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The Synoptic Problem: Some Unorthodox Solutions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
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The expression ‘synoptic orthodoxy’ will be used in what follows to designate the view, first, that the authors of the first and third gospels oth used the second gospel in a form very similar to that in which we have it; second, that they neither of them had access to the other's work, but both used a document consisting mainly of sayings of Christ (Q) as well as the second gospel; and third, that all the gospels were originally written in Greek, however much their language may have been coloured by the Semitic background of the authors or of the good news which they proclaimed. For the moment the first three gospels will be referred to respectively simply as ‘Matthew’, ‘Mark’ and ‘Luke’, without prejudice to the identity of their authors; a more complex terminology will have to be coined when the need arises.
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- Copyright © 1963 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 In 1835.
2 London 1924.
3 Mark's ‘He could do there no mighty work’ (6.5) is parallel to Luke's ‘He did there no mighty work’. And the ambiguity in Mark's story of the raising of Jairus' daughter (was she actually dead?) does not appear in Luke.
4 New York 1933.
5 p. ix.
6 As a companion volume to Our Translated Gospels.
7 e.g. Matthew Black in An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Oxford 1954).
8 op. cit., pp. 244, 249.
9 The Originality of St Matthew, 1951.
10 Chicago 1953. This book seems to me to be of much underrated importance. I cannot help feeling that its neglect derives from the assumption that no author who does not accept the theory of Marcan priority is worth serious consideration.
11 A Primitive Christian Calendar, 1952.
12 Carrington himself adumbrates the hypothesis when he says (op. cit., p. 61): ‘ A gospel very much like Mark must have existed in Syria before Mark arrived.’ On the same page he cites Matthew 14. 12-13 as a passage parallel to Mark which seems to preserve a more authentic reminiscence than Mark. To admit this, and to account for it in terms of the theory of Marcan priority, would require a very complicated and implausible hypothesis.
13 Our Translated Gospels, p. 261: ‘The Gospel of Mark differs decidedly from its fellows in that it seems to be an abridgment, a digest of material known to its author but utilised only in part.’ This is specially interesting as independent confirmation of the existence of signs of editorial excisions in Mark admitted by one who did not hold that Mark abbreviated either Matthew or a more primitive version of it.
14 Torrey expresses doubt whether any writer ever went through such a procedure with regard to his sources as the authors of both Matthew and Luke are supposed to have done on the accepted theory (p. 261). Certainly this theory would be more plausible if convincing parallels could be adduced.
15 Streeter says (The Four Gospels Vol. I, p. 500) that all the Fathers who give evidence had read Irenaeus, and that Irenaeus had read the dictum of Papias. Thus, he says, the whole patristic consensus can be traced to a single source. Surely the inference is rather that it is conceivable, though not very likely, that all the evidence is dependent on this source, than that it is probably °r certainly so.
16 Cf. A. Deissmann, Mysterium Christi, p. 21ff. Deissmann calls the offensive Matthean text ‘a piece of primitive rock on which the historian can as confidently build as on any other tradition anywhere in the history of the world.’ Soon afterwards he writes ‘It happens that the Barabbas passage in Matthew depends on Mark. If therefore the original text of Matthew had Jesus Barabbas this double name was used also in Mark’.
17 It is generally agreed that the present ending of Mark (16.9 ff) did not form part of the original text.
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