In a way, it was the lions' fault. They were so hungry, and the Christians were so delicious. And as time went on, more and more lions ate more and more Christians, for the state did its best to stamp out this dangerous new sect. Of course, most of the people who had known Jesus just plain died. Others were sentenced to the mines in Sardinia. Others went underground. But for whatever reasons, the fact remained that the generation that had known Jesus "in the flesh" was disappearing, and there was need to get some of the scattered little collections of stories about him into permanent form.
Let's start off with a little private sleuthing. Anyone who reads the first three books of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) will recognize that they are the end product of the attempt to "get down in writing" the important things about Jesus. We call them the "Synoptic Gospels" because when we study them synoptically, that is in parallel columns, we can see their similarities and relationships more clearly.
So let us imaginatively do just that. What do we find? We find that Mark is much the shortest of the three, and that both Matthew and Luke follow its basic outline. When one of them departs from Mark's account to bring in new material of his own, he inevitably returns to Mark at the point where he left off, and continues to follow Mark again. At many points, the words are identical in all three accounts. Matthew helps himself to over 90 per cent of Mark's exact words, and Luke uses over 50 per cent. The scholars conclude that Matthew and Luke must have had Mark's account before them as they wrote.Now let us cut out and throw away all the places where the three accounts are identical. (This pretty much disposes of Mark.) We make the interesting discovery that there is still a good deal of Matthew and Luke which is word for word the same. Apparently they used another common source in addition to Mark. No copy of this source has ever been found, and the scholars simply call it "Q," for the German word "Quelle" meaning (can you guess?) "source." Q" seems to have been a collection of Jesus' sayings. The Sermon on the Mount is an example of material from "Q."If you now scratch off all the places where Matthew and Luke agree, each book still has a sizable number of verses left, and the scholars conclude that the authors must have had further private sources of information.This means that our present Synoptic Gospels are based on four basic sources of information:
1. Mark's account-also used by Matthew and Luke
2. "Q" -- used extensively by Matthew and Luke
3. Luke's special source
4. Matthew's special source
No comments:
Post a Comment