See Part 1 General Comments
Matthew,
Mark and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels, because they all present a
similar view of Jesus’s life and ministry.
(This is in contrast to the Gospel of John, who presents a much
different view. I’ll write about the
problems between John and the synoptics in the next section.)
However,
careful analysis of the synoptic Gospels shows that not only do they have the
same view points, but the synoptic Gospels are word for word identical for much
of the time.
This
means that they aren’t 3 independent accounts.
Someone was obviously copying from someone else.
Bart Ehrman, in his lectures on the New Testament, says that he often has
trouble making his students believe that 3 independent accounts cannot by
coincidence alone produce passages that are word-for-word exactly the
same. So he says he does an exercise
where he walks into class and rearranges things on his desk for 5 minutes
without saying anything. Then he has
everyone in the class write down a description of what has happened, and
afterwards the class compares to see if anyone produced sentences exactly the
same as someone else. Inevitably, there
are no exact duplicates of sentences. “So,”
Ehrman asks, “if you find a group of documents that were written many years
after the event, and they all had sentences that were word for word exactly the
same, what would this tell you?” At this
point, Ehrman claims, someone in the class will usually yell out, “It’s a
miracle.”
Well,
says Ehrman, those are our two options. Either
the synoptic Gospels were copied from each other, or else there was some sort
of divine miracle that caused them to be word-for-word the same at certain
passages. However, Ehrman adds, if you
assume a divine miracle for the passages that are the same, then you are going
to have trouble explaining the contradictions in passages that are
different. As I’ve mentioned in part 4,
a certain amount of discrepancy might be excusable in human eyewitnesses, but
in divine revelation it doesn’t make sense that God is always contradicting
himself.
So,
if the synoptic Gospels are copied from each other, then which one is the
original, and which two are the copies?
Scholars
have generally assumed that Mark is the original, because the Gospel of Mark is
the shortest, and Matthew and Luke both contain most of the material that is in
Mark, plus their own substantial additions.
Scholars assume that it is more likely that Matthew and Luke would be
adding material to their source material, and less likely that Mark’s Gospel
would be deleting material from his source material.
This
is problematic for Church tradition, because Church tradition says that Matthew
wrote his Gospel first. In order to try
to preserve this Church tradition, at one time there used to be a theory that
Matthew could have written his gospel first, and then Mark wrote his gospel which was intended
as a short summary of Matthew. But that
doesn’t really make sense for a whole bunch of technical linguistic
reasons. For example, Matthew seems to
be correcting factual mistakes in Mark, or fixing the grammar, or getting rid
of the redundancies. It makes sense that Matthew would be trying
to improve on the original material that he was using as a source but it doesn’t
make sense that Mark would be taking Matthew’s account and adding mistakes or
deliberately sabotaging the grammar, or adding in redundancies.
This
is just a very brief summary of the issue.
Whole books are written on the synoptic issue, so for more hard hitting
analysis of the technical side of it see HERE, HERE, or HERE.
Moreover,
whenever Matthew and Luke can both use Mark as a source, they tell the same
story (with occasionally some added minor details or changes). But when Matthew and Luke are writing stories
for which they can not go to Mark as a common source, then they contradict each
other wildly.
For
example, there is nothing written in Mark’s Gospel about the birth of
Jesus. (Mark’s Gospel just starts when
Jesus is already an adult.) So Matthew
and Luke have no common source for the birth stories, and have to make up the
stories on their own.
In
Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph and Mary start by living in Bethlehem,
then have to flee to Egypt
when Herod kills all the newborn baby boys.
Then later, after Herod dies, they return from Egypt, but are warned in a dream not to go back
to Bethlehem so they resettle in Nazareth instead.
In
Luke, Mary and Joseph start by living in Nazareth, but then there is some sort
of strange census which for some reason requires everyone to go back to their
ancestral town, so they go down to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus, and then
return to their home in Nazareth after the birth.
(Sidenote:
The details of either birth story, by the way, are not supported by
history. We have no record of Herod
killing all the newborn baby boys in Bethlehem,
or of this Empire-wide Roman census that required everyone to go back to their
ancestral towns. It appears Matthew and
Luke are just making their stories up.
Both seem to be trying, in separate ways, to get around an awkward
problem: Jesus was well known to have been from Nazareth
but the prophesies predicted the Messiah would from Bethlehem.
So how to explain that Jesus was born in Bethlehem
even though he was from Nazareth?)
Another
example is that in Mark, in its original form, Jesus never appears to anyone
after the resurrection. (Mark 16:9-20
was added much later. This should be
footnoted in your Bible). In Mark as it
was originally written, the women see the empty tomb, they run away, and then the
Gospel just ends there, and Jesus never makes any appearances after his death.
So
Matthew and Luke, when they were writing their Gospels, could copy from Mark
only up to the point of the empty tomb story, but then after the empty tomb,
they were left on their own to write the stories of the resurrected Jesus’s appearance
to the disciples, and for this section they again contradict each other
wildly. In fact, they contradict each
other on just about every point that it’s possible to contradict on.
In
Matthew’s Gospel, the disciples are told that Jesus has been resurrected, and
to prove it he will meet them in Galilee. So they all trudge all the way out to Galilee
(the Gospel says many of them were still skeptical that Jesus had risen, but
they went out to Galilee anyway) where Jesus
met them. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus
appears to the disciples while they are still in Jerusalem,
and then leads them out to Bethany,
where he ascends into heaven from there.
In Acts (which is written by the same author as Luke) the disciples are
explicitly told not to leave Jerusalem
until they receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Unless
you assume Mark was the first Gospel, it doesn’t make sense that Matthew and
Luke would both follow Mark for the points that Mark had written on, but then go
off on completely different stories at precisely the points on which Mark is
silent.
Now
again, none of this is crazy left-wing scholarship. All of this was explained to me in my
religion 101 class at my conservative Christian college. I remember this lecture very well, because I
remember at this point getting very confused, and I raised my hand and asked, “But,
wasn’t Matthew an eyewitness?”
“Exactly!”
the professor responded. “So why would
Matthew, who was an eyewitness, be copying down from John Mark, who wasn’t
even there? This is one of the reasons
scholars think the Gospel of Matthew wasn’t actually written by Matthew.”
The
professor then went on to explain some of the other reasons why scholars don’t
think the Gospels were written by their traditional authors.
The
Q Hypothesis
There are
sections of Matthew and Luke which are word for word the same, but do not
appear in Mark. More specifically, there
are a number of sayings of Jesus which are word for word the same, and which furthermore
appear in the same order in both Matthew and Luke, but not Mark.
Once
again, note that this could not have been from coincidence. They had to be copying from somewhere.
So,
since these passages are not in Mark, is Matthew copying from Luke or is Luke
copying from Matthew?
Well,
probably neither. Or at least if the
author of Matthew knew about Luke, or vice-versa, then he obviously didn’t
trust him above half. Remember in the
places where Mark is not a common source—the birth narratives and the
resurrection appearances—Matthew and Luke tell completely different stories
which contradict each other on everything.
So if somehow the author of Luke knew about Matthew, he obviously didn’t
trust anything Matthew had to say about the birth of Christ or the
resurrection.
So
since the authors of the Gospels Matthew and Luke either didn’t know each
other, or mistrusted each other, it is hypothesized by scholars that there must
have been some collections of sayings of Jesus (so named as the “Q” source)
which both Matthew and Luke were copying from, and which has since been lost to
history.
This
is another reason why it is problematic to claim that Matthew’s Gospel is
direct eye-witness testimony. The author
of Matthew is apparently copying straight out of the Q source, and we don’t
even know who wrote the Q source, or how reliable it is. Did an eyewitness write Q? Is it a collected oral tradition? Or did someone somewhere just make it
up? Scholarship has no idea, and church
tradition is entirely silent on the issue.
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