One opportunity for general comment presents itself here and I cannot resist taking that opportunity. I am convinced that one of the reasons for the widespread scholarly difficulties in dealing with the Synoptic Problem, and with understanding Synoptic data, is their failure to spend any time working with the Synopsis. I am not talking about casual glances, but detailed, meticulous study, ideally with colouring. Of course there are many exceptions to this, but I often find that when I talk to other NT scholars, there is no point in their student life, either as undergraduate or post-graduate students, or subsequently in their careers, when they have done any serious work with the Synopsis.
One brief and more specific comment on the closing of Mike's post:
A note of advice (originating from Mark Goodacre), if you are going to colour code or mark the pages of a Synopsis such as this, then make sure that you photocopy it first just in case you change your mind from which source you think a certain text belongs to!Thanks for the mention. Yes, I always recommend that, and I print out my own Synopses for undergraduate students to colour. But I would discourage colouring in line with "which source you think a certain text belongs to". For me, colouring takes place prior to decisions about sources; it's a source-neutral exercise. So what one is doing when one is colouring is to find a clear and helpful way of representing the data in order to help one out with decisions about sources. The best kind of Synopsis-colouring is not about assigning to sources but is about isolating patterns of agreement and disagreement.
2 comments:
I'd love to see a scanned picture of one of your color-coded pages. Any chance of putting that on the blog one day?
Hi Chris. Go to http://ntgateway.com/maze/synopses.htm and click on examples of "ready coloured version". These are English only.
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