How similar are the Synoptics, and how do we represent it?

I have enjoyed the feedback, especially on twitter, from lots of people since I dusted down the blogging machine and reignited it earlier this week. I should blog more often! I had forgotten how much fun it is.

Anyway, this is the third post in the current series; cf. post one and post two.

Before continuing with critical reflections on Matthew Larsen's Gospels Before the Book, I'd like to pause to think a bit more about how we represent degrees of similarity between the Synoptic Gospels. This has been one of the most enjoyable take-aways from reflecting over the last couple of days. Larsen produced a proportional Venn diagram (p. 104) of the degree of similarity between Matthew and Mark in a bid to show just how similar these works are. He uses the pericope divisions in Aland's Synopsis. Here's my coloured version of his diagram, using my Synoptic colouring scheme: [2]:

Key:

Matthew's non-Marcan material (blue)
Mark's non-Matthean material (red)
Material shared by Matthew and Mark (purple)

The numbers:

Mark: 115 Aland pericopae
Matthew: 178 Aland pericopae
Overlapping: 107 Aland pericopae

93% of Mark is paralleled in Matthew.
60% of Matthew is paralleled in Mark.


The  diagram, though rough and ready, provides one metric for seeing how closely related Matthew is to Mark. The question then arises: what about Luke's relation to Mark? How close is it? Here's the proportional Venn diagram, again using my colouring scheme:

Key:

Luke's non-Marcan material (yellow)
Mark's non-Lucan material (red)
Material shared by Mark and Luke (orange)

The numbers:

Mark: 115 Aland pericopae
Luke: 185 Aland pericopae
Overlapping: 101 Aland pericopae

88% of Mark is paralleled in Luke.
55% of Luke is paralleled in Mark.

These figures are surprisingly similar to the figures for Matthew, surprising as Matthew is often regarded as so much closer to Mark, a kind of "second edition" of Mark. To some extent, this is a result of using the Aland pericopae rather than the traditional verse parallels, but I look forward to running some more precise numbers in due course.

The thing that got me thinking afresh about this whole question was Larsen's comment that "there are no two works from the ancient world more similar to each other" than Matthew and Mark. As I mentioned the other day, I am not sure if this is right. Matthew and Luke are much more similar overall, but we tend to miss this because of classic Two-Source Theory thinking that minimizes their macro-similarities, and projects their close non-Marcan agreements onto a non-extant source, with a view to maintaining  their independence from one another. Here's the proportional Venn diagram, again using my colouring scheme, and again using the Aland pericopae:

Key:

Matthew's non-Lucan material (blue)
Luke's non-Matthean material (yellow)
Material shared by Matthew and Luke (green)

The numbers:

Matthew: 178 Aland pericopae
Luke: 185 Aland pericopae
Overlapping: 137 Aland pericopae

74% of Matthew is paralleled in Luke.
77% of Luke is paralleled in Matthew.

I am grateful to Joe Weaks on The Macintosh Biblioblog (this is all wonderfully nostalgic!) for raising the question about the utility of traditional Venn diagrams like this. His suggestion is to work instead with rectangles:

Graphically Displaying Synoptic Data

This post shows how we can attempt to represent Matthew // Mark, Mark // Luke, and Matthew // Luke using coloured rectangles. I must admit that I really like Weaks's proposal, and not just because we use the same colour scheme. The only thing I'd say is that I think it would be harder to do the rectangle thing in black and white because it would be less clear that we are dealing with overlapping rectangles, whereas with circles, it is obvious even in black and white where one work ends and another begins.

Weaks continues by asking the next major question: can one represent the overlaps between all three Synoptics using the coloured rectangle approach? Weaks shows that it is possible here:

Graphically Displaying Three Synoptic Gospel Data

This diagram is also excellent. My only qualm is that on first sight, it can look like the double tradition (green) is also part of the triple tradition (brown), which is of course not the case, and one simply has to discipline one's mind not to see it that way, though of course in a more complex version one could at least attempt to depict with shades of colour pericopae that are pure triple (with only a handful of minor agreements), pure double (with no Marcan agreements), and everything in between. But life is probably too short for that.

My Response to Crook's Response to My Review of Parallel Gospels

I reviewed Zeba Crook's Parallel Gospels at this year's SBL and Crook responded.  I now have a few comments on that response.  I am grateful for Zeba's thoughtful comments.  I will take his points in turn:

(1) On the lack of word-alignment, I had not realized that this was a publisher's decision rather than an author's decision.  I understand the importance of affordability but I think it is a great shame that  something so fundamental to Synopsis construction is here jettisoned because of cost considerations.

In the discussion on Monday, I facetiously suggested that one could save a lot of space by getting rid of Q from the Synopsis, thereby freeing up more space for word-alignment.

(2) On the source-language translation, I understand Zeba's decision but I disagree with it.  The difficulty is that prepositions, for example, do not exist on their own, as individual sense-units.  They only attain meaning in connection with nouns in a particular case, so it makes no sense to translate hypo always as "under" and meta always as "with".  It is misleading to translate every preposition the same way, and it is a decision that greatly detracts from the appeal of the Synopsis.

(3) I am a little surprised by Zeba's response on the inclusion of Q in the Synopsis.  I think the inclusion of Q would be defensible on the grounds that it helps to illustrate the Two-Source Theory or that it facilitates comparison between Matthew, Luke and the reconstructed text of Q, but it is surely not debatable that including one solution to the problem into the presentation of the data prejudices the reader in favour of that solution, is it?

Zeba suggests that his Synopsis offers some encouragement to the Farrer Theory, e.g. placement of double tradition pericopes in the Synopsis and also the generation of more minor agreements.  However, the point about minor agreements is at least in part negated by the fact that Q is present in this synopsis to explain key minor agreements, especially Q 3.3 and Q 4.16.

Zeba also suggests that the inclusion of Q is no different from the inclusion of Thomas or John, but there is, of course, a material difference.  Both Thomas and John are extant works with textual witnesses and patristic citations; they are not hypothetical texts. In fact, the (helpful) inclusion of Thomas and John illustrates my point well -- that a Synopsis should aim to present the data without prejudice to a given solution to the problem.  Integrating Q into the presentation of the data confuses problem with solution in a fundamental way.

But my key point here is the pedagogical difficulty of including Q in the Synopsis, which turns double tradition into a second kind of triple tradition, and makes colouring the Synopsis much more difficult.  These are issues that are worth considering further.

Steve Walton and David Wenham on the Synoptic Problem

I have been working my way through the recently released second edition of Steve Walton and David Wenham's excellent Exploring the New Testament, Volume 1: A Guide to the Gospels and Acts.  As regular readers will know, I do like to look at New Testament introductions to see how they treat the Synoptic Problem.  Normally speaking, I have a lot to complain about, especially when the Farrer Theory gets ignored.

Well, with Walton and Wenham's introduction, there is good news for Q sceptics: the Farrer theory is treated in its discussion of the Synoptic Problem including its own diagram, brief discussion, and bibliographical references to Farrer's article, my introductory book (Way through the Maze), my monograph (Case Against Q) and even the NT Gateway (70, 73, 87).  Although it is naturally disappointing to see them dismiss the theory as having "many of the same objections as the Griesbach hypothesis" leading to the view being "not very widely held" (73), it is nevertheless encouraging to see the theory finding its way -- at last -- into the introductory literature.

What, though, of the substance of their exploration of the Synoptic Problem?  There are several reasons to find it refreshing.  For one thing, there is some discussion of the data before there is any discussion of the proposed solutions (61-5) echoing even those like me who advocate the colouring of the Synopsis (62, though I think that students will find my primary colour scheme more straightforward than their four-colour scheme).  For another, there is one sample synopsis (63, Sadducees' Question) and several lists taken over from Robert Stein's book (64, 68, 69) and one from Sanders and Davies (72).

Regular readers will not be expecting me to be unambiguously positive, though, and I don't want to disappoint them.  I would like to focus on a couple of difficulties in the discussion, the first with the way that they treat the Griesbach or Two Gospel (not "Two Gospels", 71) Theory.  Walton and Wenham offer several criticisms of the hypothesis, most of them well sustained, but the following criticism does not conceptualize the Griesbach theory fairly:

Luke's rearrangement of Matthean material   Consider the material shared by Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark (the Q material on the two source hypothesis).  Apart from rare examples (such as the temptation of Jesus, Matt. 4.1-11; Luke 4.1-13), Luke and Matthew do not present this material in conjunction with the same Markan material, but locate it in different settings in their Gospels.  In fact, on the Griesbach hypothesis, in editing Matthew, Luke has systematically moved almost all this material from its Matthean contexts to somewhere else in his Gospel.  This seems unlikely: a better explanation is that Luke is using Mark as a main source and other material to supplement Mark (73).

The difficulty with this explanation is that on the Griesbach Hypothesis, Luke is writing without reference to Mark, before Mark has been written, so the distinction between "Markan material" and "Q material" is irrelevant.  There is no option, then, for Luke and Matthew to present this material "in conjunction with the same Markan material".  For Griesbach's Luke, the distinction between double tradition and triple tradition does not exist.  This means that on the Griesbach hypothesis, Luke often follows Matthew's order; it is just that he does so most recognizably in the material that we call triple tradition.

On the Griesbach hypothesis, this material becomes "triple tradition" by virtue of Mark's subsequent action, according to which Mark shows preference for material that is in the same order in his sources Matthew and Luke.  In other words, it is an important element in the Griesbach hypothesis that Mark effectively creates the triple tradition by his selections from Matthew and Luke, a selection that is at least partly done on the basis of Matthew's and Luke's agreements in order.  Under such circumstances, it is a little unfair to criticize the theory for failing to explain Luke's ordering of double tradition.  The data set double tradition is generated by a subsequent move made by Mark, partly on the basis of the question of order, and not by Luke's editorial decisions.

The second difficulty I would like to mention also relates to the question or order, but this time for the Farrer Theory.  Griesbach is presented as the major alternative to the Two-Source theory (71-3) and Farrer is given a paragraph at the end under "Other Views".  It is dismissed in one sentence as follows:

This view faces many of the same objections as the Griesbach hypothesis, for it still holds that Luke has edited Matthew in ways that appear hard to understand and this has meant that, like the Griesbach view, it is not very widely held (73).

I disagree, of course, that it is hard to understand Luke's editing of Matthew, and it may be that Walton and Wenham's difficulty arises from their conceptualizing this work under the heading of criticizing the Griesbach hypothesis.  So let's take a look at what they say on the topic when they are discussing Griesbach:

Why does Luke break up Matthew's teaching blocks?  As we saw, Luke has most of the teaching found in Matthew's sermon on the mount (Matt. 5-7), but spread around his Gospel (see p. 69), and something similar happens with Matthew's four other teaching discourses (Matt. 10, 13, 18, 24-25).  If Luke is using Matthew, this seems unusual behaviour. (72).

On the Farrer theory, though, Luke's primary source for the structuring of his Gospel is Mark and paying careful attention to the way that Luke works with Mark helps to explain his use of Matthew.  His attitude towards lengthy discourses in his source material is consistent, and we would not expect him to retain all of Matthew's huge, theme-based structures when we can observe him reworking material in a plausible, biographical narrative (Case, chapters 4, 5 and 6; Maze, 123-8).

Take, for example, the third of the big Matthean discourses listed by Walton and Wenham,  Matthew 13.  Matthew 13, the parable chapter, is a massively expanded version of Mark's parable discourse in Mark 4.1-34.  Luke's parallel, in Luke 8.4-18, is a greatly reduced version of Mark 4, less than half its length, omitting some material and redistributing the rest.  Given that Luke here halves the length of Mark's version of the very discourse in question, it is hardly "unusual behaviour" to see him behaving in the same way towards Matthew's expansion of it (cf. Walton and Wenham's chart on 72 that nicely illustrates Matthew's expansion and Luke's reduction of Mark 4).

One last issue.  One of the things I like about Walton and Wenham's chapter is that it encourages students to pay careful attention to the Gospel Synopsis, and they provide an example of one themselves on 63, the Sadducees' Question.  Their English translation, however, masks an issue that is often missed, a telling minor agreement.  They have Matt. 22.27, "Last of all, the woman herself died", Mark 12.22, "Last of all, the woman herself died" and Luke 20.32, "Finally, the woman also died".  But Matthew and Mark are not identical here.  Matthew has ὕστερον δὲ πάντων . . . whereas Mark has ἔσχατον πάντων . . .  Luke follows Matthew and not Mark with his ὕστερον.  Why is this worth mentioning?  Because  ὕστερον is 7/0/1+0, seven times Matthew, never Mark, only here in Luke-Acts.  It is Matthew's way of representing the last in a series.  It's one of those nice minor agreements that illustrates Luke's knowledge of Matthew in triple tradition.

Is the Synoptic Problem tedious?

In a recent post on The Golden Rule, Mike Koke speaks of the Synoptic Problem as one of those "seemingly tedious aspects of studying the NT", echoing, perhaps unconsciously, similar remarks made my Raymond Brown in his Introduction to the New Testament.  I must admit to being somewhat baffled by those who find the Synoptic Problem boring.  It is so basic to so much of what we do in studying the New Testament that saying that it is boring is a bit like saying that New Testament study is boring.  It's a literary enigma, it's a historical puzzle, it's a theological essential.  What is not to enjoy?

I have never had anyone explain to me clearly why the Synoptic Problem is supposed to be dull or tedious.  I have a couple of theories, though, why people otherwise interested in New Testament study come to this odd conclusion:

(1) People find it dull because it is taught badly.  In fact, the Synoptic Problem is often not taught at all.  In so far as New Testament introductions and introductory courses teach it, they focus on one particular solution (the Two-Source theory) and then they refract all the data through that theory.  Simply setting out a solution deprives students of all the interest in the process of history, all the enjoyment in puzzling out the literary enigma.

(2) People find it dull because they do not actually study it.  The only way to engage in serious study of the Synoptic Problem is to get down and dirty with the Synopsis, and to spend enjoyable time working with the texts, ideally doing some colouring.  It's one of the guilty secrets of the guild that too many scholars simply do not do the work with the texts that they should, preferring instead to keep wading through the pile of largely mediocre pieces of secondary literature.

(3) People find it dull because they think that there is an obvious solution (the Two-Source Theory).  Alternatives are thought to be unpersuasive and not worth attention.  To an extent, Mike's post bears this out -- he engages only the Two-Source Theory and the Griesbach Theory.  I think that this is a shame given the strong case that can be made for the Farrer Theory, engagement with which can make the Synoptic Problem interesting again.

In my experience, students love to study the Synoptic Problem.  I have run graduate courses on the Synoptic Problem and they have produced excellent intellectual stimulation and publishable work from the students involved.  In my undergraduate classes, colouring and analyzing the Synopsis has proved to be one of the most popular assignments I have given and student feedback has been very positive.  These students had never heard that the Synoptic Problem was supposed to be dull, and found the tasks engaging, not least because it is "hands on" -- actually working seriously with texts rather than reading textbooks describing the supposed results of scholarship.

My diagnosis, then, is that the Synoptic Problem needs to be studied in detail, taught effectively and represented fairly.  It is amazing what fun it then becomes.

Synoptic Project Website

Talking about Synopses, and especially colouring Synopses (Reflections on the Synopsis) reminded me that I needed to add a link to Ben Smith's Synoptic Project on The New Testament Gateway: Gospels and Acts: Texts and Synopses page. I have now done that and here is what I wrote:

The Synoptic Project
By Ben C. Smith: a superb resource which enables one to view the Synoptics in parallel in Greek and English, and then to add colour according to a variety of colour schemes. You can call up parallels either by beginning from the Itemized Itinerary or you can begin from an Inventory of Matthew or of Mark or of Luke. This Synoptic Project is not yet complete, but there is already enough done to confirm that this is likely to be an outstanding resource.

I must admit that I love playing with the colour schemes on offer, and am flattered that Ben labels one of his schemes "Goodacre" referring to the primary colours scheme I set out in The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (see the companion website section Synopses for more).

While adding this, I realized a problem with the architecture of the NT Gateway, whereby people on the Synoptic Problem pages might not find their way to the Texts and Synopses page, so I have added a major link to the latter page on the former page. I am planning some substantial work on the architecture of the site this summer; more anon.

Reflections on the Synopsis

On Euangelion, Michael Bird has a useful Review of the New Edition of Aland's Synopsis of the Four Gospels (when he says "new", that's 2001). It is encouraging to hear that Mike gets students in class looking at the Synopsis, and that's a good reason for recommending the Greek-English edition. Here at Duke, the undergraduates in my classes rarely have Greek and so one has to work from English synopses (and I create my own for them). I would add, though, that it's good for second year Greek students to work with a Greek-only Synopsis, to take away the prop. And for those students, I'd recommend either the fifteenth edition of Aland, which includes the Gospel of Thomas in an appendix, or the underrated Huck-Greeven. Graduate students should own at least one of those and preferably both.

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.

Carlson colours the Synopsis again

The world is divided into those who enjoying colouring their Synopsis and those who do not. Well, that's one way I like to divide the world up. I was taught to colour the Synopsis by Ed Sanders in his lectures on the Synoptic Gospels in Oxford in the mid 1980s and I was captivated by this straight away. There's no question that it is an ideal way of getting familiar with the data in the Synopsis. And everyone who has tried it at any length will have reached the stage where they become quite frustrated by it because it's never as easy to apply as you might wish. I did make the mistake as an undergraduate, though, of beginning to colour directly in my copy of Greeven's Synopsis. So I now always advise students to photocopy first and then colour; always avoid defacing books if possible, especially with coloured pencils.

I have just been teaching the Synoptic Problem and Redaction Criticism to new first year students over the last couple of weeks, so it is nice to have the topic of colouring the Synopsis come to light again on the web courtesy of Stephen Carlson's post today Multi-color Synopsis @ Synoptic Problem website, which draws attention to the relaunch of his colouring project, probably the first attempt to colour the Synopsis on the internet back in ?1996. Here's the first page of the new Synopsis:

John's Imprisonment

The first noticeable thing is the excellent and necessary move to unicode fonts from the Symbol font used in the earlier version, at the time a necessary evil. The second thing to notice is the colouring scheme, which Stephen explains in the blog entry, and which is continuous with the earlier system. One of the things that is fascinating about the business of Synopsis colouring is how different systems appear intuitive to different people, and I suppose this shows differences in how we find it helpful to view things. I remember looking at the way that other students did their revision and being surprised by how different it was to the way that I organized my own. I feel the same way now when I see how colleagues organize their hand-outs. This is something of a round-about way of saying that I don't at this stage find Stephen's scheme as intuitive as my own (explained in The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze, with English examples here and blogged on here), which to me has the advantage of giving at-a-glance visual clues to what kind of agreement one is dealing with. For example, since Mark is red, a purple in Matthew will tell us straight away that there is some Marcan material in Matthew here since purple has red in it. Or when I look at green material, I see something with no red in it whatsoever, and this is double tradition (Q) material, i.e Matthew (blue) + Luke (yellow). And so on -- I like the combinations and the way that the colours merge into one another and contrast with one another. For me it creates a kind of colour map of the Synopsis, representing visually the way in which the different agreements and disagreements are networking with one another.

But I didn't begin this post with a view to discussing again my own preferred scheme, but to commend Stephen on the re-launch of an excellent project.

Update (Wednesday, 23.32): Stephen Carlson comments and comes up with the great idea of using user-defined CSS (cascading style sheets) to override Stephen's own colour choices. I've followed Stephen's instructions and have adjusted the style sheet but can't seem to get it to achieve the desired result. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong there; is it just me? One comment, though: even if I can get it to work, Stephen's scheme works with triple tradition agreements = default / black text, and so not separately encoded, whereas mine works with triple tradition agreements as brown (i.e. expressive of blue+red+yellow, Matthew+Mark+Luke), so in order to get from Stephen's scheme to mine, the default text would also need to be encoded and not just left.

I've been thinking a little more about my scheme too and want to pose this question: what do we think we are doing when we colour the Synopsis? Well, for me one of the goals is to create a visual map of the way in which the different agreements network together, i.e. to find a way of visually presenting the contours of a given passage that one can pick up straight away. It's a bit like diagramming Greek grammar. The way the primary-colours and combinations scheme works is to present to the reader with a one-look demonstration of the different degrees of agreement and disagreement. I am not sure if I am finding a clear way to articulate this yet, and at the root of my inability to articulate it may be some misunderstanding on my part of how, for example, Stephen's scheme works, e.g. I am more familiar with primary colours and combinations in painting and paint-mixing than I am with "the primary colours of light", but in the latter does blue+red+green = black (Matt+Mark+Luke = triple agreemnt) in the same way that blue+red+yellow = brown on my scheme? It's probably just my ignorance showing here.

Update (Thursday, 16.02): Catherine Smith helps me out with the Primary Colours of Light with that link to a nice diagram. The diagrams here bear out my concern. The top one could be re-labelled according to my colouring scheme for the Synoptics, replacing blue / red / yellow with Matthew / Mark / Luke, purple with Matthew + Mark orange with Mark + Luke, green with Matthew + Luke, brown with Matthew + Mark + Luke. In fact, it occurs to me that that would be a useful way of my demonstrating my colouring scheme. But the same is not true for the primary colours of light in relation to Stephen's scheme since the latter has a rough adherence to the combinations but not a complete adherence.

One other thing -- Stephen corrects the CSS in his post on Synoptic Colors but I still can't get it to work for me. I am probably being Mr Thicko on this but can't work out what I am doing wrong.

English Reader's Synopsis

I commented yesterday on Zeba Crook's homepage. I would now like to draw attention to this element on his homepage:

An English Reader's Synopsis

This is an introduction to a project on which Crook has been working for some years. There are several examples in the PDF file to which the above page links. Crook is attempting a major English language Synopsis in which the use of a "source language translation" (i.e. literal, non-idiomatic) will help the reader to see as many of the actual agreements in the Greek as possible, agreements that are sometimes obscured in "target language translation" Synopses like Throckmorton's Gospel Parallels. Stephen Carlson makes some useful comments on this in Hypotyposeis and asks about the target audience for the proposal. I would say that there is a potential market at least among the growing number of undergraduate Theology students in the UK who do not do Greek. Greek went optional on the Theology BA Honours in 1995 here in Birmingham and most, if not all, other British Universities are the same. When I was in Oxford, Greek was still compulsory for Single Honours Theology BA students but I understand that this is the case no longer. But the students without Greek still want to do courses on Jesus and the Gospels and it will be useful to be able to push them towards a resource like the one proposed by Crook. When I am teaching New Testament courses to our undergraduates, I make use of my own simple English language Synopses, some of which I have made available on-line (I have a lot more, so perhaps I ought to think about making those more broadly available too). We have now moved Greek Synopsis work into the Level 2-3 Greek New Testament courses.

There may be sufficient interest for an English language Synopsis like the one Crook is proposing for a more general audience, but I don't know.

Some further comments on the proposal:

(1) Its essential ethos is right. I recall E. P. Sanders complaining that the Funk Synopsis matches up parallels in the RSV that are not actually present in the Greek. I have not checked up the Funk Synopsis to see if that is right or not. See Robert Walter Funk, New Gospel Parallels: Volume One, The Synoptic Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985). Even that is not true, the comment points up the potential danger with using "target language translation".

(2) Crook explains that "Each gospel is presented in its own order, indicated when the gospel name and passages appear in bold lettering". This sounds like a good idea for combatting the big problem over how to order a Synopsis. For English-only readers, one should probably be especially conscious of the difficulties they might have in finding parallels and anything that facilitates their easy handling of them should be encouraged. If I understand Crook's proposal correctly, pericopae will be repeated in that particular Gospel's relevant order where that Gospels is out of sync with one or both of the others.

(3) I am fully behind the importance of teaching textual criticism to users of the Synopsis. I wonder, though, if the textual apparatus provided is a bit too detailed for an English language only reader. I am not sure if the target audience is conceptualised clearly here. The list of witnesses in the selected cases where textual apparatus is provided is too terse and focussed for non-Greek readers. I would have thought that something that explains the most important variations is required or the student will ignore it.

(4) My major qualm about the proposal is the use of the reconstructed text of Q in the Synopsis. On one level, this is a useful and interesting way of showing students where the IQP's Reconstructed Q comes from, i.e. from Synoptic comparison between Matthew and Luke. But my concern is that the use of Q limits the usefulness of the Synopsis in a fundamental way by foreclosing one of the key issues in Synoptic Problem research, which is the very reason for looking at a Synopsis. Instead of acting as a tool for students to investigate and test the Q hypothesis, the actual printing of the reconstructed text of Q inevitably gives Q a tangibility, a concrete presence, that makes it harder to encourage students to test the hypothesis. In my experience of teaching the Synoptic Problem, many students have difficulty grasping the Q hypothesis -- it takes a lot of patient explanation -- and they are quickly put off if they hear about its chapter and verse numbers, its reconstructed text and so on. In fact I tend to avoid talking about the properties of reconstructed Q in introductory lectures because it unduly biases the students against the Q hypothesis. I want them to understand the hypothesis and to judge it as fairly as possible and not to be biased against it by leaping ahead too quickly to reconstructed Q. This may just be my experience; it may just be Birmingham students! But I know that I would find it tough to introduce a Gospel Synopsis to undergraduate students that features the text of Q, with verse numbers and the like. I am afraid that many of them would simply refuse to take it seriously, for all my attempts to defend it.

(5) There is a related practical issue. The introduction of Q turns the three-column Synopsis into a four column Synopsis (and more when Thomas and John come in too). I think this is potentially problematic on two fronts. First, it reduces the simplicity of the presentation, thinning out the columns and crowding the page. This is a shame in a Synopsis that is designed to appeal to undergraduate students. Second, it radically alters the opportunity to colour the Synopsis. In my own view, it is greatly fortuitous that there are three Synoptic Gospels and three primary colours and that the combinations between them make colouring both intuitive and fun (see previous blog entry and discussion in my The Synoptic Problem). I'm not sure how one would encourage students to colour a four-column Synopsis. Would one leave Q white? Would one colour in-line with the colouring of Matthew and Luke so that one could see how the wording of Q had been reconstructed? Either way, it seems to me that the problem is that one weakens the gift we have been given of three Synoptic Gospels.

(6) A related problem is that I would find it less straightforward to use a Synopsis like this in teaching the Synoptic Problem. Pure triple tradition is still in three columns, so one has the link there between triple and three columns. But the pure double tradition is in three columns, Matthew, Q and Luke, and so it's less straightforward to explain these "triple" and "double" tradition terms. This might sound like an overly simple point but I reckon that it is a very useful way to begin the discussion of the Synoptic Problem and to go from triple tradition and double tradition to possible explanations of these.

My critical comments should not detract from the fact that, to repeat, I think this a very interesting proposal with some real merit.

Update (3 December 2004): Zeba Crook has uploaded a new version of the proposal here:

English Reader's Synopsis

Marc Chan Chim Yuk, Jesus' Sayings in the Triple Tradition

In Bible Software Review Weblog, Rubén Gómez draws attention to the following online Festschrift, quite an unusual phenomenon:

"What Does the Text Actually Say?"
A Festschrift in Honour of Dr Richard K. Moore
with articles by Evelyn Ashley, Michael Bullard, Marc Chan, Tim Finney and Alan Gordon and notes of appreciation from Barbara Aland, Ann Harding, David Neville, Ken Panten, Michael Welte and Geoff Westlake.
Published at http://purl.org/RelTech/books/RKM/, 2002.

Given my interest in the Synoptic Problem, I was drawn in particular to the following article:

Marc Chan Chim Yuk, "Jesus' Sayings in the Triple Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels"

Essentially, what the author does is to look into the actual degree of verbatim agreement between the Synoptics in triple tradition material, showing that the average is about 26.4%, a figure lower than the 50% figure mentioned by Sanders and Davies in Studying the Synoptic Gospels (see article for reference). But the study also concludes that:

It has revealed quite positively the fact that the correlation of Jesus' sayings in the Triple Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels is twice as high as the correlation for the surrounding narratives.

And it sees this as evidence that:

This indicates that the words of Jesus were treated with very high respect and thus transmitted and reproduced with care.

The last sentence rather took my breath away since it seems to go far further than the evidence allows:

There are still problems that have not been solved but the overall trend in this article points towards the fact that indeed the sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels do represent what Jesus actually spoke during his ministry on earth.

It's a shame that a generally useful essay overreaches itself in the end, not least in that the topic it begins with is the avoidance of claims that are not supported by appropriate evidence. One or two other comments on the essay:

(1) It's a shame that the essay perpetuates the lore that there are essentially two alternative solutions to the Synoptic Problem, the Two-Source Theory and Griesbach, with no mention of Farrer (Marcan Priority without Q). This is particularly disappointing in an essay that begins and ends with E. P. Sanders and Margaret Davies's Studying the Synoptic Gospels which not only discusses the Farrer theory at length but also comes down broadly in support of it (see some quotations from it).

(2) The author recommends a colour coding scheme apparently devised by a certain Karawara Gospels Project. The article explains that this system was designed by Richard Moore, in whose honour this Festschrift was produced, in 1987-8. David Neville, author of two books on the Synoptic Problem, mentions this same project in his Thanks to Richard Moore, in the same volume. I am happy to see that the scheme is effectively identical to the one I came up with and recommended in my The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze! It takes advantage of the fact that there are three Synoptics and three primary colours, and works with that. This has always seemed so intuitive to me that I am surprised that more have not tried the same thing, so I am reassured to find someone independently coming to the same conclusion. However, when it comes to computerizing the scheme, they adjust Luke's yellow to grey "since yellow is barely visible when printed", and they make similar adjustments in the various combinations. I understand the problem here because when I went from the manual colouring of my Synopsis to trying to represent it on-line, the first problem was indeed the faintness of the yellow. But the solution I have used in my on-line synopsis examples has been to avoid the problem by simply providing a grey background rather than a white one. Then the yellow shows up better than anything.

Unfortunately, there are no examples of the colouring provided in the article, no doubt because it was originally projected as a print volume (see note 4) rather than an on-line one.