The Synoptic Problem
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.
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.
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 it is assumed that men wrote them without inspiration, then which do we believe, and how reliable are they in relaying God's intention?
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.
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.
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.
