The Synoptic Gospels

On Sundays we take a break from reading another chapter and spend a brief time summarizing what we've been reading (or will read.)

Even a cursory reading of the New Testament reveals that the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are very similar, with many common stories and parables.  Then the fourth gospel, the Gospel of John, is very different, with different events and a special collection of teachings by Jesus that do not appear in the other three.

Presumably, the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke had a common source for their accounts of Jesus's ministry and had personal reasons for deviations from that account.  Matthew, written to Jews, deviates from the common accounts to quote Old Testament prophecies, for example while Luke, written by a Greek to the Gentiles, adds observations and stories that might be of interest to the individual not aware of Jewish history.  (Luke is also careful to mention women in the Jesus ministry, naming women among his followers, both before and after the resurrection.)

One of the simplest explanations for the common passages in the first three gospels is that the Gospel of Mark was written first and that the other two gospel writers had access to Mark as an outline for their work.   (From the first few verses of the Gospel of Luke, we see that Luke interviewed individuals before writing his report, so one would expect that he would have access to Mark's gospel, if had had been written by that time.)

One can then explain the Gospel of John as deliberately different from the other three, since John, writing much later, probably assumes those other stories have been told and wants to add to, flesh out, the reports on Jesus's acts and teachings.

The term commonly used to identify the first three gospels, distinct from that of John, is "synoptic".  More information, in considerable depth, is available on this Wikipedia page .

Related to the 3+1 gospels in the New Testament is the issue of gospel harmony.  Can we, using the four gospels, create an orderly summary of the events of the life of Christ?  There is an old, classical tradition of this and I have several harmonies of the life of Christ in my personal library.  These attempts differ slightly since the different gospels do have different orders for certain events and teachings.  And, very likely, Jesus taught the same messages several different times, in different places.  The Wikipedia page on this, at the link above, does a pretty good job of outlining one version of a gospel harmony, giving a table with 161 events from the life of Christ, along with their references in the four gospels.  Those 161 events – with representative church artwork! – can be found here.

Tomorrow we return to Matthew, reading the growing challenges by the religious leaders, as Jesus spends the Passover Week in Jerusalem.