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When you read the four Gospels: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, the first thing you notice is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are similar in telling a sequential story of Christ and John is very different. John seems to speak mystically or thematically, where the others appear to speak literally of the life of Christ. Scholars set aside John to compare the other three to each other.
When you read the four Gospels—Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John—you might notice that the first three, called the '''Synoptic Gospels''' (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), tell the story of Jesus in a similar way, while John’s Gospel feels very different. John focuses more on themes and ideas, almost like he’s speaking in riddles, rather than just telling a straightforward story like the others.


Written in the order of Mark, Matthew, Luke, scholars debate where the authors got their information as if they were only capable of copying the work of someone else. Sometimes this seems to make sense when the exact verbiage is used, but they are hard pressed to explain why changes were made.
People who study the Bible often compare Matthew, Mark, and Luke to see how they’re alike and different. Some think the authors of these Gospels might have copied parts from each other or from a shared source. This makes sense when you see the exact same wording in parts, but it doesn’t explain why they sometimes change details.


If one assumes that God gave them word-by-word dictation of the Gospels, then you create a problem: Why would God makes changes from one book to the other? Did God make mistakes or did they not hear him properly?
If God dictated the Gospels word-for-word, why would there be differences between them? Did God make mistakes, or did the writers hear Him wrong? On the other hand, if the writers weren’t inspired by God, how do we know which Gospel to trust, and how do we know they reflect what God wanted to say?


If it is assumed that men wrote them without inspiration, then which do we believe, and how reliable are they in relaying God's intention?
Some Bible scholars make these questions even harder by saying the Gospel writers used a now-lost document, which they call '''Q''', as their source. But if Q was real and important, why didn’t God protect it? And why would the Gospel writers change things if Q was so authoritative?


Theologians are subtly hostile against God by their ignorance. The ignorance begins with a mistaken identity of the genre of the scriptures (writings). 'Genre' describes the 'kind' of writing to expect. If the genre is 'poetry', typically people read over it not expecting to understand it, dismissing it as flowery language that means something to someone.
The real problem is that many scholars misunderstand the Bible’s '''genre'''—what kind of writing it is. For example, if you read a poem, you don’t expect it to tell facts like a history book. If you think the Bible is just '''literal history''', you might miss its deeper meaning. Jesus said all Scripture speaks about Him, but some people ignore this and treat parts of the Bible as just old stories about what happened.


If it is identified as historical, we expect to read it literally only learning something if we can infer good and bad behavior from it.
When we see the Bible in its proper context—as writings inspired by God to reveal His plan and point to Christ—all these supposed “problems” disappear. The Gospels aren’t random copies or inventions. They are unique perspectives on how God fulfilled His promises through Jesus.
 
Theologians identify the Bible as literal-historical. This is their first error. Jesus said it all speaks of him. This is a hostility that defines Christ out of those pieces they identify as merely historical.
 
Not satisfied with the disbelief sowed by such hostilities, they surmise a document that precedes the gospels which the authors had access to and more or less plagiarized. They call it the Q document.
 
They invent even more hostilities with their invention. If Q was an authoritative document that no longer exists, then God could not protect his word. Furthermore, since the gospel writers did not 'copy' it the same way, or corrected it, they did not see it as authoritative.
 
All these 'problems' disappear by identifying the proper historical context and genre.

Revision as of 09:56, 10 January 2025

The Synoptic Problem [∞]


When you read the four Gospels—Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John—you might notice that the first three, called the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), tell the story of Jesus in a similar way, while John’s Gospel feels very different. John focuses more on themes and ideas, almost like he’s speaking in riddles, rather than just telling a straightforward story like the others.

People who study the Bible often compare Matthew, Mark, and Luke to see how they’re alike and different. Some think the authors of these Gospels might have copied parts from each other or from a shared source. This makes sense when you see the exact same wording in parts, but it doesn’t explain why they sometimes change details.

If God dictated the Gospels word-for-word, why would there be differences between them? Did God make mistakes, or did the writers hear Him wrong? On the other hand, if the writers weren’t inspired by God, how do we know which Gospel to trust, and how do we know they reflect what God wanted to say?

Some Bible scholars make these questions even harder by saying the Gospel writers used a now-lost document, which they call Q, as their source. But if Q was real and important, why didn’t God protect it? And why would the Gospel writers change things if Q was so authoritative?

The real problem is that many scholars misunderstand the Bible’s genre—what kind of writing it is. For example, if you read a poem, you don’t expect it to tell facts like a history book. If you think the Bible is just literal history, you might miss its deeper meaning. Jesus said all Scripture speaks about Him, but some people ignore this and treat parts of the Bible as just old stories about what happened.

When we see the Bible in its proper context—as writings inspired by God to reveal His plan and point to Christ—all these supposed “problems” disappear. The Gospels aren’t random copies or inventions. They are unique perspectives on how God fulfilled His promises through Jesus.

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