Plus, when they talk about the same topic, the synoptic gospels have entire sentences that are basically the same, word by word.
For a comparison table see https://www.ammannato.it/vangelo-di-vangeli/appendice/cronol....
(Just someone who had a very good religion teacher in middle school).
All the gospels have differences. None of them are historical work as different events are taking different orderings (or are missing from the other gospels).
But in terms of differences, John is the most overtly different.
Watch out for using that standard. You have to throw out Pompeii and Josephus. Both replay events and move them around in time to make a point.
But I'm also somewhat studied in history. The gospels are the best historical records available for Jesus but they have their flaws (and that's why all four gospels are used, to help us figure out the truth between the writings).
It's actually somewhat uncomfortable to discuss the differences of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John with regards to important events like the first Easter.
Did Peter come to the tomb first? Or did the women? When exactly did the angel appear to declare that Jesus is risen? In the tomb? Outside the tomb? Etc. etc. Who rolled back the stone?
The core, historical truth, is muddy. The four gospels have slightly different stories even if the important events are mostly there (Peter checking the tomb. The women checking the tomb. The appearance of the angel and the declaration that Jesus is risen)
Even Mark itself isn't a single work either. The earliest versions of Mark don't have the events of Easter detailed like the later versions of Mark. (IE longer Mark 16 vs Shorter Mark 16 issue). And Mark is the earliest written gospel, the one we should defacto trust the most.
That Jesus arose from the tomb is in no doubt for any of these gospels. But when we dig into the specific order of events, we realize it's a story and reconstruction of the history with different nuances.
And alas, that is the nature of the Gospel Truth. Anyone who studies the Bible must contend with this and accept it.
Catholics believes the Bible to be a collection of stories, and that God wants us to know these stories. Certain elements of the Bible are taken as truth, but so are long running traditions (such as the Assumption of Mary, an event that is NOT in the Bible).
Indeed: Catholics treat the Bible as just one of many traditions and even as other traditions beyond the Bible in terms of truth.
IE: Biblical Literalism (trying to take the Bible as LITERALLY True or historical) is a mistake. And ignoring other traditions (ex: assumption of Mary) is also a big mistake.
Still, the myth of Biblical Literalism exists today. Because well... Catholicism is not the only interpretation and some other Christians have a different belief system.
The Bible is written by men, specifically prophets and apostles. As such, there is errancy that creeps into the work. There is also errancy introduced in copying and translation.
Well, not all of it (depending on your definitions of course).
The gospels, for example, have no known authorship. Several of the epistles are believed to be pseudepigrapha.
A problem to contend with in bible authorship is the name on the book/epistle isn't always going to be the actual person that penned that book/epistle.
A great example of this is Isaiah, which is believed to have at least 2 to 3 authors (with most scholars, afaik, believing it's probably 3).
This wasn't really a nefarious action, because the people that wrote the bible didn't believe they were writing infallible works of religious text. Much like the telling of tall tales, it was simply acceptable to write (or relay through spoken tradition) fables of favorite historical characters. So what if Moses didn't exist, it's pretty cool to use him as a figure to unify the Canaanite tribes. (Fun fact, biblical scholars/historians believe that the ancestors of the Jews were Canaanite and that the story of moses was mostly there to unify them).
The bible is a mishmash of historic documents mostly solidified in ~400CE.
> When exactly did the angel appear to declare that Jesus is risen? In the tomb? Outside the tomb? Etc. etc.
Right. An angel appeared. You going to need a whole lot better evidence to convince me of that, than a few ancient text that may or may not agree with each other.
Jim Warner Wallace's
COLD-CASE CHRISTIANITY
It really should be read by everyone!!!
John, on the other hand, is organized around theological and moral themes, rather than the totality of Jesus' ministry and teachings. That's why it's not considered a synoptic gospel.
Maybe you're only thinking about religious people who would have encountered this one in such a context?
I don't frequent any so I am clueless, but if true I would suspect there could be more than correlation to the aptitude to use words without meaning and religiosity.
That mostly seems to be true whenever you talk to people who don't specifically have some interest in linguistics.
>Maybe you're only thinking about religious people who would have encountered this one in such a context?
Yeah, presumably the original questioner (and myself because it's not something I've ever given much thought towards) didn't realize synoptic had a definition outside of religion, because knowing the definition would have answered their question.
This is often untrue, though—words will evolve along parallel tracks and often diverge quite significantly in how they're used across different contexts. In those cases the homonyms make for fun etymological deep dives but don't help much for deriving the specialized meaning from the more general one.
Sure that happens, but mostly when they are borrowed from language to language. Mostly in the english language, if you have a situation where you have synopsis and synoptic, it's more often than or not that they are different forms of the same word or closely related. I think it doesn't immediately register for people because those 'sis' words from Greek origin aren't used a ton in general speech. Genesis and genetic is a similar situation that many people probably don't realize they are related unless they are familiar with abiogenesis or such from science.
Correct, but what I'm saying is that frequently etymologies are nothing more than fun exercises that would actually mislead you as to the modern definition because the word has changed so much. In those cases it's amusing to identify the shared root but you should be careful about blindly translating from one to the other. The original sense is often somewhere in the middle of the two modern meanings.
Taking your example of Genesis: if I know that Genesis means "the first book in the Bible" that doesn't help me derive the definition of "genetic" all by itself. Likewise if I know the "genetic" means "relating to the structures that encode traits in living organisms", I won't be able to arrive at "the first book in the Bible". At best I might come up with some folk etymology explaining that Genesis has to do with life, which is close but not fully accurate.
The correct understanding of the shared root of "creation" is only possible if you understand both concepts and triangulate to what they have in common. It cannot be derived from only one of the two definitions.
In this case I doubt many people have heard the word "synoptic" in any other context. That makes it a rather meaningless word.
This and that's sorta what I found interesting, most people don't realize a word they've only heard in the context of religion actually has a definition outside of, and predating, that context and that definition more or less explains the religious usage.
The fact that synopsis is a Greek word makes it even harder to discern because a lot of names and terms of early Christianity are Greek, just as much as Latin names and terms come along later. I don't think it's a religious thing at all. I think it's going to be common to anything that has a lot of terminology that is rooted in a foreign language and culture.
> 1763, in reference to tables, charts, etc., "pertaining to or forming a synopsis," from Modern Latin synopticus, from Late Latin synopsis (see synopsis). It was being used specifically of weather charts by 1808. Greek synoptikos meant "taking a general or comprehensive view."
> The English sense "affording a general view of a whole" emerged by mid-19c. The word was used from 1841 specifically of the first three Gospels, on notion of "giving an account of events from the same point of view." Related Synoptical (1660s). The writers of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are synoptists.
The subtle change vs OP's is that EtymOnline does include some sense that the word 'synoptic' should be understood to describe the way in which the works relate to one another. But they do say that the connection to 'synopsis' is, in fact, part of the original intent of the usage.
I'm going to do some more digging and reply to OP directly when I find out more about where this comes from.
The usage of "synoptic" in reference to charts is also attested in other contexts from this time. For the English language, the Online Etymology Dictionary mentions 1763 as the date of the earliest usage of the term "synoptic" (from Greek syn- "together" + opsis "sight, appearance") in "reference to tables, charts, etc.", also used in other contexts such as wheather charts.[4]
Today, a synopsis of the gospels typically also includes the gospel of John, see for example Kurt Aland's 'classical' "Synopsis of The Four Gospels"[5]. However, the term "synoptic gospels" stuck to the original set of just Matthew, Mark and Luke.
The term ‘synoptic’ in relation to the Gospels is thus derived from a technical term in connection with charts and tables, not from the more general meaning ‘summary’.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Jakob_Griesbach
[2] Here is a scan of this book: https://archive.org/details/synopsisevangeli00dewesynopsisev... -- The table starts at p. 12.
[3] Matthew as based on Mark + Q + extras, Luke as based on Mark + Q + extras. However there is one longer passage in John 7:53–8:1 ("Jesus and the woman taken in adultery"), that is not included in the oldest manuscripts of John, but nevertheless became canonical, that is sometimes refered to as a "synoptic" interpolation into John, although it is not from any of the synoptic gospels, but similar in style to them.
[4] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=synopsis
[5] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/291923.Synopsis_of_the_F...
Yep, but more specifically Jesus as the Logos, which is a core concept in Platonism and Stoicism.
John very clearly meant his gospel to be read by gentiles from a Greek background.
The nativity was important for Jewish converts, partly because of descending from kind David (you'll notice the lengthy listings of ancestors in the synoptic gospels).
Luke was not a disciple, but the rest of his works read like a scholar doing careful interviews of eye witnesses to find the truth.
Most of the associations between Mark and Peter come from Papias (whom we possess only in fragments). He makes no suggestion of a filial relationship between the author of the second gospel and Peter.
I guess at this point, I'm legitimately asking who holds this view such that one can say "It is thought that . . ."
It’s also possible that Eg they’re written down from an earlier oral tradition which originated with them
That may have been what you were trying to say and I just misunderstood. I think I may have just misunderstood what you meant by the 170 AD date.
Why does it matter? It is the difference between eyewitness testimony and hearsay. Either type of testimony could be true or false, but generally speaking we put more weight on eyewitness testimony and far less on hearsay.
The primary argument against the traditional assignation of authorship of the Gospels is that they're not referred to by name in the Church Fathers before Irenaus (~180 AD). But by the literary standards of the ancient world, that just doesn't seem that weird to me? The early Fathers were referring to works by authors in living memory, and the prevailing bibliographical standards were somewhat lax for even further removed sources. We wouldn't claim that anyone who referred to Aristotle as "the philosopher" or Isaiah as "the prophet", as often happened, didn't know their names. Moreover, Justin Martyr (~150 CE) is often cited as evidence against named Gospels, but in the same source he refers to the Gospels collectively as "the memoirs of the Apostles", which doesn't help the case for anonymous authorship.
The biggest problem for the anonymous theory, however, is simply that there are no manuscript witnesses to support it: all the early manuscripts have titles. So the anonymous theory has to posit:
- The last Gospel, John, was reduced to writing about ~95 AD.
- The Gospels circulated throughout the Mediterranean in anonymous form.
- At some point before 180 AD, the Church decided to get its story straight and assigned names to the Gospels.
- At that point, everyone from France to India started referring to the Gospels with their present names, without any controversies or mixups.
- All of the earlier anonymous manuscripts were lost to history.
I'm not saying that definitely could not have happened, just that it doesn't seem especially more plausible than the traditional account.
I've read a suspiciously large amount of historical criticism for someone who doesn't do this for a living, thinking I would finally get to the bottom of what the New Testament was "really" about. I came away with the impression that the optimal amount of attention to pay to NT hist crit is either a lot, or zero. Every generation of hist crit somehow comes away with the conclusion that the NT is really about the issues of concern to that generation. In fact this has been going on ever since the field was founded by 19th century German Romantics, who discovered that the NT was the product of national ur-spirits expressed through folklore [!]
Our cultural familiarity with the NT sometimes keeps us from seeing how strange a collection of documents it really is. It is perhaps the best attested collection of sources in the ancient world, yet contains a mixture of Greco-Roman biography and history, supernatural events, and mystical theology. I am not trying to persuade you of any particular view about NT scholarship so much as challenge the idea that there's anything cut and dry about it.
There were dozens of other books often attributed to other apostles, and even by the time of Paul, he was warning about false gospels in circulation. The point is that we know that authorship was attributed to various books to give them weight and credibility.
It took around 200 more years before the current canonical list of books was settled on -- and then distributed around the world of Christianity without mixups (of course, Eastern Orthodox had their own ideas but the point stands). Considering how much less established and illiterate Christianity was in 180 vs 380 it seems even less surprising that the names of authorship could be chosen and settled.
My impression is that "gospel" (evangelion, G2098) is used exclusively to refer to something like "the good news of the Kingdom of God" rather than this or that manuscript or written account. The word is used extensively by Jesus in that sense: "the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the Gospel" (Mk 1:15) means "believe the good news that I am telling you", not the (rather meta-literary) "believe the literal document that you are now reading, in which I am a character".
This sense carries over straightforwardly to the Epistles. So "false gospels" seems better interpreted in context as "false teachings about Jesus" rather than "counterfeit manuscripts" in particular. In fact, AFAWCT there were no written Gospels when Paul was writing, so he couldn't have been referring to manuscripts.
We do know that there were non-canonical gospel manuscripts floating around at some point, which is not that surprising if we consider a gospel manuscript to be "something somebody wrote down about Jesus". But the non-canonical gospels are for the most part very late, and I'm not aware of any serious early debate about the list of canonical gospels, with one exception: Marcion rejected all of the canonical gospels, along with all of the OT, and substituted his own Gospel of Marcion (based on Luke and composed ~150 AD). There are debates about some of the minor Epistles, but there's no (surviving) argument about this or that community proposing to replace John with Thomas or anything like that.
There is a common misconception that if an Ecumenical Council pronounces a doctrine at a certain date, then the Church must have started believing it on that date. But more often the definitive ruling comes only when a long-held but unarticulated belief is challenged and the Church is forced to respond to the controversy. (Think of how the rules of sports evolve when a player exploits a loophole that obviously isn't in the spirit of the game.) So the fact that the canon was formally defined at a certain date doesn't seem to require that there was no practical fact of the matter as to which accounts were accepted before then: the early sources we have seem pretty unanimous on Gospel canonicity.
But I could be garbling all of this and don't want to overstate my case.
That's the big thing.
My understanding is that in spite of the names, the disciples didn't write them.
We can't know that that's the case, but I can see the argument.
However, this doesn't preclude the idea of their evangelism being recorded by someone else.
Paul—while not an Apostle himself—is generally held to be the true author of at least some of his letters and is likely the closest we'll find to identifying the earliest authors of the new testament with real, historical figures.
First, you can't just assume that 'the disciples' wrote those text. There is no evidence for that and lots of evidence against that. Basically no series scholars believe this anymore.
These text came into being later without titles. They circulated without titles. Its later church fathers who just assigned names to them based on tradition.
John is just to different. Especially in terms of 'Christology', meaning Jesus and his relationship to god. In Mark for example, Jesus basically doesn't say that he is the son of god. Mark Jesus is basically just a middle eastern wizard. In John Jesus is basically fully god doing some performance art in a human body.
But many people still believe that John had access to some of the likely earlier gospels (and not necessary just those in the bible). While they are quite different, there is no way they can be fully different. Some apologist want you to believe that John is an independent oral tradition but that is not accepted by most secular scholars.
As someone who was raised in the christian faith, learned the sunday school version of the bible and only later seriously studied the texts (first in theological seminary and later from a purely historical perspective after becoming an atheist) - it's remarkable how different the consensus of serious historians is from what most people learned in sunday school.
As you've said, we don't even know who wrote the synoptic gospels, where or when (closer than estimated decades). Due to the lack of original documents, reliable contemporaneous accounts and other supporting evidence, we know shockingly little with any certainty. It's extremely unlikely the authors of the gospels were eyewitnesses to any of the events they describe. I was most surprised when I learned from later study just how much the canonical bible I'd learned as a child was retconned hundreds of years later through an opaque process of curation and editing by fractious groups of church leaders at events like the Council of Nicea.
> In Mark for example, Jesus basically doesn't say that he is the son of god.
Which is why the inconsistencies in today's canonical new testament are even more remarkable. This is the most consistent version they could assemble from a far larger group of even more divergent, inconsistent texts. Ultimately, the bible we know today is descended from a pastiche of copies of copies, written over decades by unknown authors in different places and languages and then survived several 'negotiated settlements' between opposing factions arguing over arcane theological points in the context an overarching power dynamic trying to unite some semblance of a unified "church" (and even what we know of these councils is the sanitized version written by the 'winners').
Applying an adult's experience of how large groups work and how ad hoc organizations adapt orthodoxies over time and distance (ie 'telephone game'), the only way to not see the synoptic gospels as randomized fan fiction largely unrelated to any actual historical events is to believe that god miraculously intervened dozens of times over hundreds of years to enforce a "correct" outcome.
Well one side is "children, once a week" and the other is "full time commitment in history career".
Sunday school is just day care with stories. I once believed that "wet wood burns better than dry wood" because that's what a Sunday school teacher opened with for the story of the altar burning comparison (OT).
I'm still "a Christian" in some sense of the word, in that I think humans operate wholly on stories, and that there needs to be a unifying power structure that is ruthless yet humane, and I think some form of Christianity fits the bill.
but I believe no one (in most churches) actually knows what they're talking about. "Useful ignorance" useful for the power structure. They don't want historians at Sunday school they want recital.
Even fairly conservative evangelical churches like the one I grew up in were pretty much totally in alignment with modern scholarship when it comes to topics like the authorship of various New Testament books. If you are into debating the "Q source" or other fun stuff then there is no better place cause most elders would know what you are talking about, whereas this is all a niche topic at best outside of that environment (but thankfully not on HackerNews).
Study of ancient languages and strict study of the base texts is kind of a foundational aspect of most serious Protestantism.
Basically what I'm getting at is that everything you've written is reasonable, and I don't think it would be remotely out of the ordinary to hear in an adult Sunday school or other sort of adults oriented class (for adults interested in these sorts of things...we usually don't do classes on Sunday lol, that's too long at church for one day).
I'm as irritated as you are by the way a lot of the childrens content comes off.
Either they were copying off each other, or were copying from some other source. That's the sense in which they were "synoptic".
John is a separate document. It does tell different stories, but more importantly, it has completely different text even when the stories do overlap.
It is widely thought that the writer of John had access to some of the other gospels. But he wrote his text from scratch.
Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote. I didn't know that scholars assumed that Matthew and Luke already had Mark's gospel to draw from.