Scholars disagree about when these books were written. I will also discuss the “Synoptic Problem,” or the attempt to determine which of the Synoptic Gospels was written first and the exact nature of dependence among the Synoptics as far as this can be determined.ĭating and Authorship of the Synoptic Gospels In this study I will discuss the individual nature of the Synoptic Gospels and provide an overview of their respective authors, the potential dates of their composition, and their intended audiences. While the Gospel of John shares a small amount of material with the Synoptic Gospels (such as Jesus’s baptism, implied at John 1:28–34), it differs enough from the Synoptics to be in a class of its own (see chapter 18 herein). Consequently, the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are referred to as the “Synoptic” Gospels (the word Synoptic comes from a Greek word meaning “to see together” or “from the same point of view”). Since most scholars believe that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, it is commonly held that both Matthew and Luke employed Mark as a source in their respective Gospels. These are small and seemingly inconsequential changes, but we must nonetheless ask why they were made. Here we have three different Gospels with three slightly different renderings of an event at Jesus’s baptism. Luke is different still: “the Holy descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him” (Luke 3:22). At Jesus’s baptism in Mark 1:10, for example, the Gospel of Mark speaks of “the Spirit like a dove descending upon him,” whereas Matthew’s account reads “the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him” (Matthew 3:16). Why this repetition? Why does the New Testament begin with three Gospels that essentially tell the same story about Jesus?Ĭareful readers, however, will notice that Mark tells the story of John the Baptist slightly differently than Matthew does and that Luke has yet more differences. Continuing, they discover that Luke also shares a high degree of material with both Mark and Matthew. For example, Mark 1:2 begins the story of John the Baptist, but this story was already covered in Matthew 3:13–17. But upon encountering Mark, they may be surprised to discover that it shares a high degree of material with Matthew.
After completing it, they tend to proceed to Mark, the next Gospel in canonical order. Most readers of the New Testament begin with the book of Matthew. Alan Taylor Farnes is an independent scholar of New Testament manuscripts whose research primarily focuses on how scribes copied the New Testament text.
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