Smoodock's Blog

When I was a child, going to church every Sunday, I could name the four Gospel narratives that we find in our Bibles. I could name them in order, and I knew that the first three, Matthew, Mark and Luke were similar in content. In fact, my naïve faith told me that this was evidence of their inspiration. God gave each writer the same words to write down. Well, when I was a child, I spoke as a child and believed as a child. Now, I’m an adult, so how should I understand the similarity that I find in the first three Gospel narratives? It wasn’t until years later, when I began studying the Bible in earnest as a young adult in my twenties, that I found out that they were called the Synoptic Gospels. That was new to me, so I wondered, what is a Synoptic Gospel, and how did this occur? The word synoptic comes from a Greek word synoptikos, which means “seeing the whole together or at a glance.” What we can draw from this is that Matthew, Mark and Luke have a unique relationship and probably have a common source, while John is clearly different in content, which indicates that its author has a different source for its content.

One of the suggestions for all the similarity we find in the first three Gospel narratives is that their existed then, but not now, a document referred to, today, as “Q”. “Q” is a hypothetical gospel manuscript that was used by Matthew and Luke together with the Gospel of Mark. However, if Matthew was written prior to Luke, and Luke had a copy of Matthew’s Gospel, there is no reason to hypnotize the existence of a “Q” manuscript.

Luke tells us in the introduction of his Gospel narrative that, prior to his writing down his own account of Jesus’ words and deeds, there was already in existence “a declaration (or narrative)” that “many have taken in hand to set forth” and what they had written in narrative form was “believed among us” (Luke 1:1). Luke also tells us that these folks who wrote this narrative were “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Luke 1:2). Therefore, Luke continues his explanation to Theophilus that “it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the first, to write to you, most excellent Theophilus” (Luke 1:3). The reason for Luke’s writing was that Theophilus “might know the certainty of those things, wherein he had been informed” (Luke 1:4).

Therefore, according to Luke, he had a written source before him, as he wrote his narrative to Theophilus, and that source material was the end product of many eyewitnesses. In other words, he was speaking of Matthew’s Gospel. Therefore, Matthew’s Gospel was written prior to Luke’s account, and Luke used Matthew to help fill in the blanks that he did not witness himself. While this explanation is plausible, it doesn’t account for the fact that 90% of Mark’s Gospel can be found in both Matthew and Luke. How can this be so, unless they had a copy of Mark before them, as they each wrote their own narratives? This is the conclusion of modern scholars. Mark had to have been written first, and both Matthew and Luke copied from Mark. Mark is the shortest narrative, but its record of common events and common saying of Jesus is longer than those events and sayings found in Matthew and Luke. Is it more believable that Matthew and Luke abbreviated Mark or that Mark enlarged upon the other two narratives? Tradition tells us that Matthew came first. His was the first written account in the early church. So, which is true, and can we reasonably prove our conclusion?

As I mentioned in an earlier study, Matthew was a tax collector by trade, before he met Jesus. It makes sense, then, after he began following Jesus that he would make use of his habit of record-keeping and write out a running journal or outline of the events and sayings of Jesus during his 3 ½ year ministry. Each disciple could have had input in this journal, when they, vis-à-vis Peter, James and John, were the only disciples with the Lord. Moreover, even Jesus could have made certain that Matthew’s account of events and sayings was accurate. Afterward, the Twelve would have had input into exactly what would be used in the journal to produce the first Gospel narrative that would be used in discipling others in the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.

In this theory of which came first, Peter or the whole group of Apostles would have been able to also produce an oral Gospel, which would be preached by all who went from town to town or who met with pilgrims from the Diaspora who came to Jerusalem to celebrate the annual Holy Days. After believing the Gospel, certain of them could have been given a copy of Matthew’s Gospel to take to their local synagogues, when they returned to their respective cities throughout the Empire. We know from 2^nd century AD records that Mark wrote out Peter’s oral Gospel for the Christian authorities at Rome. This declaration is supplemented in the fact that Mark changed certain Greek words and idioms into their Latin counterparts, in an effort to cause the Gospel to make better sense to its Latin readers. Thus, Peter’s oral Gospel, which he preached wherever he went, became a written narrative, when Mark copied it for the Church authorities at Rome

To conclude, I’ve offered what I believe to be a logical alternative to Markan Priority, as an explanation for the unique agreement the three Synoptic Gospels have with one another. This also helps to understand why Matthew was considered the first written Gospel by the early church. Finally, it offers a challenge to those folks who claim the Gospel narratives had to have been written after AD 70. Such a presumption is primarily due to an anti-supernaturalistic bias, which says Jesus couldn’t have known that Jerusalem and the Temple would be destroyed in his Olivet Prophecy (Matthew 24).