Griesbach's Hypothesis

When people consider the Synoptic Gospels, they believe that they all complement each other. This is not entirely the case. While these Gospels speak on similar topics with regard to Jesus' life, they differ in how they portray it. This is where the Synoptic Problem is developed. Essentially, the Problem is that the Gospels are not all the same and they each present something different about Jesus' life. The Problem addresses which Gospel was written first. Since they are all similar but some have excluded or added details, it is difficult to tell which one was produced first and to tell which description of Jesus' life is accurate. Scholars have produced theories that offer a solution to the confusion regarding the order that the Gospels were written and to identify the original values of Jesus and early...show more content...

The Two–Source Hypothesis is the most widely accepted theory. The Augustinian Theory suggests that Matthew was written in Aramaic and the first Gospel. Then it says that Mark was written based off of Mathew and was written in Greek when Hellenistic culture became prominent which is why it is the shorter Gospel. The Griesbach Hypothesis, also known as the Two–Gospel hypothesis, written by 18th century biblical scholar Griesbach, maintains that the order of the Gospels is Matthew, Luke, then Mark. However, neither of these solutions accounts for the fact that Mark had to be written first. So, we look to the Two–Source and Farrher Hypothesis' for a reasonable explanation to the synoptic problem. The Two–Source Hypothesis says that Mark is the original Gospel and that Matthew and Luke independently used Mark to write their own Gospel. This is the most popular solution amongst scholars today. It has also been hypothesized that the Q, which is a collection of teaching traditions is used to relate the Gospels but the issue is that there is

Get more content

Synoptic Problem

The synoptic problem

The first three books of the New Testament which are Matthew, Mark and Luke are compared, and it is discovered that they look similar to one another in content and expression. As a result they a referred to as the synoptic gospels. The word "synoptic" basically means "to see together with a common view". This raises the question of why they are similar to one another in these respects. This is known as the synoptic problem.

The many similarities between the synoptic gospels have led some to wonder if the gospel authors had a common source, another written account of Christ's birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection from which they obtained the material for their gospels. Some argue that Matthew, Mark, and Luke...show more content...

Mark`s fast moving account presents Jesus as a man of action, the son of God who was a servant among men. Luke is in inquisitive Greek literary style, seems to address cultured Gentiles and shows Jesus as a friend of disadvantaged groups. Attempts to account for both similarities and differences within the three Gospels constitute the synoptic problem.

Matthew is the author of the first Gospel and is an eye witness to the events that occurred during approximately the last half of Jesus` ministry. He was one of the twelve apostles who followed Jesus and was commissioned by him. His account is second to that only of Luke. He groups events in topical order and as a result his account often deviates from a strict chronological order. He is pre–eminently the reporter of Jesus` sermons and other discourses such as the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), the instruction given to the twelve apostles (Matthew 16), the sermon on the sea (Matthew 13) and the last preaching in the temple (Matthew 21).

Mark is not an eye witness of the events he describes in his writings and he even quotes Isaiah and is also a close associate of the apostle Peter one of the twelve. He narrates what he heard from the lips of Peter the apostle. His purpose was to report what Jesus did and not what he said and therefore teaches that Jesus is a man of action. He called it, "a brief of our Lord`s biography" because of lack of the exact term. He follows much of a chronological precise than that of

Matthew the premise you present regarding the Synoptic problem is an interesting take, and definitely different than the majority of the class (M. Moore, personal communication, September 20, 2017). Moreover, I relish the chance to respectfully disagree with you regarding this premise, as this is how one truly understands what they believe. So, yes, there are grounds for arguing that the Gospels plagiarized information from the other Gospel's due to their similarities (Wilcox, 2014). However, this premise does not account for the separate terminology, chronological variations, and differing focus of each writer (Harris, 2014). Moreover, if these writers did not personally observe the acts explained in the Gospels, and had limited sources to

Get more content