesus. Recollecting this story from memory, I remember that she brings a very expensive jar of ointment made of spikenard—a costly herb native to India. She anoints Jesus and washes his feet with her tears. She is a sinful woman, and Jesus recognizes her repentance and forgives her. The Pharisees are upset because this suspicious woman is behaving improperly, but Jesus commends her because she has been forgiven for so much and all the more is her love; her story will be told for generations wherever the gospel is preached.

Which Gospel is this story from? Well, if you look it up in the New Testament Gospels, you will find that I have inadvertently combined and mixed up details from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The gist of my summary above resembles the story of the sinful woman who is forgiven in Luke 7:36–50. But a few pieces of information that I accidentally added appear only in Matthew or Mark. Mark mentions that this ointment is made from spikenard (Mark 14:3; neither Luke nor Matthew has this detail). Matthew is the one who mentions that this woman’s fame will go out to all the world (Matt. 26:13). Though in Matthew’s telling her repute involves her anointing Jesus with this ointment, not necessarily her extraordinary love. When we compare Luke against the other Gospels, Luke says that she weeps on Jesus’s feet; Matthew and Mark do not offer this information. Luke mentions that she is a sinful woman, but Matthew refers to her only as a woman. Matthew and Mark seem to be telling the exact same story with only slight variation in some of the details. Luke appears to be sharing a story with a few overlapping aspects, but it potentially could be a different story—and yet how likely is it that on separate occasions two different women unexpectedly come to Jesus in a home with an alabaster jar of expensive ointment, cover him with it in some fashion, are criticized by dinner guests, and are defended by Jesus?

When we compare Matthew, Mark, and Luke in this way—lining up their versions of a particular story or saying and trying to puzzle out how they are similar and different—we are engaging in what scholars call the “Synoptic Problem.” The word “synoptic” means “seen together,” and it is used to refer to these three Gospels, since they can be placed side by side and compared and contrasted because of their similarities—what we might call “family resemblances.” How can it be that these Gospels seem so similar in ordering (for the most part), inclusion of material (for the most part), and verbal overlap (sometimes), and yet there are some major differences (e.g., very different beginnings and endings) and numerous small differences?

And what about John? John is often studied separately from the Synoptic Gospels, because it is so different. John has no exorcisms and a very limited number of Jesus’s miracles, for example, compared to the Synoptics. John is more likely to recount Jesus talking about “eternal life” than about the “kingdom of God.” So, when we bring John into the mix, it is all the more clear that the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) belong together; they seem to have some sort of shared background, or they share some kind of original set of traditions. Or perhaps one or two of them is dependent on the third.

Have you ever wondered why the early Christians came to include four Gospels in their canon? Why not just one (such as Matthew) or two (Luke and John)? Why not just the earliest one because it is closest to the time of Jesus, or the latest one because it would include the most time-tested traditions? Does it not set Christians up for confusion to have four different Gospels? Sometimes I have heard this explained by the analogy of multiple witnesses to a crime. Imagine three different people who view a car accident. When they are independently interviewed by the police, surely they will end up agreeing on a few key elements of what happened: maybe that the incident happened around 10 a.m. on Thursday; there were two vehicles, a car and a truck. And maybe also that one car was wrecked and the other was fine. But we might also expect that, based on human error and various viewpoints, some details would be different between the witnesses: one witness might say the truck had one person, but another saw two people. Or they might disagree about who was at fault for the accident.

This analogy relates to the Synoptic Gospels in some ways, but the matter is more complex than chalking up differences to human error or point of view. What if two of the witnesses of the car accident are brothers and they talk at length about the incident before being interviewed? What if all three could recall both license plates perfectly, but then they disagreed about the states of the license plates? The scholarship on the Synoptic Problem attempts to address how these three Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—are noticeably similar and yet have many differences in how they word things, how they arrange material, and what they include or leave out.

A Long History of Investigation

Many of us discover the Synoptic Problem in college or seminary, but in truth this conversation and investigation has been going on for almost two thousand years. A third-century theologian named Origen attempted to trace the development of the writing of the Gospels and gave this account: “I have learned by tradition that the Gospel according to Matthew . . . was written first; and that he composed it in the Hebrew tongue and published it for the converts from Judaism. The second written was that according to Mark, who wrote it according to the instruction of Peter. . . . And third, was that according to Luke, the Gospel commended by Paul, which he composed for the converts from the Gentiles. Last of all, that according to John.”1 As you can see, Origen was especially interested (as others were in his time) in priority (who wrote first), ordering, influences, and audience/purpose. The Gospels were clearly not written as free-floating literary works for intellectual consumption. They had some unique interests and objectives. But the Synoptic Problem has to do with their interrelationship: How is it that they are part of the same family? And how are these family members related?

We will engage with these questions with two different perspectives in view. The most common approach to answering these questions focuses on textual or literary relationships (who copied from whom). We will call this the “literary-dependence perspective.” In recent years, though, some scholars have tried to incorporate what they have learned from oral cultures into their answers to the Synoptic Problem. Many of these scholars are still interested in the question of copying, but they acknowledge that this process would have looked different in a primarily oral culture.

Literary-Dependence Perspective

As a professor, sometimes I have to deal with plagiarism, that unfortunate occasion when you get two papers or exams that have a lot of word-for-word overlap. Clearly somebody copied off of someone else. Usually, even without talking to the people involved, you can highlight the similar or identical portions and detect the copied bits, but unless someone confesses to copying, it is actually pretty difficult to figure out who wrote first and who copied. We have a somewhat similar challenge with the Synoptic Gospels, insofar as scholars have debated and disagreed about who’s first. Let’s say that one of the Gospels was composed first, and others depended on that first one for a large amount of information but also incorporated information from other sources. How would you decide which one was written first?2

St. Augustine came up with a theory about the interrelationship of the Synoptics. He argued that Matthew was written first; Mark came second, abbreviating Matthew’s Gospel. And Luke came next, utilizing both Matthew and Mark.3 Until the nineteenth century, the view was rather popular that Matthew was first. But eventually scholars by and large came to believe that Mark was written earlier than Matthew and Luke. There are many reasons for this conclusion of Markan priority—for example, Mark supplies some Aramaic words where Matthew and Luke offer only the word in Greek; and it makes more sense that Matthew and Luke (both longer Gospels than Mark) would add information about Jesus’s teachings (like the Sermon on the Mount), rather than that Mark would choose to cut out material (if the shorter Mark borrowed, let’s say, from the longer Matthew).

At present, the most popular theory (presuming literary dependence) is that Matthew and Luke depended on Mark; that is, they had access to Mark’s Gospel and wrote their Gospels based on his (with some editorial freedoms), but clearly they had other sources as well. If you take out of Matthew and Luke passages or stories that are also in Mark, you are left with two kinds of material: (1) material unique to their respective Gospels (e.g., Luke’s song of Mary, 1:46–55; Matthew’s Great Commission teaching, 28:16–20) and (2) material that Matthew and Luke have in common (that is not in Mark). Scholars refer to this shared material (2) as coming from a hypothetical source that we call “Q.”

In the study of Jesus and the Gospels, Q is short for the German word Quelle, which means “source.” It is important to know that this is a hypothetical document. There is no such real text in existence—we don’t have a physical copy of Q, or a fragment, and no ancient writer referred to anything called Q—but some scholars believe some kind of document like this must have existed. Take, for example, the teaching of Jesus about the man who builds his house on the rock. This teaching is not in Mark, but it is in Matthew (7:21–27) and Luke (6:46–49). How is it that Matthew and Luke both have this teaching if it is not in Mark? The Q theory explains this. According to scholars invested in relying on Q as a source, this theoretical document would not have been a narrative-based Gospel but more like a collection of teachings of Jesus. Some Q proponents hold loosely to this hypothesis and refuse to go too far down the road of outlining Q in detail. Others have worked hard on mapping out the contents of Q in minute detail. And still others believe there are important reasons to question the existence of Q altogether. For example, Mark Goodacre has argued that the shared material between Matthew and Luke is better explained by Luke using and editing Matthew rather than the two of them separately depending on another source (Q).4

Whatever the ...

Índice

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Synoptic Problem
• 2. The Historical Jesus
• 3. The Fourth Gospel and History
• 4. Jesus and Paul
• 5. Paul’s Theological Perspective
• 6. Paul and the Jewish Law
• 7. Interpreting the Book of Revelation
• 8. Pseudonymity and the New Testament Letters
• 9. The New Testament and the Roman Empire
• 10. Women in Leadership in the New Testament
• 11. Justification by Faith and Judgment according to Works
• 12. The Old Testament in the New Testament
• 13. The Application and Use of Scripture
• Author Index
• Scripture Index
• Back Cover