The Synoptic Problem

In 1947 Ella Fitzgerald made one of her most famous recordings, “How High the Moon.” In my favorite section of the recording two minutes in, she quotes Charlie Parker’s Ornithology. I’ve frequently suggested this song to friends, especially those who are new to scat singing or bebop line construction. It’s amazing to me how she could construct perfect bebop lines – something most of us do more by theory than by ear – and then sing them. It’s one thing to improvise a line because you know the notes on your instrument, it’s another thing to improvise the line with no buttons or keys, only your voice. As if to prove her place in the pantheon of jazz greats, she quotes the well-known Parker line from Ornithology showing she understood the theory, the history, the construction and had the vocal chops to pull it off in one simple line. Amazing.

Jazz musicians often quote each other in solos in this way. The quotes are frequently famous lines that aficionados recognize, like an orator quoting, “I have a dream,” or, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Because bebop is a language, there are also smaller phrases musicians learn and use all the time. There are certain things I find myself saying in my everyday speech, like, “at the end of the day,” or, “I think the ball is in my court.” Jazz musicians call these, “licks,” and they show up in Fitzgerald’s scatting as well. If you happen to be a jazz musician, listen to her use of pivoted arpeggios and consider how easy those are to play on a piano and how difficult they are to vocalize. Again, amazing. Finally, there is a lot of original language being made up on the fly as well. And just to complicate things, recently musicologists have begun crediting Benny Harris as a co-composer of Ornithology, so we can’t even say definitively that Ella is quoting Bird in these passages.

You might say that Fitzgerald’s, “How High the Moon,” has a synoptic problem. We have her signature song, the Gospel According to Ella. Yet, we get some obvious material quoted from other famous works. Then, we also get the licks, or the sayings that are passed around. And of course, Ella adds her own touches all over the place. Because many people quote Ornithology – it’s an extremely common bebop head to memorize – Parker and Harris get included in a lot of other songs, too. Now, for you jazz nerds, it also so happens that, “Ornithology,” is a contrafact of, “How High the Moon.” A contrafact is a song where you use the chord progression of an existing song and write a new melody over it. So, there was, “How High the Moon,” then Parker and Harris reworked it into, “Ornithology,” and that became so famous that Fitzgerald quoted it in her version of, “How High the Moon,” a kind of bebop ouroboros. And that’s just the stuff we know about.

Turning to the Bible with this bebop analogy in mind, the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke have interesting patterns of overlap (quoting), interesting uses that seem to be from other sayings sources (licks), and then quite a bit of original content as well. The number of similarities is remarkable, and the texts often recount the same stories, have similar sequences and in several cases have the same phrasing. The Gospel of John doesn’t get included because it doesn’t share these similarities and has a lot of unique material.

If the term is new to you, “synoptic,” in this sense comes from the Greek, “synopsis.” Today we mostly use that word to mean summary or overview which is accurate, but it can also mean to see things together. So, we talk of Mark, Matthew and Luke as being the synoptic Gospels because they share a lot in their perspective, language and narrative.

Ancient Christians saw these parallels, but in general tradition credited each Gospel to specific authors and so they didn’t spend much thought on critical scholarship of the matter. Then in 1776, Johann Jakob Griesbach published his synopsis – in the sense of being seen together – version of the three Gospels. It’s what we refer to today as a parallel edition. When readers could easily see the three Gospels side-by-side, the similarities screamed out to careful readers. Thus, the synoptic problem was born. Basically, how do we explain this textual interdependence?

I’m of the mind that we’ll never know exactly; however, and this should not surprise you, that won’t that stop me from giving you my opinions.

To start out in understanding these overlaps, you at least have what has commonly been understood as the triple tradition. About three-quarters of Mark shows up in Matthew and Luke together and 97% shows up in at least one or the other. Matthew and Luke have almost a quarter of their Gospels that are unique to each of them, yet only 3% of Mark is unique. And then, Matthew and Luke share some things not found in Mark at all.

Complicating all of this is the fact that we don’t have a definitive history of which Gospel was written first, we’re most likely missing some other sources of sayings and certainly we’re missing some oral traditions that were passed around before the Gospels were written. But the most accepted explanation for the synoptic problem is called the double-source or two-source hypothesis. This makes the following claims which seem to me to provide real explanatory power:

• Mark was written first, and that’s why it enjoys so much overlap (97%) between the other two. Matthew and Luke use Mark as their primary source.
• There was a lost collection of sayings that Matthew and Luke also use, which explains why they share some overlap that doesn’t include Mark.
• This lost sayings Gospel is the second source, and we call it “Q,” from the word, “quelle,“ which means source in German. Because it is a lost source, we don’t have any proof of its existence but the fact that a bunch of sayings are shared in Matthew and Luke seem to indicate there was another source besides Mark that they both used.
• We think Q was a book of Jesus’ sayings, because the unique Matthew and Luke overlaps are sayings while the use of Mark was more about narrative.
• We believe Q was a book written in Greek as opposed to simply an oral tradition. If they both took their content from oral traditions, we would not see such a word-for-word correspondence in the sayings. If it was written in a different language, say Aramaic, then it is likely Matthew’s and Luke’s unique translations would not have been word-for-word.

There is some other support for the existence of Q even though it is lost to time. Matthew and Luke seem to be writing for their own theological purposes and don’t otherwise copy each other. But if they had another source outside of Mark, that would explain the similarities in the sayings. It would make sense that the early church would want to record the wise things Jesus said first. Sometimes a saying is repeated twice, once in the Mark way and again differently, implying that Q provided the second take on the saying. Finally, the author of Luke famously writes that he is aware of other written records of Jesus’ life, and he is setting out to write the most accurate and complete version. If that’s the case, it makes sense that the early church favored the Gospels over Q, because the Gospels contained Q but added narrative context. In other words, prior to Gutenberg, it was difficult to copy a manuscript by hand so not as many manuscripts of Q were copied and eventually, we just lost it all. The early church probably felt that they had Q covered inside Matthew and Luke anyway, so spent less time copying Q than they did the fuller gospels.

I mentioned that we’ll never know even though what I’ve presented here is the most common solution taught in most seminaries. It’s possible that Mark was written first, then the authors of Matthew used Mark and came up with everything new and then the authors of Luke came afterward and copied Matthew. On the other end of the spectrum, maybe there were many lost sources that were used in various combinations with each other. But the double-source hypothesis is at least quite tidy.

I only wanted to provide an overview of this issue for anyone interested in the history and critical scholarship of the Gospels. I’ll probably return to various topics around this from time to time and this is a fair enough background. For example, early church fathers indicated that there was an earlier Gospel of Matthew largely composed of sayings and written in Hebrew. If so, we’ve lost that, too. Papias of Hierapolis, who was born around 60 CE, supposedly wrote five books called Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord, where he recorded what he learned from people who hung out with some of the earlier apostles. Unfortunately, we only have fragments from Papias left over. He did, however, make some claims that my more traditionalist readers will like, and I think we should take them seriously because he was such an early source. Namely, he is one of the reasons I’ve started to lean toward there being a real Mark who wrote the Gospel of Mark based on a bunch of anecdotes he heard while travelling with Peter – much to the chagrin of my more liberal, scholarly and historically-minded friends.