Studies in the Gospels (Part Four)
Welcome to my fourth installment in looking at the similarities and differences among the gospels. I am exploring the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke first and then we will look at the gospel of John, which is very different from the first three. So far, we have established that each gospel writer received oral and written traditions which were passed down to them by the communities of Jesus-followers in the first century. Each writer then took those traditions, arranged them in a certain order and edited them, sometimes to improve the grammar and sometimes to advance a certain theological perspective.
Each gospel was written anonymously. The earliest copies we have don’t have any names associated with them. It wasn’t till the middle of the 2nd century CE that the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were associated with the gospels. We have established that the gospel of Mark was written first, around 65 CE (common era), and that the gospels of Luke and Matthew were most likely written in the period from 80 to 85 CE. Scholars have concluded that Luke and Matthew incorporated the text of Mark into their gospels independently of one another. Scholars made this conclusion because Matthew and Luke insert Mark’s stories in different places in their narratives and they make different edits to Mark’s accounts of Jesus’ miracles, parables, and teachings.
Now we want to explore the material that Luke and
Matthew share which is not part of Mark’s gospel. This material is made up mostly of sayings of
Jesus (wisdom sayings and parables) along with some narratives of John the
Baptist and the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. This material is called the “double
tradition” since it appears in both Luke and Matthew. It is also called “Q” which comes from the
German word quelle, meaning source. I am
going to call it the “double tradition” since Google kept deleting this post
when I was calling it by the capital letter from the German word. I think maybe Google is scanning for some
political conspiracy theories and they thought this post was one, so they
deleted it.
Anyway, back to the blog…Remember that in the first century Mediterranean world, most people were illiterate. The way they accessed texts like the Hebrew Bible was by hearing someone read the text. Scribes were literate people who copied sacred texts, studied them, and read them in public settings. Scribes were very important people in 1 century Palestine, and they appear in the gospels several times.
Another way the Jewish people in 1st century Palestine learned was through oral tradition. Stories and ideas were transmitted orally from person to person and from group to group. This was how the stories about Jesus’ life and ministry were transmitted in the early days of the Christian movement. We can call that specific oral tradition the “Jesus tradition.” The Jesus tradition began in the Aramaic language, since that was the language of Jesus and the common people of Roman-controlled Palestine. The Jesus tradition began in rural Galilee where Jesus began his ministry. The tradition was probably in existence before his death and spread to wider circles after his death and resurrection. The tradition consisted of narratives of Jesus’ actions, his parables, and his wisdom sayings. At some point, some of those oral traditions were committed to writing (perhaps initially in Aramaic). The four gospel writers drew on those oral traditions and available written traditions to compose their gospels. Each gospel was composed in Greek. Greek was the language of commerce for the Mediterranean world in the 1st century. It functioned like English does today – a common language used for business across cultures.
All our 27 New Testament documents are written in koine (common) Greek. Paul’s letters are the earliest compositions in our New Testament, and they date from around 49 CE to 64 CE. Paul was executed in Rome sometime between 62 and 64 CE. Paul’s letters don’t tell us much about the life or teachings of Jesus. They contain interpretations of Jesus’ death and resurrection as well as ethical instructions to the early Christian communities that Paul had founded. We must rely on the four gospels for information on Jesus’ life and teachings.
New Testament scholars have spent over 100 years analyzing the double tradition. Is it possible that Matthew and Luke heard the same traditions being performed orally in different locations, apart from one another, and then wrote those oral traditions down from memory in their gospels? Yes, it is possible, but not likely, based on the evidence we have in the text of Matthew and Luke. Scholars have identified 92 literary units in the double tradition. In most of these units, Matthew and Luke use the same Greek words in the same sequence.
When repeating an oral tradition, one would memorize and repeat the ideas in sequence. It would be very unusual to repeat the exact same words to convey those ideas. New Testament scholar John Kloppenborg writes, “this level of verbatim agreement is very difficult to explain except on the thesis that Matthew and Luke were copying a document,” (Q, The Earliest Gospel, John S. Kloppenborg, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 2008, p. 56). Matthew and Luke often include multiple units of double tradition material in the exact same order. This is more evidence that they were working from a previously written document and not from their transcriptions of oral performances of the Jesus tradition.
Just because we don’t have copies of this document today does not mean
it never existed. Papyrus was used for most
documents in 1st century Palestine, and due to the humid climate there,
they rotted in less than 100 years. The
only papyrus documents that have survived are the ones kept in very dry
climates like in Egypt or in the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
Leather parchment was used starting around 400 CE and it was much more durable.
For more on writing in 1st century Palestine see this excellent
article: https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/2000/Millard_Jesus. The double tradition document may have existed for many years as a standalone before it was incorporated into the gospels of Matthew and Luke between 80 and 85 CE. In fact, some New Testament scholars believed it functioned as the earliest written gospel, even before Mark was published around 65 CE. The double tradition document may have existed as early as 40 CE.
Is it possible that the double tradition was first written in Aramaic? Perhaps. Papias, an early church leader who lived in present-day Turkey around 125 CE, wrote that the disciple Matthew had assembled a collection of Jesus’ “sayings” in Hebrew (see E.P. Sanders and Margaret Davis, Studying the Synoptic Gospels, SCM Press, London, 1989, p. 9). This could not mean the gospel of Matthew as we know it today since it is much more than a collection of sayings, and it was written in Greek. Some scholars guessed that Papias might have been referring to the double tradition, which is a collection (mostly) of sayings. However, as they investigated further, they determined that the double tradition was also originally written in Greek. As I mentioned, Matthew and Luke are both written in Greek, and in many cases, they agree word for word in sharing a given passage from the double tradition. This indicates that the double tradition was also a Greek document (at least at the point in time when it was used by Matthew and Luke as a source). This exact agreement happens in so many passages, the possibility they both chose the same Greek word to translate the Aramaic in the double tradition is very low. The double tradition also contains some expressions of grammar that are only possible in Greek (Kloppenborg, 2008, p. 59). This evidence all points to the conclusion that the double tradition was originally written in Greek.
One might wonder then, why would early followers of Jesus bother to take Jesus’ Aramaic words and translate them into Greek for this document? Why not just create an Aramaic document? We do know that the scribes who did the majority of document writing in this time and place preferred to write in Greek. Greek was the scribal language of the time. Greek was the administrative language of politics and the language of business and trade. That is one possible explanation of why the double tradition was originally written in Greek and not in Aramaic.
Is it possible that there was no double tradition document, and that Matthew had direct access to Luke or vice-versa? If that was the case, then the third gospel writer might have copied the double tradition material from the second gospel writer, placing it in a different order and editing its content. That all makes sense. But then where did the second gospel writer obtain the non-Markan material? Perhaps it was a set of oral traditions in the palette of the second gospel writer. This is a theory held by some scholars. For example, see this presentation: https://www.alangarrow.com/extantq.html. The problem with this theory is if Matthew had copies of both Mark and Luke when he was writing his gospel why did he completely change the birth stories and the resurrection appearance stories? The same problem exists if Luke was writing with copies of Mark and Matthew in hand. The birth stories and resurrection appearance stories in Matthew and Luke are completely different. That is one reason why most scholars believe Matthew and Luke worked independently of one another.
Unfortunately, when it comes to making sense out of the synoptic gospels, there is no one theory that completely fits all the evidence. In my opinion, the two-document hypothesis makes the most sense. This is the theory that Mark was written first and then Matthew and Luke worked independently of one another, using two sources: Mark and the double tradition. Here is a diagram which shows this relationship:
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