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Rethinking the Synoptic Problem

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This book is a presentation of papers delivered at Wake Forest in April of 2000. Craig Blomberg introduces "the synoptic problem." He writes that "up front" none of the "major solutions to the Synoptic problem is inherently more or less compatible with historical Christian views on inspiration." Blomberg then goes on to line out the major positions of the synoptic problem.

In the second essay, Darrell Bock writes that there was a Q. Positing that there was one is the best way to explain the 225 verses shared by Matthew and Luke. However its compositional history must remain a mystery due to the fact that Jesus probably said the same thing at different times in slightly different ways. Yet for Bock the verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke "should be evaluated as part of a tradition that had solid roots in the early church and as reflective of Jesus' teaching."

Scot McKnight begins the third essay by writing about the unfortunate happenstance that students of modern scholarship do learn modern scholarship but so often fail to learn the scholarship of the previous generation; it's as if B. H. Streeter et al are obsolete. McKnight then goes on to reaffirm that the priority of Mark is correct. "Matthew sometimes was a scribe using Mark." McKnight concludes with a warning that if Markan prioritists don't get busy, deconstructionists will win the day.

William Farmer writes a case for the two gospel hypothesis. Mark was limited in that he drew his material from Matthew and Luke. Quite often Mark either follows Matthew or Luke in its order of events. Farmer writes that this is difficult to explain if Matthew and Luke followed an Urmarcus or Ur-Mark. Besides, Helmut Koester of Harvard thinks that Mark was written after Matthew and Luke.

Grant Osborne wrote the response to the papers. Source criticism has returned as an important tool in NT studies. Farmer is right in that Mark never disagrees with the order of events in either Matthew or Luke while Matthew and Luke never agree while departing from Mark. Also the two gospel hypothesis needs not posit the existence of Q. But then what happened to the M and L material in Mark?

Incidentally, David Alan Black is an editor but writes none of the essays for this book.

Anyone interested in biblical studies will want a copy of this. The essays are interesting, and the writers include some of the most respected of Evangelical scholars, including Craig Blomberg, Darrell Bock, and Scot McKnight.

And what a knotty problem the synoptic problem is! Osborne speculates gloomily "It is likely the problem will never be solved" (p 137).

There certainly seems no agreement among the scholars as to who wrote the first gospel. They did seem to agree on a few things, however. First, there seems a general recognition that scholarship has veered off course in a number of ways. For the last fifty years, there has likely been too much reliance on the concept of Q, to the point that the Jesus Seminar authors have lately 'quoted' from Q. Speculation has piled on speculation and "the study of Q has crossed into historical revisionism and distortion" (p 58).

Two other errors have been the modern desire for an inoffensive Jesus, and a belief that there was ever an early Christian community that was "nonmessianic and noneschatological...(since why would) the later messianic and eschatological use so many texts" (p 59) from a group they disagreed with?

Anyone who thinks biblical scholarship is dull will find this book an eyeopening experience, with Scott McKnight holding to Mark as being the first gospel written, while Farmer insist "Matthew appears to be the earliest gospel (p 100) and the others all over the map.