Gospel Parallels/Parallel Gospels

The “gospel synopsis” or “gospel parallels” is a fundamental tool in the biblical scholar's toolbox, allowing her to see at a glance both the differences and similarities among three or more “Synoptic” Gospels—that is, gospels that display sufficient similarities to be “viewed together” (syn-opsis). The modern critical synopsis was the creation of Johann Jakob Griesbach, whose synopsis was first printed in 1774 as part of his Libri Historici Novi Testamenti Graece and two years separately as Synopsis Evangeliorvm Matthaei, Marci et Lucae textum Graecum (1776).

Unlike gospel harmonies, which merged four Gospels into a single continuous narrative and thus disguised the differing wordings, inflections in meaning, and sequences of pericopae, the gospel synopsis allowed the user to understand the distinctive architecture of each Gospel and to engage in a close comparison of the wording of gospel texts—for example, noticing that Mark's disciples register astonishment and incomprehension at Jesus' maritime walk (Mark 6:51–52), while Matthew's disciples worship Jesus and acclaim him as the son of God (Matt 14:33). Hundreds, even thousands of observations of such differences, large and small, allowed for the recognition of the distinctive literary and conceptual profiles of each of the evangelists. The gospel synopsis also allowed the scholar to see how Matthew's and Luke's sequencing of pericopae agreed with, and differed from Mark's, and how, for example, Matthew and Luke located the Woes against the Pharisees differently, Matthew placing these woes in public space during Jesus' final days in Jerusalem (Matt 23:1–39), while Luke located them at a meal setting while Jesus was travelling from Galilee to Jerusalem (Luke 11:39–54). Unlike the gospel harmony, which created the impression that one could reconstruct a biography of Jesus, the stark differences in editorial choice visible in a modern synopsis underscored how difficult it is naively to read any of the gospel accounts as a historical record of Jesus' activities. But the synopsis also allowed the scholar to set the literary architecture of each of the Gospels in sharp relief. Thus, the development of the gospel synopsis became the essential precondition of the emergence of “redaction (or editorial) criticism,” pioneered by Hans Conzelmann, Willi Marxen, and Günther Bornkamm in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the recognition that each of the Gospels had its own literary and conceptual profile and distinctive set of governing issues.

The construction of a gospel synopsis is not, however, a simple matter, and the creation of a synopsis from scratch is daunting indeed. Anyone who has tried for him/herself to set three or four Gospels in parallel will understand immediately how many thousands of individual decisions are required: for example, in aligning the opening scene of Mark with its Matthaean and Lukan parallels, does one place the citation of Isaiah 40:3 side by side (Matt 3:3 | Mark 1:3 | Luke 3:4) and arrange the other material around this agreement? Or does one align the three descriptions of John's preaching: Matthew's “repent for the Reign of the Heavens is near” and Mark's and Luke's “preaching a baptism of repentance for the release of sins” (Matt 3:2 | Mark 1:4 | Luke 3:3), a decision that throws the Isaian citation out of alignment? Each alignment nudges the user toward a particular editorial scenario, for example, that Matthew and Luke have relocated the description of John's preaching from its Markan location after the Isaian citation, which was the “anchor” (in the first alignment), or that Matthew and Luke have described John's activities first and only then used the Isaian citation as a kind of biblical footnote (in the second alignment). It becomes immediately clear that alignments matter when one comes to assess the literary and theological craft of each of the evangelists. Which portions of a complex text were evangelists willing to move about, and which did they consider to be the basic pillars of the story?

This exercise is repeated hundreds of times as one moves through the Gospels. It is probably for this reason that many of those who construct synopses simply take over the alignments of their predecessors, so arduous is the prospect of making all of these decisions on one's own. Hence, the synopsis of Hans Lietzmann (1935) adopted the alignments of the earlier (third) edition of Albrecht Huck (1906), and this arrangement was then re-used in the 1981 synopsis of Heinrich Greeven (Huck & Greeven 1981), even though Heinrich Greeven also introduced many improvements in the Greek text used, its legibility, and alignments within pericopae. The English Gospel Parallels by Burton Throckmorton (1949) was simply an English version of Lietzmann, using the RSV translation, and the later edition (1992) substituted the NRSV. Likewise, Kurt Aland's synopsis, first published in 1963 and reprinted numerous times since maintain the same basic arrangement of pericopae. The Greek-English edition (1971) and an English version (1982) then replicated the structure of the original 1963 Greek synopsis.

Seen in this historical context, Zeba Crook's Parallel Gospels: A Synopsis of Early Christian Writing is ambitious and innovative: while Crook is no doubt guided by some of the decisions of his predecessors, there is plenty that is new and useful and many innovations that attempt to overcome some of the limitations of other synopses. Unlike the works of Griesbach, Huck, and Aland, it is not a Greek synopsis, but rather a tool developed for teaching, in particular for students who do not read Greek.

The most obvious innovation concerns the addition of a text of Q and relevant parallels from the Gospel of Thomas to the display of the four intracanonical Gospels. For the text of Q, Crook has offered an English translation of the Q text reconstructed by the International Q Project (Robinson, Hoffmann, & Kloppenborg 2000). This is a bold and perhaps controversial decision. For users who accept the Two Document hypothesis, Crook's display allows the instructor to illustrate both how the text of Q has been reconstructed from the Matthew-Luke agreements. When turning to the study of Matthew and Luke, the instructor can show how these evangelists have variously and differently edited and incorporated Q into their respective works. This has the great advantage of sparing the beginning student from having to imagine a source text lying invisibly behind Matthew and Luke, and Matthew and Luke manipulating this phantom text. The drawback is that the printing of the text of Q lends it a materiality and reality that the instructor must then qualify both by pointing out that the reconstruction of the wording of Q is itself the product of certain understandings of the editorial practices of Matthew and Luke and—just as importantly—that the positing of Q itself is the product of conclusions about Markan priority and the independence of Matthew and Luke. It does, however, give the student something tangible with which to argue. This is to say that this aspect of Crook's Parallel Gospels demands a critical and informed mentor to guide students in their use of the tool. But that of course is also true of the use of the “texts” of any Gospel, which are, after all, the reconstructions of text critics and their hypotheses about the transmission of the text of the New Testament. For those who reject the Two Document hypothesis to embrace the Farrer hypothesis (Matthew used Mark, and Luke used both Mark and Matthew), or the Two Gospel hypothesis (Luke used Matthew and Mark used and conflated both), or some other non-Q hypothesis, the Q column can simply be ignored.

The presence of parallels from the Gospel of Thomas represents a real innovation, regardless of whether one thinks that Thomas's versions of Jesus-sayings are independent of the Synoptics or dependent upon them. While Aland's original Synopsis printed Thomas, curiously, in Latin (!), German and English versions, substituting the Coptic text of Thomas for the Latin only in the 15th (1996) edition, Thomas was relegated to an appendix, thus preventing the user from comparing Thomas closely with the Synoptics (if she ever noticed that it was there in the first place). Kloppenborg's Q Parallels (1988) was an advance insofar as it printed the Coptic text of Thomas on the pages facing the display of Matthew and Luke. But he did not precisely align Thomas with the Matthaean and Lukan texts, and of course only included the Thomasine parallels to Q texts. Hence, Crook's work is another step forward, since he not only prints Thomasine parallels in columns directly adjacent the synoptic texts, but also includes Thomas where it has parallels with Markan and special Matthaean texts (e.g., Gos. Thom. 100 || Mark 12:15–17, and Gos. Thom. 8, 57, 76, 109 || Matt 13:24–30, 44–50). Although Crook's display of parallels sometimes leads to six parallel columns (Matt, Mark, Q, Luke, John, Thomas) the great advantage is that it allows for easy comparison of parallel materials. Nothing gets lost or relegated to an appendix.

Inevitably there will be some quibbling about which parallels are displayed. Thus, for example, Q's divorce saying (Q 16:18) is visible in §37 (Matt 5:31–32 | Q 16:18 | Luke 16:18) but not in §291 (Matt 19:3–9 | Mark 10:2–12) even though the Matthean formulation in 19:9 seems indebted to the Q version of the saying. And a case might be made for occasionally aligning non-Gospel texts with the Synoptics: for example, 1 Corinthians 11:23–26 with Luke 22:15–20 (§349).

Another innovation, or at least resurrection of an innovation, is Crook's system of lines to mark the division between columns. A single unbroken line indicates that the pericope under examination appears in two or three Gospels in the same relative sequence. For example, the three columns in §295 (Matt 19:23–30 | Mark 10:23–31 | Luke 18:24–30) are so marked because they follow in canonical sequence after §294 (Matt 19:16–22 | Mark 10:17–22 | Luke 18:18–23)—that is, irrespective of which source-critical theory one adopts, the synoptic writers are following their sources without transpositions. A broken line to the left of a column, however, indicates that although that column contains a parallel to the text(s) in the other column(s), that parallel is not in the same relative sequence. Thus, for example, §159 uses a broken line for the Matthaean column (Matt 8:28–34) to signal that while Mark and Luke's versions of the Gerasene Demoniac appear in the same relative sequence, Matthew's story comes much earlier in the outline of his Gospel. This device was first used in Griesbach's synopsis, but then promptly forgotten until it was revived by the little-known Boismard-Lamouille synopsis (1986) and then by Crook. This is particularly useful for displaying Q texts. Since it is usually concluded that Luke preserved the original sequence of Q better than Matthew, the broken line in front of the Q and Lukan columns will alert the reader that Matthew has evidently moved a Q text from its original ‘Q’ location to serve a new purpose in Matthew. Finally, a double line is used to mark both Johannine and Thomasine columns, to indicate that the full texts of John and Thomas are not provided in the synopsis, but only those portions of John and Thomas that have synoptic parallels.

One of the critical issues in the construction of a synopsis concerns decisions about how to break up the synoptic text into discrete pericopae and how to align these with their “major” parallels in the other Gospels. A case in point is the presentation of Mark 1:2–6, Matthew 3:1–10 and Luke 3:1–14—John's initial preaching. Tischendorf lumped all of this material in a single section (1851, §14) but it is more common since then to divide the material into three separate sections, a first section where Mark 1:2–6 is present, a second with ‘Q’ material (Matt 3:7–10, Luke 3:7–9) and a third with special Lukan material (Luke 3:10–14). This normally aligns Matt 3:7a with Luke 3:7a. But what is normally missed is that Mark 1:5 (“and all the region … came out and were baptized by him“) has strong affinities with Luke 3:7a (“he was saying to the crowds who came out to be baptized by him”). Thus it is likely Luke's inspiration for his introduction to John's oracle is Mark 1:5. This means that, contrary to the display one encounters in Huck (hence, Throckmorton) and Aland, which suggests that Matthew and Luke have independently composed introductions to John's oracle (Matt 3:7a | Luke 3:7a) on the basis of some now-lost Q introduction, Luke's introduction is simply a re-presentation of Mark 1:5, and Matthew 3:7 is completely Matthew's work. If Q had an introduction, it must be sought elsewhere. Crook's presentation shows what other synopses, except Boismard-Lamouille, hide. Crook's decision is consequential, since it changes the way in which we might imagine both Luke and Matthew's editorial practices in fusing Mark with Q.

A yet more important issue of alignment concerns where one locates Matthew's Sermon on the Mount relative to Mark. Aland, following Tischendorf, located both the Sermon on the Mount and Luke's Sermon on the Plain after Mark 3:19. This is possible, but then requires that Matthew dislocated a great deal of the stories that occur in Mark 2:1–3:6 to points after his Sermon. It also harkens back to a now-rejected nineteenth century theory that the core of the Sermon once belonged to an earlier version of Mark, and that both Matthew and Luke knew this “Ur-Markus” and built their respective sermons around the vestigial sermon in Ur-Markus. The Huck synopsis and its successors place the Sermon on the Mount at Mark 1:39, and Luke's Sermon at Mark 3:19, which implies that Matthew and Luke independently fused Q's sermon with Mark, and also requires that Matthew dislocated fewer Markan stories to points after the Sermon. But Crook, following a suggestion of Neirynck (1982), puts the Matthaean Sermon at Mark between Mark 1:21 and 1:22, which requires that Matthew moved only Mark 1:40–45 (the curing of the leper) in Mark's opening sequence. None of these arrangements of course is “objective” or indubitably correct. But each implicitly paints a picture of Matthew as either an aggressive editor, willing to move around much of Mark's material, or as a more conservative editor, basically guided by Mark's sequence of stories (see Kloppenborg 2011). Again, the choices made by the editor of a synopsis are consequential for how we think about the editorial practices of the evangelists. Crook's alignment stands out, along with that of a Flemish synopsis by Denaux and Vervenne 1986 and an Italian one by Angelo Poppi (2006) as the only modern synopsis to choose this alignment.

Probably the most controversial aspect of Crook's Parallel Gospels is his policy on translation. Those who teach undergraduates who lack Greek will have encountered the frustration of having to tell students that some of seeming verbatim agreements among the Synoptics in Throckmorton's Gospel Parallels are not in fact agreements in Greek and some of the seeming disagreements are in fact agreements. This is because neither the RSV nor the NRSV has adopted a consistent policy on translation and neither has tried to render phrases that appear in Matthew in the same way that identical phrases in Mark are translated. Thus, for example, I have to tell students that the RSV's “when [Jesus] was baptized” in Matthew 3:16, Mark 1:9 and Luke 3:21b is not a triple agreement but a triple disagreement, since Matthew uses an aorist participle with de, Mark an aorist with kai and Luke a genitive absolute. Likewise the RSV's “he saw the heavens opened” looks like an agreement with Matthew and Luke, but is not because Mark uses schizo, “to tear,” while Matthew and Luke use different forms of anoigo, “to open” (the NRSV corrects this error).

Crook has avoided the problem of phantom agreements and disagreements by a cumbersome, but still useful expedient of adopting a consistent translation policy that renders one Greek word by its own unique English word and by using a system of hyphens to signal single Greek words (especially verbs and adverbs) that must in English be rendered with two or more words. Thus in the baptismal scene Mark's ebaptisthī is translated as “was-baptized,” and Matthew's participle by “having-been-baptized” and Luke's as “having-been-baptized,” the latter underscored to indicate that Matthew's Greek (baptistheis) is not the same as Luke's baptisthentos.

The policy that one word in Greek has its unique English equivalent produces some awkward results: “Judge no in-order-that you-might-be judged no” (Matt 7:1). This is because Crook consistently translates ou as “no.” So in order to render the phrase a bit more intelligible, he adds in smaller font, “Judge no [=not] in-order-that you-might-be judged no [=not].” It is rather like hearing Yoda in Star Wars speak, placing direct objects before subjects and verbs. The insistence on an English translation that reflects the structure of the Greek sentence has certain pedagogical advantages: besides making agreements and disagreements immediately visible, it renders strange a text that to many users is so comfortable and familiar. This is as it should be, since we are dealing with a text penned in a strange culture, with different linguistic and grammatical practices and with values that seem strange to the twenty-first century reader. Although Crook's translation policy is likely to attract vigorous criticism (and indeed already has!) by those committed to a different translation practice, my guess is that our students, who have no difficulty in understanding Yoda, will also make the transition to Crook's English with only a small amount of practice.

There are, inevitably, some translations that might be reconsidered. Crook translates the neuter pleion in §219 (Matt 12:41–42 | Luke 11:31–32) as “[a] more [=person greater than] Solomon/Jonah is here,” where it should be “[a] more [= thing greater than] Solomon/Jonah is here,” consistent with his translation of meizon in §130 (Matt 12:6) as “[something] greater of [=than the] temple is here.” But such details can, presumably, be corrected in later editions.

There are other innovations designed with the beginning student in mind. Crook has added seventeen cameo essays, distributed at strategic points throughout, on such topics as “Source criticism,” the “Griesbach/Two-Gospel Hypothesis,” “the Gospel of Thomas and the Synoptics,” “Problems with the 2DH: the Minor agreements,” and “the ending of Mark.” These are brief, well written, and balanced presentations that serve as ideal ways to introduce students to some of the complex debates in the study of the Synoptic Gospels.

In sum, Crook's Parallel Gospels is a signal achievement. That achievement can be appreciated in two levels. On the one hand, Crook's work manifestly reflects a deep experience in teaching the Synoptic Gospels to beginning students and the challenges that this presents to the instructor. But on the other hand, those familiar with the complex history of the construction of synopses since Griesbach will appreciate the sophistication and learning that has informed Crook's many decisions on formatting, alignment, and division of pericopae, as well as his commitment to producing a tool that maximally assists in seeing the synoptic data in its complexity.