Chapter 4

The Synoptic Problem

Modern critical scholarship has questioned the credibility of the patristic tradition and has established through extensive literary analysis that the canonical Gospels are not independent eyewitness depositions. This point is foundational for the argument that follows. The question is not whether the evangelists preserved apostolic tradition in some form, but whether the texts now called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John represent four independent lines of eyewitness attestation. The extensive verbal agreement and shared pericope¹ order among the Synoptics, together with recognizable editorial relationships visible across all four canonical Gospels, show that these are literarily related writings rather than four separate accounts.

This literary dependence has serious consequences. If one Gospel used another, then the later Gospel is not an independent witness to the same material; it is a revision, expansion, abbreviation, harmonization, or theological re-framing of an earlier text. Direction of dependence therefore matters. The central historical question becomes which Gospel preserves the earlier form of the tradition and which Gospels revise that form. A later Gospel may still be valuable, but it does not function in the same way as the earliest recoverable narrative witness.

Methodological Approach to Gospel Dependency

Once literary dependence is acknowledged, Gospel comparison becomes a method for identifying layers of tradition. The task is to determine which evangelist is preserving an earlier form and which is revising it.

This methodological approach is not a modern imposition on ancient texts. The evangelists themselves treated their predecessors as revisable. Harry Gamble notes that source criticism shows the Gospel writers exercising great editorial freedom in adapting their written sources, attaching no special sanctity to them and each meaning, in Gamble’s phrase, “to provide something better.”² In order to strip away later changes and expansions and restore the most primitive gospel narrative, as The Core New Testament aims to do, identifying the correct solution to the Synoptic Problem is most necessary.

The direction of literary dependence among the Synoptic Gospels can be assessed by criteria internal to the texts themselves. Source criticism asks which written sources lie behind the Gospels and how the evangelists used them. Redaction criticism asks how an evangelist or editor arranged, omitted, expanded, clarified, and reshaped inherited material in order to express narrative, literary, and theological aims. The following four criteria are especially important for identifying the earliest Synoptic Gospel.³

The first is comparative restraint. In literary dependence, the more primitive form of a shared episode is often the simpler, less dramatized, and less elaborated one. Later writers may abbreviate a source in particular cases, but the regular movement of revision is toward amplification, clarification, literary polish, dramatic intensification, and theological specification. A repeated pattern of restraint in one Gospel, set against repeated expansion in its parallels, constitutes a directional indicator.

The second is linguistic substratum. A Greek text exhibiting heavy Semitic syntax, idiom, and word order most plausibly stands closer to Hebrew or Aramaic source material than a smoother Greek paraphrase does. Where one Synoptic Gospel repeatedly retroverts more naturally into Hebrew or Aramaic than its parallels, that Gospel is the more probable carrier of the earlier Semitic tradition. The Synoptic substratum is specifically Mishnaic (post-biblical) Hebrew, attested by idioms such as “kingdom of heaven” (מַלְכוּת שָׁמַיִם) and “flesh and blood” (בָּשָׂר וָדָם) that have no precedent in biblical Hebrew. This distinction rules out the alternative that the substratum reflects Septuagint imitation: Septuagint Greek reproduces biblical Hebrew idioms, while the Synoptic Gospels reflect post-biblical idioms contemporary with Jesus.⁴

The third is theological development. Earlier forms of a tradition tend to be less explicit in later doctrinal, ecclesial, and apologetic formulation. Where one Gospel presents a shared episode in plainer Christological, ecclesial, or polemical terms while its parallels supply fuller titles, sharper conflict, fulfillment formulas, passion anticipations, church-order concerns, or more developed post-resurrection theological framing, the plainer form is ordinarily more primitive and the developed form more likely secondary.

The fourth is redactional signature. Each evangelist exhibits distinctive editorial habits, including characteristic vocabulary preferences, recurring syntactic constructions, preferred narrative devices, and stylistic mannerisms, that constitute a discernible idiolect. When these distinctive patterns cluster in the wording that differs between parallel passages, they identify which evangelist is the active reviser rather than the preserver. Where the differences between Mark and Luke in shared episodes consistently display Mark’s recurring stylistic features, including high-frequency historical-present verbs, ἵνα (hina, “so that”) plus subjunctive constructions, stacked prepositional phrases without connecting conjunctions, diminutive nouns, explanatory γάρ (gar, “for”) clauses introduced as afterthoughts, dramatic intensifications, and vivid additions of numerical and biographical specificity, and where those features are rare or absent from the Lukan parallels, the redactional signature identifies Mark as the redactor and Luke as the carrier of the underlying source.⁵ Once the simpler form is identified, redactional signature can be seen by editorial fingerprint is visible by the comparative differences.

The phrase progressive embellishment is used in this study as a concise description of a repeated redactional pattern: a shared Gospel episode becomes more vivid, more polished, more theologically explicit, or more harmonized as it moves through successive literary stages. The phrase is not proposed as a separate technical school of criticism, but its meaning is consistent with established redaction-critical language such as redactional expansion, amplification, elaboration, theological redaction, dramatic intensification, and harmonizing addition.

These four criteria operate cumulatively. No single one establishes priority on its own, and none should be applied mechanically. Together, however, they give the reader a methodological lens before the following sections apply the evidence.

Major Synoptic Hypotheses and Their Implications

The relationship between the first three Gospels has been debated for centuries, and five positions are presently defended in the scholarly literature. The dominant view, held by a clear majority of contemporary New Testament scholars and reproduced as the default in most introductory textbooks, is the two-source hypothesis: Mark was written first, and Matthew and Luke each used Mark along with a second, now-lost collection of Jesus’ sayings, which scholars call Q.⁶ Its principal contemporary defenders are John S. Kloppenborg and Christopher M. Tuckett.⁷ A popular but less dominant view is the Farrer hypothesis, which keeps Mark first but dispenses with Q, arguing instead that Luke read both Mark and Matthew. Mark Goodacre has developed this position in recent decades.⁸ The two-gospel hypothesis, revived by William R. Farmer in the twentieth century and continued by Allan J. McNicol, David L. Dungan, and David B. Peabody, reverses the sequence and places Matthew first, with Luke drawing on Matthew and Mark conflating both.⁹ A more recent proposal, the Matthean posteriority hypothesis, places Matthew last in the sequence Mark → Luke → Matthew and holds that Matthew drew on both Mark and Luke; Robert K. MacEwen and Alan Garrow are its leading academic advocates, with Evan Powell having argued the same sequence from independent literary evidence.¹⁰ The fifth position, argued in this study, is Lukan priority: Luke was written first, Mark revised Luke, and Matthew revised both. This position has been developed most fully by the Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research, whose principal figures include Robert L. Lindsey, David Flusser, David N. Bivin, and Halvor Ronning.¹¹

Table 1. Major synoptic hypotheses and their implications for literary dependence.

These alternatives are not interchangeable from the standpoint of historical reconstruction. If Mark is first, Luke is largely secondary in the shared narrative material. If Luke is first, Mark’s vividness, roughness, explanatory additions, and dramatic intensifications are better understood as revision rather than primitive reminiscence. If Matthew uses both Luke and Mark, then Matthew’s more polished and liturgically developed forms are later expansions rather than independent confirmations.

One feature of the two-source hypothesis deserves special attention because it is rarely stated openly. The hypothesis has the effect, whether its defenders intend it or not, of insulating Matthew and Luke from each other. If both Gospels draw independently from Mark and independently from Q, then neither is responding to the other, neither is correcting the other, and neither is embellishing the other. The awkward implications that follow from a direct literary relationship between the two, whether in the direction of Luke correcting Matthew or of Matthew expanding and liturgizing Luke, never arise. The invention of Q removes the question. The Lukan priority position does not permit this insulation, and that is one of the things at stake in the debate. If Luke is the primitive source and Matthew is the later revision, then Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Beatitudes, Lord’s Prayer, and Great Commission are more developed and more liturgically refined versions of material that Luke preserves in a simpler and earlier form. This insulating effect, inherent to the two-source hypothesis, gives many of its defenders a theological motive for retaining it.

A second and more persistent difficulty with the two-source hypothesis is the lack of documentary evidence. No manuscript of Q has ever been found. No ancient writer refers to it. No church father quotes from it, and no canon list names it. Its existence is an inference, drawn by subtracting Markan material from what Matthew and Luke share and ascribing the remainder to a hypothetical source. The reconstruction has grown more elaborate over time. Early proposals described Q as a simple sayings collection; more recent reconstructions give it a narrative structure, a compositional history in three redactional layers, a Galilean community of origin, and a distinctive Christology, with each feature inferred from the same source that no one has ever seen.¹²

It is best to adopt the simplest solution that accounts for all the evidence. Every synoptic hypothesis involves reconstruction of some kind, but the two-source hypothesis is alone among the five in requiring a document that leaves no trace in the ancient record. If the evidence can be accounted for by a document that demonstrably exists and that the church has read continuously for two millennia, the simpler explanation deserves the first hearing. That simpler explanation is the one developed in this study: the shared material originates in Luke, or in the earlier form of Luke (Proto-Luke) that preceded the published gospel. Q is not needed.

The Historical Emergence of the Markan Priority Consensus

The Markan priority consensus emerged through a nineteenth-century chain of reasoning that began with critical doubts about the traditional attribution of the First Gospel to the apostle Matthew. Once Matthean eyewitness status was rejected on critical grounds, scholarship faced the problem of locating a reliably primitive source for the life of Jesus. Mark, together with a hypothetical sayings source later labeled Q, was eventually proposed to fill that role.¹³ The two-document hypothesis that was crystallized in the mid-nineteenth century was popularized for the English-speaking world by Burnett H. Streeter’s The Four Gospels, first published in 1924 and substantially revised in the fourth edition of 1930.¹⁴ The consensus served both conservative and liberal interests simultaneously, supplying a primitive canonical foundation that could be defended against both traditionalists and radical skeptics. William R. Farmer, in his critical history of the synoptic problem, concluded that “the decisive factor in the triumph of the Marcan (or two-document) hypothesis was not any particular scientific argument or series of arguments, however important some of these may have been. The decisive factor in this triumph… was theological.”¹⁵ A detailed account of this emergence is given in the companion article “The Spurious Emergence of Markan Priority.”¹⁶ Many of the specific arguments now offered in support of the consensus were developed only after the hypothesis was already in place; these arguments are addressed individually under “Critiquing the Standard Arguments for Markan Priority.”

The Markan priority hypothesis is also advocated by non-Christian skeptical scholarship. The successive Quests for the Historical Jesus, from Schweitzer’s early-twentieth-century survey through the Third Quest and the Jesus Seminar at the close of the century, proceeded on the shared working assumption that Mark was the earliest gospel and the most promising source for recovering the Jesus of history. Skepticism directed at nearly every other element of the gospel tradition was not extended to the Markan priority paradigm itself. The theological origins identified by Farmer were inherited by movements that otherwise repudiated the interests those origins had served. The authority of Markan priority crossed ideological lines without ever being tested at its foundations.