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In the Pauline writings, as noted above, gospel, kerygma, and creed come close together from oral to written formulas that were transmitted about the Christ event: Jesus’ death and Resurrection. In the apostolic Fathers (early 2nd century), the transition was made from oral to written tradition; the translation of the presumed Aramaic traditions had taken place before the Gospel material had been committed to writing. By the time of Justin Martyr (c. 155), these writings were called Gospels and referred to in the plural; they contain the words, deeds, and Passion narratives—i.e., the present four Gospels compiled and edited by the Evangelists according to their various needs and theological emphases. Justin also referred to these as “memoirs of the Apostles.”
Such a Gospel began with a missionary announcement concerning a cosmic divine figure, a man with divine characteristics who would bring salvation and hope to the world. The earthly historical Jesus, however, was the criterion of the proclamation—being both the content of the church’s proclamation and the object of its faith.
The identification of basic patterns in the history of oral and written traditions—the stage of tradition prior to any literary form and particularly as the traditions passed from an oral to a written form—and the determination of their creative milieu, or their situations and functions in various places and under various circumstances, are tasks of form criticism. Through such study, small independent units may be isolated in a postulated more primitive form than they were before being incorporated into more extended accounts. The term Sitz-im-Leben refers to the “Sitz im Leben der Kirche”—i.e., the situation in the life of the church in which the material was shaped and adjusted to the needs at hand. Only through such studies is it possible to progress tentatively to an assessment of a “Sitz im Leben Jesu.”
Both Jews and Gentiles could use “biographies,” often for propaganda purposes. Philo and Josephus recounted the wonderful lives and deeds of Old Testament heroes such as Moses; and there are miraculous tales of the prophets Elijah and Elisha told in order that faith might be inspired or justified. A miracle worker (theios anēr, “divine man”) and stories about him comprised an aretalogy (from aretē, “virtue”; also manifestation of divine power, miracle). Aretalogies were frequently used to represent the essential creed and belief of a religious or philosophical movement. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a Neo-Pythagorean philosopher and wonder-worker (transmitted by the Greek writer Philostratus), was widely read. He was depicted as having performed miracles and as being possessed of divine cosmic power not as an exception but as an example to men who have the possibility of sharing such power (cf. Matt. 9:8). There were tales of Heracles, the Greek hero, and a whole literature of Alexander the Great as wonder-workers, divine men.
Though the pericopes (small units) of which the Gospels are constituted include many forms, or genres, they are mainly divided into narratives (including legends, miracle stories, exorcisms, healings, and tales) and sayings (prophetic and apocalyptic sayings, proverbs and wisdom sayings, parables, church discipline and rules for the community, Christological sayings, such as the socalled “I am” sayings [e.g., “I am the bread of life”] in John, revelations, and legal sayings). Some stories may simply be the background for a pithy saying; these latter are sometimes called paradigmatic sayings, and the pronouncement stories are their vehicles of transmission. The forms have many different names, but form criticism started with Homeric form analysis (taking oral tradition into account), which was applied to Old Testament studies by Hermann Gunkel, a German biblical scholar, and applied to the New Testament, on the basis of the German classical philologist Eduard Norden’s stylistic studies, by such biblical scholars as Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius.
Form criticism asks and answers questions about what shaped the preliterary tradition and the earliest written traditions into blocks as they are found in the Gospels. This may be a historical context (as a missionary situation), a need for admonition (as church-discipline sections), or for the transmission of teaching in a faithful way (as in a “school,” be it Matthean, Pauline, or Johannine). One large block of the material, however, is to all intents and purposes the same (although differing in details) in all four canonical Gospels: the Passion narrative. In the Synoptic Gospels there is also a basic nucleus in the sayings about Jesus that are mysterious, prophetic, and apocalyptic and that point to the significance of Jesus as the Christ who has come in history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Such form-critical studies were centered on the smaller units of tradition (pericopes) that make up the Gospels, and their intention was partly to assess relative age and authenticity of such traditions. In more recent times the tools of form criticism have been applied to a more synthetic method that could be used to determine the relation between a genre of literature and the Christological and theological perspectives that made such genres natural. A presentation of Jesus material in the form of more or less disconnected sayings (as in the so-called Q Source, composed of independent sayings, behind Matthew and Luke, and in the Gospel of Thomas; see below The two- and four-source hypotheses) tends to fit a Christology in which Jesus is viewed as a teacher of Wisdom, an envoy of Wisdom, or as Wisdom herself. The collections of wonder stories (aretalogies) grew out of a Christology of Jesus as the divine man. Another type of Jesus material with independent existence seems to have been “revelations,” or “apocalypses,” in which Jesus Christ speaks to his followers. This is seen, for example, in Mark 13, I Thessalonians, chapter 4, the canonical book of Revelation to John, and the noncanonical Didache 16.
These genres of material now represented in the canonical Gospels are amply represented also in the noncanonical writings from the first Christian centuries. The discovery of a Gnostic library of Coptic writings at Najʿ Ḥammādī, in Egypt, in the 1940s gave scholars a new opportunity to compare the canonical Gospels with the Jesus material of these various types, some of them having been called and used as gospels (such as the Gospel of Thomas). In the light of such a wider spectrum of material, it appears that the gospel form for which Mark is the earliest witness became a criterion for the orthodox transmission of the Christian message about Jesus. By making the confession of Jesus as the crucified and risen Lord (the earliest kerygma and “gospel” as found in Paul and Acts) the form of an extensive Passion account prefaced by a limited amount of narrative and teaching, Mark set the stage for a faith that anchored faith in Jesus Christ in the events of the earthly life of Jesus. This form of the “gospel” became the standard within which the other commonly accepted Gospels grew. It became the criterion for later creedal statements concerning Jesus Christ as true God and true man. By such a criterion, gospels that seemed to disregard his humanity (e.g., Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter) were judged heretical.
The Synoptic problem
Early theories about the Synoptic problem
Since the 1780s, Matthew, Mark, and Luke have been referred to as the Synoptic Gospels (from synoptikos, “seen together”). The extensive parallels in structure, content, and wording of Matthew, Mark, and Luke make it even possible to arrange them side by side so that corresponding sections can be seen in parallel columns. John Calvin, the 16th-century Reformer, wrote a commentary on these Gospels as a harmony. Such an arrangement is called a “synopsis,” or Gospel harmony, and, by careful comparison of their construction, compilation, and actual agreement or disagreement in wording or content, literary- or source-critical relationships can be seen. Augustine, the great 4th–5th-century Western theologian, considered Mark to be an abridged Matthew, and, until the 19th century, some variation of this solution to literary dependency dominated the scene. It still recurs from time to time.
The Synoptic problem is one of literary or of source criticism and deals with the written sources after compilation and redaction. Matthew was the Gospel most used for the selections read in the liturgy of the church, and other Gospels were used to fill in the picture. One attempted solution to the problem of priority was the proposed existence of an Aramaic primitive gospel, which is now lost, as the first Gospel from which a later Mark in Greek was translated and arranged. The Greek Mark would thus be first based on a prior Semitic Matthew, and later both Mark and Matthew would be translations dependent on Matthew, and Luke dependent on both. The preservation of an ecclesiastical priority of Matthew breaks down because of the literary word-for-word agreement in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This agreement occurs to far too great an extent to be accounted for in translations and revisions, not to mention the agreement in the order of the various pericopes as they are viewed in a synoptic parallel arrangement.
For similar reasons, a fragment theory holding that the Gospels were constructed of small written collections brought together in varying sequences cannot stand the test of actual structure—but it has the merit of stressing compilation of sources.
In 1789 J.J. Griesbach, a German biblical scholar, hypothesized that the Synoptics had not developed independently, but in his “usage-hypothesis” he recognized that there must be literary dependency. He thought that Mark used Matthew as well as Luke, but this could not account for the close relationship of Matthew and Luke. His basic concept of literary dependency, however, paved the way for K. Lachmann, who observed in 1835 that Matthew and Luke agree only when they also agree with Mark and that, where material is introduced that is not in Mark, it is inserted in different places. This, it is held, can only be explained on the basis of the priority of Mark and its use as the patterning form of Matthew and Luke. This insight led to a so-called two-source hypothesis (by two German biblical scholars, Heinrich Holtzmann in 1863, and Bernhard Weiss in 1887–88), which, with various modifications and refinements of other scholars, is the generally accepted solution to the Synoptic problem.
The two- and four-source hypotheses
The two-source hypothesis is predicated upon the following observations: Matthew and Luke used Mark, both for its narrative material as well as for the basic structural outline of chronology of Jesus’ life. Matthew and Luke use a second source, which is called Q (from German Quelle, “source”), not extant, for the sayings (logia) found in common in both of them. Thus, Mark and Q are the main components of Matthew and Luke. In both Matthew and Luke there is material that is peculiar to each of their Gospels; this material is probably drawn from some other sources, which may be designated M (material found only in Matthew’s special source) and L (material found only in Luke’s special source). This is known as the four-document hypothesis, which was elaborated in 1925 by B.H. Streeter, an English biblical scholar. The placement of Q material in Luke and Matthew disagrees at certain points according to the needs and theologies of the addressees of the gospels, but in Matthew the Marcan chronology is the basic scheme into which Q is put. Mark’s order is kept, on the whole, by Matthew and Luke, but, where it differs, at least one agrees with Mark. After chapter 4 in Matthew and Luke, not a single passage from Q is in the same place. Q was a source written in Greek as was Mark, which can be demonstrated by word agreement (not possible, for example, with a translation from Aramaic, although perhaps the Greek has vestiges of Semitic structure form). A diagram might thus be:
In approximate figures, Mark’s text has 661 verses, more than 600 of which appear in Matthew and 350 in Luke. Only c. 31 verses of Mark are found nowhere in Matthew or Luke. In the material common to all three Synoptics, there is very seldom verbatim agreement of Matthew and Luke against Mark, though such agreement is common between Matthew and Mark or Luke and Mark or where all three concur.
The postulated common saying source of Matthew and Luke, Q, would account for much verbatim agreement of Matthew and Luke when they include sayings absent from Mark. The fact that the sayings are used in different ways or different contexts in Matthew and Luke is an indication of a somewhat free way in which the editors could take material and mold it to their given situations and needs. An example of this is the parable in Matthew and Luke about the lost sheep (Matt. 18:10–14, Luke 15:3–7). The basic material has been used in different ways. In Matthew, the context is church discipline—how a brother in Christ who has lapsed or who is in danger of doing so is to be gently and graciously dealt with—and Matthew shapes it accordingly (the sheep has “gone astray”). In Luke, the parable exemplifies Jesus’ attitude toward sinners and is directed against the critical Pharisees and scribes who object to Jesus’ contact with sinners and outsiders (the sheep is “lost”).
Another example of two passages used verbatim in Luke and Matthew is Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem. In Luke (13:34–35; the lament over Jerusalem) Jesus refers to how they will cry “Blessed be the King who comes in the name of the Lord” when he enters Jerusalem (Lk. 19:38). In Luke, the passage is structured into the life of Jesus and refers to his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”). In Matthew (23:37–39) this same lament is placed after the entry into the city (21:9) and thus refers to the fall of Jerusalem and the Last Judgment. Apparently, Luke has historicized a primarily eschatological saying.
Since the 1930s, scholars have increasingly refined sources, postulated sources behind sources, and many stages of their formation. The premise of the two- (or four-) source hypothesis is basic and provides information as to literary sources; further refinement is of interest only to the specialist. Another movement in synoptic research—and also research including John—is that which concentrates rather on the treatment of gospels as a whole, formally and theologically, with patterns or cycles to be investigated. It may be significant that the latest and best regarded Greek synopsis is that of the German scholar Kurt Aland, Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum (1964; Synopsis of the Four Gospels, 1972), which includes the Gospel According to John and, as an appendix, the Gospel of Thomas, as well as ample quotations from noncanonical gospels and Jesus’ sayings preserved in the Church Fathers.
