The Synopsis, the Exploding Helicopter and Pictures or Conversation

I am constantly baffled by how few scholars allow themselves the luxury of illustrating their articles on the Synoptic Gospels with a nice Synopsis of the Gospels.  I like to tell my students that there are few articles on the Synoptics that would not be greatly improved by the addition of a nice Synopsis of the passage in question.  In this respect, Synopses are like exploding helicopters in films.  Just as there are few articles that would not be improved with the addition of a Synopsis of the Gospels, so too there are few films that would not be improved by the addition of an exploding helicopter (Roger Corman via Mark Kermode).

I suspect that the reticence proceeds from several factors.  First, it takes a long time to construct your own Synopsis, even of just the one pericope.  Many scholars are computer-literacy-challenged and balk at the pain of constructing their own Synopsis, with all its word alignments and line breaks, let alone having to master the use of a decent Greek font.

Moreover, some scholars have never taken a course on the Synoptic Problem and are reticent to risk exposing their ignorance by constructing a Synopsis that misses key pieces of data.

And many scholars are happy with the existing Synopses on their desks (these days usually Aland, though some, like me, still prefer Greeven) and they assume, wrongly, that their readers will turn up the relevant page in the Synopsis when they are reading the article.

But there are so many benefits to producing your own illustrative Synopses of Gospel passages in your academic writing.  For one thing, there will often be a specific piece of data to which you wish to draw attention.  Producing your own Synopsis, perhaps with some nice underlining to draw attention to the key point, can help the reader to visualize the data instantly, and without the added hassle of looking up the passage in Aland or Greeven.

The effort involved is nothing like as bad as it was in the days of typewriters and drawing.  Although it can sometimes be a little frustrating, producing Synopses is like any other element in word-processing -- practice makes perfect.  A simple table is the way to do begin, with single line spacing, no paragraph spacing or indents, left alignment and lots of carriage returns.  There are plenty of good electronic texts that you can use as the base text too, even if one wishes to tweak them.

For me, it's a bit like Alice's observation at the beginning of her Adventures in Wonderland:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'

As Alice knew, pictures and conversation break up bland and boring blocks of text.  Far too many articles on the Synoptic Gospels are made up of boring old blocks of prose, with no Synopses or tables. And what is the use of an article, thought Mark, without Synopses or tables?

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.