INT.Chapter 2. Part 1.docx

Chapter Two The Synoptic Gospels INTRODUCTION The first three gospels were first labeled the Synoptic Gospels by J. J. Griesbach, a German biblical scholar, at the end of the eighteenth century. The English adjective synoptic comes from the Greek συνόψις (synopsis), which means “seeing together,” an...

Chapter Two The Synoptic Gospels INTRODUCTION The first three gospels were first labeled the Synoptic Gospels by J. J. Griesbach, a German biblical scholar, at the end of the eighteenth century. The English adjective synoptic comes from the Greek συνόψις (synopsis), which means “seeing together,” and Griesbach chose the word because of the high degree of similarity found among Matthew, Mark, and Luke in their presentations of the ministry of Jesus. These similarities, which involve structure, content, and tone, are evident even to the casual reader. They serve not only to bind the first three gospels together but also to separate them from the Gospel of John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke structure the ministry of Jesus according to a general geographic sequence: ministry in Galilee, withdrawal to the north (with Peter’s confession as a climax and point of transition), ministry in Judea and Perea while Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem (less clear in Luke), and final ministry in Jerusalem. Very little of this sequence is found in John, where the focus is on Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem during his periodic visits to the city. In content, the first three evangelists narrate many of the same events, focusing on Jesus’ healings, exorcisms, and teaching in parables. John, while narrating several significant healings, has no exorcisms and no parables (at least of the type found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke). Also, many of the events we think of as characteristic of the first three gospels, such as the sending out of the Twelve, the transfiguration, the Olivet Discourse, and the Last Supper narrative, are absent from John. By having Jesus constantly on the move and by juxtaposing actions—miracles, especially—with (usually) brief teachings, the first three evangelists convey a tone of intense, rapid-fire action. This is quite in contrast to the more meditative tone of John, who narrates far fewer events than do the synoptic evangelists and who prefers to present Jesus as speaking in long discourses rather than in brief parables or pithy sayings. Over the last two centuries, scholars have scrutinized the Synoptic Gospels from many angles and with many different results. This is inevitable, given the vital importance of these books for Christian belief and life. In these books is narrated the life of the One in whom God has chosen especially to make himself known to human beings. They depict the events on which the significance of history and the destiny of every single individual depend: the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. Issues pertaining to these books individually will be treated in the chapters devoted to each; here we address significant issues that embrace all three accounts. Specifically, we examine three questions: How did the Synoptic Gospels come into being? How should we understand the gospels as works of literature? And what do the gospels tell us about Jesus? THE EVOLUTION OF THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS How did the Synoptic Gospels come to be written? A simple and in some ways adequate answer would be to identify the people who, under inspiration of God’s Spirit, wrote these books, and to note the circumstances in which they were written. These issues are addressed in the introductions devoted to each of the four gospels. But simply identifying the authors of the Synoptic Gospels leaves some questions unanswered. How did the authors get the material about Jesus that they have used? Why are the three accounts so similar at so many places and so different at others? What was the role of the evangelists themselves? Recorders of tradition? Authors with a viewpoint of their own? And, to raise the larger question that lurks behind all of these, why four gospels? These and similar questions have occupied thoughtful Christians since the beginning of the church. A second-century Christian, Tatian, combined all four gospels together in his Diatessaron. Augustine wrote a treatise entitled The Harmony of the Gospels. But scholars have pursued these questions especially vigorously since the rise of modern biblical criticism at the end of the eighteenth century. While we may dismiss as inconsequential some of the questions raised during this time, and even more of the answers as simply wrong, the issue of synoptic origins and relations is one that cannot be avoided. The number and nature of the gospels raise such literary and historical questions. Moreover, one of the evangelists refers to the process by which the gospel material has come to him: Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:1–4) In this introduction to his two-volume “history of Christian origins,” Luke acknowledges three stages in the genesis of his work: the “eyewitnesses and servants of the word” who “handed down” the truth of Jesus; those “many” who have already drawn up accounts of Jesus and the early church; and Luke himself, who, having “carefully investigated” these sources, now composes his own “orderly” account. Investigation of the process to which Luke refers appears to be quite in order. We look first, then, at the earliest stage of transmission, during which eyewitnesses and others handed down the tradition about Jesus, much of it orally; then at the stage when written sources began to grow and become more important; and last, at the stage of final authorship. The Stage of Oral Traditions: Form Criticism In the course of investigation into the origins of the gospels over the last two centuries, several distinct approaches have emerged, each of them emphasizing different aspects or stages. Three approaches in particular have made distinct and significant contributions to the problem of gospel origins and development: form criticism (Formgeschichte), which focuses on the period of oral transmission; source criticism, which focuses on the way different literary units were put together to make up the gospels; and redaction criticism (Redaktionsgeschichte), which focuses on the literary and theological contributions of the authors of the gospels. These methods correspond generally to the three stages mentioned by Luke in his introduction. Yet they are not mutually exclusive; most contemporary gospel critics employ all three simultaneously in what is called traditions analysis or tradition criticism (Traditionsgeschichte). Nevertheless, these three approaches are both historically and methodologically distinct, and we examine each in turn. We begin with form criticism because, though arising only after the heyday of source criticism, it concentrates on the earliest stage in the process by which the gospels came into being: the oral stage. Form critics claim that the early Christians transmitted the words and actions of Jesus by word of mouth for a considerable length of time. Only after two decades or so did the material begin to be put into written sources, with the gospels themselves coming shortly afterward. Description. Form criticism was first applied to the Old Testament by scholars such as Hermann Gunkel and was then brought into New Testament studies in the second and third decades of the twentieth century by a trio of men who had come to recognize that the source-critical approach, pursued rigorously for several decades, had exhausted its potential. These men were Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolf Bultmann. Though differing at several important points, these pioneers of form criticism had in common at least six assumptions and beliefs that came to be the basis for form criticism. 1. The stories and sayings of Jesus circulated in small independent units. The early form critics argued that an exception to this rule was the passion narrative, which they thought was a self-contained literary unit from a very early period. Even this exception is not admitted by many contemporary form critics. 2. The transmission of the gospel material can be compared to the transmission of other folk and religious traditions. Responsibility for this transmission rests not with individuals but with the community within which the material takes shape and is handed down. Certain laws of transmission generally observable in such instances of oral transmission can be applied to the transmission of the gospels. 3. The stories and sayings of Jesus took on certain standard forms (hence “form” criticism, or “the history of forms”) that are for the most part still readily visible in the gospels. Form critics have not agreed on the number and exact nature of these forms. Table 1 presents three influential schemes. 4. The form of a specific story or saying makes it possible to determine its Sitz im Leben (“setting in life”), or function in the life of the early church. According to Bultmann, “The proper understanding of form-criticism rests upon the judgement that the literature in which the life of a given community, even the primitive Christian community, has taken shape, springs out of quite definite conditions and wants of life from which grows up a quite definite style and quite specific forms and categories. Thus, every literary category has its ‘life situation.’ ” 5. As it passed down the sayings and stories of Jesus, the early Christian community not only put the material into certain forms, but it also modified it under the impetus of its own needs and situations. With this point we move from what may be called form criticism proper (a literary enterprise) into a broader conception of the discipline in which historical judgments are being rendered that by and large do not grow out of the discipline as such. Table 1 Terminology of Form Criticism Form Dibelius Bultmann Taylor Brief Sayings of Jesus set in a context (e.g., Mark 12:13–17, which climaxes in Jesus’ saying “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”) Paradigms Apophthegms Pronouncement Stories Stories about Jesus’ miraculous deeds (e.g., the feeding of the 5,000) Tales Miracle Stories Miracle Stories Stories that magnify Jesus as a “hero” (e.g., Luke’s story about Jesus in the temple at twelve years of age [2:41–52]) Legends Historical Stories and Legends Stories about Jesus Teaching of Jesus that does not climax in a single saying (e.g., the Lord’s Prayer) Paranesis Dominical Sayings Sayings and Parables Form critics differ widely over the degree to which the early church modified and created gospel material. Bultmann, for instance, thinks the influence was huge, attributing most of the gospel material to the early church and finding relatively little that can be reliably considered to have come from the earthly ministry of Jesus. He does so because he, with many other form critics, believes that the early church was not concerned to distinguish between things Jesus said while on earth and things that he was continuing to say through prophets in the life of the church. As Norman Perrin puts it, “The modern distinction between historical Jesus and risen Lord is quite foreign to the early church.” Radical historical judgments such as these are not intrinsic to form criticism, and many form critics are much more conservative in their historical assessments. Vincent Taylor is one, and there are others still more conservative who confine the influence of the early church mainly to the arrangement of material (e.g., the series of controversy stories in Mark 2:1–3:6 and parallels). But these are exceptions to the rule, and it must be said that the great majority of form critics have pursued their enterprise with a good measure of historical skepticism. 6. Classic form critics have typically used various criteria to enable them to determine the age and historical trustworthiness of particular pericopes. These criteria are based on certain laws of transmission that are thought to hold good for any orally transmitted material. According to these so-called laws, people tend to (1) lengthen their stories, (2) add details to them, (3) conform them more and more to their own language, and (4) generally preserve and create only what fits their own needs and beliefs. On the basis of these laws, many form critics have declared that gospel material that is shorter, lacks details, contains Semitisms, and does not fit with the interests of the early church or first-century Judaism is earlier and thus more likely to be historical. The last criterion, usually called the criterion of dissimilarity, is especially important for the more radical form critics. By eliminating anything that was likely to have been introduced by the early church or that could have been picked up from the Jewish milieu, advocates of this criterion claim to be able to secure a “critically assured” minimum number of sayings and activities on which a supposedly historical understanding of Jesus can be based. The criterion of dissimilarity, for instance, suggests that Mark 13:32—“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”—may well be original with Jesus, since it uses language not typical of Judaism (“the Son”) and contains a premise (Jesus’ ignorance) that runs counter to a view in the early church. A fifth criterion is a by-product of this one, holding material to be authentic that agrees with material isolated by the criterion of dissimilarity. A sixth criterion, multiple attestation, gives preference to material found in more than one stream of tradition (e.g., Mark and “Q”—about which more below). Evaluation. The historical skepticism that characterizes many of the most prominent form critics has given form criticism itself the reputation of attacking the historicity of the gospels. But as we have suggested above, this need not be the case. As a literary discipline, form criticism entails no a priori judgment about the historicity of the material it analyzes. Moreover, many of the assumptions on which form criticism is based appear to be valid: there was indeed a period of mainly oral transmission of the gospel material, much of it likely in small units; there probably was a tendency for this material to take on certain standard forms; and the early church undoubtedly influenced the way this material was handed down. Defined narrowly in this way, there is certainly a place for form criticism in the study of the gospels. Nevertheless, we must register certain cautions even about this narrow application of the discipline. First, it is probable that more of the gospel material than many form critics allow existed from very early periods in written form and that much of the rest of it may already have been connected together into larger literary units. Alan Millard, for example, has demonstrated that writing was quite common in Herodian Palestine and that there were many precedents for the recording in writing of a religious teacher’s sayings.9 Second, we must be careful not to impose a straitjacket of specified, clearly delineated forms on the material. The existence of so-called mixed forms suggests that any classification must be viewed as provisional and general at best. Third, the claims of form critics to be able to identify the setting in the life of the church that gave rise to specific forms must be treated with healthy skepticism. Often—perhaps usually—we lack sufficient data for any such identification. Finally, and perhaps most damaging, the assumptions of many of the form critics about the nature of the transmission process are suspect. Several authors have argued that most form critics have not sufficiently appreciated the dynamics and nature of oral transmission and that far too little attention has been given to the role of individuals—including eyewitnesses—in shaping and handing down the material.11 More serious criticisms must be directed against the antihistorical application of form criticism typified by Bultmann, Dibelius, and many of their heirs. First, the claim that the early church did not distinguish the earthly Jesus from the risen Lord and thus felt free to place on the lips of the earthly Jesus sayings uttered by early Christian prophets is unjustified. Bultmann claimed that verses such as 2 Corinthians 5:16b—“if, indeed, we have known Christ according to the flesh, we now no longer will know him in this way” (authors’ translation)—demonstrated that Paul and others in the early church had no interest in the earthly Jesus as such. But Paul is saying in this text, not that he would no longer have any interest in a “fleshly” (i.e., earthly) Jesus, but that he was determined no longer to regard Jesus “from a fleshly point of view.” In fact, nothing in the New Testament substantiates the notion that early Christians did not distinguish the earthly Jesus and the risen Lord, and the radical form critics have never come near to explaining how the utterance of a Christian prophet in, say, Antioch in A.D. 42 would have been put on the lips of Jesus as he taught in a specific locale in Galilee thirteen or so years earlier. That Christian prophecy actually functioned in this way is being questioned more and more. Second, we must question whether the transmission of the gospel material over a period of twenty or so years can appropriately be compared with some of the other material that form critics use to draw conclusions about the gospels. The rabbinic literature, for instance, with which both Bultmann and Dibelius compare the gospels, was a very undefined body of material gathered over the course of centuries. And the rabbis never produced anything remotely resembling a gospel. Third, and related to this last point, are doubts about the validity of the so-called laws of transmission. E. P. Sanders and others have shown that oral transmission by no means always tends to lengthen material. The use of such laws, then, to attribute stories and sayings to the church rather than to Jesus is not valid.14 Particularly to be criticized is the criterion of dissimilarity. To be sure, the application of this criterion is often misunderstood: most who use it do not claim that only those sayings that it can isolate are authentic, but rather that these are the only ones we can be sure about. Nevertheless, its use has the tendency to focus attention on what was peculiar to Jesus over against both his Jewish environment and the early church. Its use thus tends to skew our view of Jesus. More conservative form critics insist that the criterion must not be used in isolation and must be used only with the positive purpose of providing evidence of historicity rather than the negative purpose of disproving historicity.16 Even so, the use of the criterion assumes a discontinuity in the process of transmission that needs to be questioned. A fourth problem with radical form criticism is its failure to come to grips with the presence of eyewitnesses, some of them hostile, who were in a position to contest any wholesale creation of gospel incidents and sayings. As McNeile puts it, “Form-critics write as though the original eyewitness were all caught up to heaven at the Ascension and the Christian Church was put to live on a desert island.” Fifth, many form critics are guilty of underestimating the degree to which first-century Jews would have been able to remember and transmit accurately by word of mouth what Jesus had said and done. The so-called Scandinavian School, represented particularly in the work of Birger Gerhardsson, looked to key authoritative figures in the early church as the transmitters of the gospel tradition and argued that the process would have been akin to the transmission of the rabbinic traditions, in which both written materials and careful memorization would have played key roles. Criticism that this particular approach assumes a similarity between the scholastic setting of the rabbis and the more popular setting of early Christianity is warranted. But the importance of memorization in first-century Jewish society is undeniable, and we are justified in thinking that this provides a sufficient basis for the careful and accurate oral transmission of gospel material.19 Recent study of eyewitness testimony in the Greco-Roman world at large also generally confirms the value and accuracy of such testimony. And when we add to these points the very real possibility that the words and actions of Jesus were being written down from the beginning, we have every reason to think that the early Christians were both able and willing to hand down accurately the deeds and words of Jesus. The Stage of Written Sources: Source Criticism (the Synoptic Problem) Introduction. The oral stage of the development of the Synoptic Gospels, which we examined in the last section, probably also included some written traditions about Jesus’ life and teachings. Some of the apostles may have taken notes on Jesus’ teachings and activities during the ministry itself, and they and other eyewitnesses probably accelerated that process after the resurrection. At the same time, of course, much of the material was being passed on orally. But as time moved on, we can suspect that these early written fragments were combined with oral testimony to produce lengthier written sources and, finally, the canonical gospels. Source criticism is devoted to the investigation of this written stage in the production of the gospels. It asks and seeks to answer this question: What written sources, if any, did the evangelists use in compiling their gospels? The question is of particular interest to the historian of the early Christian movement and one that any student of the Synoptic Gospels is bound to ask. For there are startling similarities, both in general outline and in particular wording, among the Synoptic Gospels. Consider the italicized words in the example in table 2, the account of the healing of a paralytic. Table 2 Synoptic Parallels: The Healing of a Paralytic Matthew 9:1–8 Mark 2:1–12 Luke 5:17–26 Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over and came to his own town. Some men brought to him a paralyzed man, lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.” At this, some of the teachers of the law said to themselves, “This fellow is blaspheming!” Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said, “Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “Get up, take your mat and go home.” Then the man got up and went home. When the crowd saw this, they were filled with awe; and they praised God, who had given such authority to human beings. A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, “Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to this paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!” One day Jesus was teaching, and Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there. They had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick. Some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus. When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, “Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, “Why are you thinking these things in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God. Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.” Not only is the wording almost exact (as is true in the Greek original), but each of the three evangelists inserts an abrupt break in Jesus’ words at the same point. (This break, an awkward syntactical shift from a second person plural address—“I want you to know”—to the third singular—“he said to the man”—in Matthew 9:6/Mark 2:10/Luke 5:24, is smoothed out in the TNIV quoted above.) Such duplication of unusual or awkward constructions occurs at other places, along with passages in which two or three of the evangelists use precisely the same words, in the same order, over several lines of text. In table 3, for instance, note how Matthew and Luke use almost exactly the same words to record Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem. The student of the gospels naturally wants to know how we can account for so exact a similarity in wording. But what makes the synoptic problem particularly knotty is the fact that, alongside such exact agreements, there are so many puzzling differences. Take the passage cited in table 2, for example. While the three accounts agree closely in the portion we have put in italics, Matthew omits the “I tell you” found in both Mark and Luke. And when we consider the passage as a whole, other potentially more significant differences appear. Matthew, for instance, does not include the part about the paralyzed man’s friends opening a hole in the roof to let his mat down in front of Jesus. Table 3 Synoptic Parallels: Jesus’ Lament over Jerusalem Matthew 23:37–39 Luke 13:34–35 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ” “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ” This combination of agreement and disagreement extends to the larger structure of the gospels as well. Consider the list of events in table 4, which follows Mark’s order. (Any place where one gospel has deviated from the other two in order of events is indicated with bold type.) We find here, though not perhaps in the same proportion, the kinds of agreements and disagreements that recur throughout the Synoptic Gospels. All three roughly follow the same order of events, even when there is no clear chronological or historical reason to do so. Each evangelist, however, omits material found in the other two, each contains unique incidents, and some of the events that are found in one or both of the others are put in a different order. The question behind the synoptic problem, then, may be reformulated in light of these data: What hypothesis best accounts for the combination of exact agreement and wide divergence that characterizes the first three gospels? The Main Solutions. While the number of solutions to the synoptic problem is proportionate to the amazing amount of research and imaginative thinking that has been devoted to the matter, we may single out four main options. Table 4 Order of Events in the Synoptics (Note: Bold type indicates places where Matthew and Luke deviate from the order of events followed in Mark. A dash indicates that the incident does not appear in the gospel.) Pericope Matthew Mark Luke Jesus and Beelzebul 12:22–27 3:20–30 11:14–28 The Sign of Jonah 12:38–45 ——— 11:29–32 Jesus’ Mother and Brothers 12:46–50 3:31–35 8:19–21 Parable of the Sower 13:1–9 4:1–9 8:4–8 The Reason for Parables 13:10–17 4:10–12 8:9–10 Interpretation of the Parable of the Sower 13:18–23 4:13–20 8:11–15 Parable of the Weeds 13:24–30 ——— ——— A Lamp on a Stand ——— 4:21–25 8:16–18 Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly ——— 4:26–29 ——— Parable of the Mustard Seed 13:31–32 4:30–34 ——— Parable of the Yeast 13:33 ——— ——— Jesus’ Speaking in Parables 13:34–35 ——— ——— Interpretation of the Parable of the Weeds 13:36–43 ——— ——— Parable of the Hidden Treasure 13:44 ——— ——— Parable of the Pearl 13:45–46 ——— ——— Parable of the Net 13:47–50 ——— ——— The Householder 13:51–52 ——— ——— The Stilling of the Storm 8:18, 23–27 4:35–41 8:22–25 Healing of the Gerasene Demoniac 8:28–34 5:1–20 8:26–39 Raising of Jairus’s Daughter/Healing of a Woman 9:18–26 5:21–43 8:40–56 Rejection at Nazareth 13:53–58 6:1–6a 4:16–30 Sending Out of the Twelve 10:1–15 6:6b–13 9:1–6 Beheading of John the Baptist 14:1–12 6:14–29 [9:7–9] Feeding of the Five Thousand 14:13–21 6:30–44 9:10–17 Walking on the Water 14:22–36 6:45–56 ———