Synoptic Gospels

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The Synoptic Gospels is a term used by modern New Testament scholars for the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke of the New Testament in the Bible. They are three of the four gospels, of which the Gospel of John is not included due to his different style and approach to the subject matter. The synoptic gospels often recount the same stories about Jesus of Nazareth, though sometimes with different details and lengths, but mostly following the same sequence and to a large extent using the same words. According to Bruce Metzger commenting on Clement of Alexandria (c 150 AD to 211AD) "One finds in Clement's [work] citations of all the books of the New Testament with the exception of Philemon, James, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John. (p. 131).

The term synoptic is derived from a combination of the Greek words συν (syn = together) and οψις (opsis = seeing) to indicate that the contents of these three Gospels can be viewed side-by-side, whether in a vertical parallel column synopsis, or a horizontal synoptic alignment.

Already the early Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (4th century) had devised a scheme that enabled scholars to find parallel texts; but a synopsis in the modern understanding did not come into existence until the 18th century through the labours of Johann Jakob Griesbach. The relationship between the texts is the subject of the Synoptic Problem, which essentially seeks answers to the question of why the texts are quite as so similar as they are, at times using exactly the same wording and mentioning the same sequence of events, despite the fact that other intervening events must have existed when something doubtless happened, even they were mundane things like Jesus sleeping, or people gossiping about him.

Griesbach used it to study and demonstrate a dependence of Mark and Luke on Matthew, a hypothesis that, while going back on the earliest traditions of the Church which held to the Augustinian hypothesis, in refined forms has been gaining supporters among scholars since the beginning of the 20th century. The majority of their colleagues, however, on internal evidence are proponents of the modern hypothesis of the priority of Mark supported by the possible gospel of Mark fragment 7Q5 in contrast to the Rylands Library Papyrus P52 (which on the front contains lines from the Gospel of John 18:31-33, in Greek, and the back contains lines from verses 37-38.). Furthermore, the two source hypothesis argues that all three Synoptic gospels used a common source referred to as the Q Manuscript, and, although as yet this hypothetical document has not been found or identified amongst early Christian texts, it appears to have some similarity with the ancient noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. While supporters say that the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas supports the concept of a "sayings gospel," Mark Goodacre argues that Q, as reconstructed, has a basic narrative structure and is not simply a list of sayings.

The Gospel according to John has a number of points of contact with the three synoptic Gospels, but differs considerably from them in content; and therefore not all Gospel Synopses display it.

Views about the dating of all four Gospels vary greatly, from about 60–70 AD until the end of the first century.

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Synoptic Gospels

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