What is the synoptic problem?

Question 1078

Anyone who reads Matthew, Mark, and Luke one after another notices something straight away. These three Gospels tell much of the same story, often in the same order, and sometimes in almost identical words, while John stands apart with his own material and arrangement. The close agreement of the first three has led scholars to call them the Synoptic Gospels, from a Greek word meaning to see together, because they can be set side by side in parallel columns and viewed at a glance.

The question of how to explain both their striking similarities and their real differences is what is meant by the synoptic problem. It sounds like a problem only in the older sense of the word, a puzzle to be worked out, rather than a difficulty that threatens faith. Understanding it well will deepen your confidence in the Gospels rather than shaking it, and it will guard you from the alarm that some popular writers try to stir up when they raise the subject.

What the Pattern Actually Looks Like

The agreements among the three are too close to be accidental. Whole sentences appear in the same wording across two or three Gospels, the events often follow the same sequence, and even unusual turns of phrase are sometimes shared. When three witnesses agree to this degree, something connects them, whether a shared written source, a shared body of memorised teaching, or one writer’s knowledge of another.

Yet alongside this the differences are just as real. Matthew includes long stretches of teaching that Mark omits, Luke records parables found nowhere else, such as the prodigal son and the good Samaritan, and each writer arranges and phrases his material with his own purpose and audience in view. Matthew writes with the Jewish reader in mind and is full of fulfilled prophecy, Mark moves at pace and emphasises action, and Luke writes as a careful historian for a wider Gentile world. The synoptic problem is the attempt to account for this mixture of overlap and independence in a way that honours the text as it stands.

The Main Proposals

The most widely held view among scholars today is the theory of Markan priority, which holds that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke both drew upon it. This is said to explain the shared narrative backbone, since almost all of Mark reappears in the other two. To account for the teaching material that Matthew and Luke share but Mark lacks, many scholars propose a lost collection of the sayings of Jesus, given the label Q from the German word Quelle, meaning source. On this scheme Matthew and Luke each used Mark and this sayings source, together with material unique to themselves.

It is worth being honest about the status of this sayings source. No copy of Q has ever been found, no early writer mentions it, and it remains a scholarly reconstruction built backwards from the agreements between Matthew and Luke. It may have existed, and a written collection of the Lord’s sayings would be no threat to anything we believe, but it should never be spoken of as a discovered document. It is a hypothesis, and a believer is free to weigh it as such.

Other solutions have been offered and still have able defenders. The view associated with Augustine held that Matthew wrote first, with Mark following and abbreviating him. The Griesbach proposal placed Matthew first and Luke second, with Mark drawing on both. Still others have given far greater weight to oral tradition, arguing that the apostles passed on a carefully fixed and memorised body of teaching, so that the agreements come from a shared store of remembered material rather than from copying a written page. In a culture skilled at memorising long texts, this is a serious possibility that the written-source theories sometimes overlook.

Why None of This Threatens Inspiration

For the believer the heart of the matter is this. The use of sources does not threaten the inspiration of Scripture in the slightest. Luke tells us plainly at the start of his Gospel that he investigated everything carefully and consulted those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning before he wrote his orderly account. He used research, and his Gospel is no less the Word of God for it. The Holy Spirit who breathed out the Gospels was perfectly able to work through an evangelist’s reading of another account, through shared apostolic memory, and through careful enquiry, guiding each writer so that what he produced was exactly what God intended.

Inspiration has never meant that the human authors wrote in a trance, with no use of memory, witnesses, or earlier records. It means that God so superintended the whole process, using the full personality and labour of each writer, that the result is true and without error. Whether Mark wrote first or Matthew did, whether a sayings source existed or the agreements arose from oral tradition, each of the four accounts stands as a fully inspired and trustworthy testimony to Jesus.

The Differences Are the Marks of Witnesses

The differences among the Gospels are not contradictions to be explained away but the natural marks of real witnesses, each writing to his own readers under the same Spirit. Anyone who has heard several honest people describe the same event knows that they will tell it from different angles, select different details, and use their own words, and that this variety strengthens rather than weakens their testimony. Identical accounts would suggest collusion. Independent accounts that agree on the substance while differing in detail are exactly what truthful witness looks like.

So when Matthew and Luke arrange the same events in a slightly different order, or record the Lord’s words with small variations, we are seeing four portraits of one Lord, each painted for a particular people with a particular emphasis. Together they give us a fuller picture of Jesus than any single account could, and the church has always received this fourfold witness as a gift rather than a difficulty.

So, now what?

Hold the synoptic question with an open hand. It is a fair area of study, and a believer can weigh the proposals without anxiety, because nothing in the gospel hangs on which solution proves correct. When you read a confident claim that the Gospels copied each other carelessly, or that a lost source proves them unreliable, you can answer that the agreements show how close the witnesses were to one another, and that the differences are the fingerprints of honest testimony.

Let the four accounts do their appointed work, which is not to be harmonised into a single flat narrative but to bring you to know the Lord Jesus from every side. Read them, compare them, and let their united voice lead you to trust and follow the One of whom they all speak.

“Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus.” Luke 1:1-3

For Further Study

Those who wish to read further will find balanced treatments in the New Testament introductions of conservative scholars such as Donald Guthrie and the work of D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo. Robert Thomas has written helpfully in defence of a careful evangelical handling of the question, and Charles Ryrie’s basic works set the matter within a sound dispensational and inerrantist frame. Reading the three Gospels in a parallel arrangement, a Gospel harmony, will teach you more than any theory, for it lets you see the agreements and differences with your own eyes.