Source: Craig Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1997. Most of this material is a summarization of Blomberg’s section, “Critical Methods for Studying the Gospels,” pp. 73-112. I recommend reading Blomberg’s original material if possible (he’s a much better author than I).

The New Testament contains 4 books that tell us all we know of the life of Jesus. These books are called the “Gospels:” Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

For most of Church history — until the Enlightenment of the 18th through the 20th centuries — Christians assumed these books were written in the order in which they appear in the canon. Matthew was assumed to have been written first, with the others following. Everyone recognized there were similarities in the material contained in Matthew Mark and Luke. These similarities were explained by scholars who said that Mark and Luke copied Matthew. Many Church theologians, from Tatian in the 100’s A.D. to Augustine and John Calvin, wrote commentaries on harmonies of the Gospels. (You can find Calvin’s commentaries at http://www.ccel.org/c/calvin/comment3/comm_index.htm.)

The Enlightenment brought the entire Bible into question. During this time, scholars began studying the Bible more as a historical document or literary document than as inspired Scripture. Many of the scholars were not Christians. Approaching the Gospels from a secular, “objective” standpoint led these scholars to far different conclusions than those the Church had held for centuries.

Enlightenment thinkers basically approached the Scripture with the following assumptions:

1. miracles could not be rationally explained and therefore were only myths.
2. Biblical material about Jesus was transmitted orally for several decades before it was preserved in written form; therefore, many legends became intertwined with the actual events.
3. the Gospels did not tell the whole story of Jesus, but only what the early Church decided to transmit.

Scholars began searching for what was known as the “historical Jesus,” the Jesus that actually existed before the Church wrote the Gospels. Unfortunately, all the 19th century scholars who looked for the “historical Jesus” found Him to be an advocate for whatever philosophy they happened to champion. Albert Schweitzer brought the nonsense to an end by pointing out this obvious fact with his book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1910. Schweitzer accused all the other scholars of seeing Jesus through their own biases, and then added his own: Jesus was a failed apocalyptic prophet who believed He would bring in the kingdom of heaven in His lifetime, and therefore was shocked when He was crucified without seeing the kingdom come.

With Schweitzer’s publication of The Quest for the Historical Jesus, the search for the “historical Jesus” ended until the 1950’s with the work of German scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann is famous for saying that all we can know about Jesus is “that he lived and died.” Bultmann later clarified this statement by saying that we can accept a “small core” of jesus’ ministry as historical.

Scholars also studied the so-called “synoptic problem,” focusing on the dissimilarities between the Synoptic Gospels.

While much of this scholarly interest took an skeptical interest in the Gospels and was rejected by orthodox academics and theologians, the renewed interest in the Bible — and the Gospels in particular — led to a greater understanding and appreciation of the process by which the Gospels’ information is transmitted to us.

Form Criticism of the Synoptic Gospels

In the early 20th century, German scholars began dividing the Synoptics into pericopes (passages) and trying to determine the form (genre) of each passage. The scholars found:

• parables
• miracle stories
• pronouncement stories: short controversial episodes climaxed by a key saying of Jesus
• proverbs
• wisdom sayings
• “I”-sayings
• discourses

The scholars assumed most of the biographical and miracle stories of Jesus were myths created by Christians later.

Each form was assigned to a Sitz im Leben (situation in life). The question became, in which situation in life was each form used?

Then, the scholars developed the transmission of tradition “laws.” Form scholars assumed all the stories about Jesus began as oral stories that were passed from generation to generation of believers, with new details and embellishments added as the stories were transmitted.

According to these scholars, the Gospels were not composed until some time beginning in 70 A.D., when the Romans were destroying Jerusalem and the Christians were recovering from Nero’s persecution, and ending in the 90’s A.D. The scholars also assumed all the Gospels were composed anonymously and were not connected with the people for whom they were named. The assumption of a late date, with oral transmission replete with errors, assumed:

1. that no one wrote down anything Jesus said or did during His life.
2. that the oral tradition was composed of units circulating independently until someone compiled them and wrote them down.
3. that the Church selectively chose the material written for its own purposes.
4. that the biographical, geographical, and chronological information of Jesus’ life was not preserved orally but created later.
5. that the Christian oral tradition was similar to that of places as far away as Europe and Africa.
6. that almost none of the true stories survived the oral process without error.

Even if no one wrote anything during Jesus’ life, there are good reasons to trust the first-century oral tradition.

1. Jewish education relied heavily on memorization. The scribes and rabbis often memorized the entire Old Testament, and disciples of teachers were expected to memorize their teacher’s sayings. Therefore, any transmission based on memorization would have been extremely accurate.
2. There were still eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life as late as the 90’s A.D. Any errors would have been corrected by the eyewitnesses.
3. Followers of teachers often took notes as their teachers taught. (We still do!) It would have been highly unlikely that nothing was written during Jesus’ time.
4. The Sitz im Leben already existed in Jesus’ time: His real life encounters with people.
5. In spite of any “contradictions” found in the Synoptic Gospels, the documents do not read as if they included information created only after Jesus’ death and resurrection. There are too many “hard sayings” of Jesus in the Gospels, and too few sayings that would have completely resolved controversial issues, for the Church to have “made up” sayings and facts in the composition of the Gospels.
6. We find emphases in the Gospels that were not stressed by the Church in years to come. The prime example is Jesus’ favorite reference to Himself: “The Son of Man.” This title refers to Jesus only three times in the entire New Testament outside the Gospels (Acts 7:56, Revelation 1:13, and Revelation 14:14) and 81 times within the Gospels.

There undoubtedly was a period of oral transmission, but given these reasons to trust it, we can believe the Gospels are highly accurate. The question becomes how long did the oral period last.

Source Criticism and Markan Priority

As scholars more carefully examined the Gospels, they noticed that much of Mark’s material was repeated in Matthew and Luke. Also, if Matthew were the first gospel, Mark shortened some of his stories in dramatic fashion. Scholars began to believe that Mark was the first Gospel written, and that Matthew and Luke used his Gospel as the basis for their own work.

Of the 661 verses in Mark, 500 are found in Matthew and 350 are found in Luke. There are further reasons to believe Mark was the first Gospel:

1. Mark seems to be more detailed in his descriptions of events than Matthew or Luke, both of whom seem to generalize certain details. cf. Mark 6:39, Matthew 14:19, and Luke 9:14 (the feeding of the 5,000).
2. Mark’s Greek grammar is the worst of the 3. Both Matthew and Luke smooth out many of Mark’s grammatical errors.
3. Mark gives potentially embarrassing or misleading details that Matthew and Luke omit. Examples: Mark 6:5, Matthew 13:58, Luke 4:24 (the visit to Nazareth), Mark 10:18, Matthew 19:17 (the rich young ruler).
   Mark is the shortest Gospel, but his narratives are generally longer than either Matthew’s or Luke’s. Mark and Luke share 92 passages, and Mark is longer 71 times. Mark and Matthew share 104 passages, and Mark is longer 63 times.
4. Most of Mark’s material is also present in Matthew and Luke, leading one to wonder why he would write at all with so little new to add to their works.
5. Mark has the most incidents of Aramaic words preserved in Greek transliteration: Boanerges (3:17), talitha koum (5:41), Corban (7:11), ephphatha (7:34), and Abba (14:36).
6. Markan priority is the only explanation for why Mark would have omitted so much material from the other 2 Gospels, especially such critical material as the Sermon on the Mount.

There are reasons to believe Mark was not the first Gospel, but these reasons do not stand against the body of evidence for Markan priority:

1. Patristic testimony in support of Matthean priority. This cannot be easily dismissed and is the strongest argument against Markan priority. However, Matthew may have written his Gospel in 2 stages and read Mark in between.
2. There are certain minor agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark.
   Mark 6:45-8:26 is missing from Luke. Why did Luke omit this material? A possible explanation is that Luke arranged his material in geographic fashion.
3. The hypothesis of Markan priority originated with scholars attempting to remove the evidence of miracles from the Gospels. However, Mark includes numerous miracles in his Gospel, so this reason is suspect.

Overall, Markan priority, to this point in biblical studies, seems to be a strong position.

The “Q” Hypothesis

As scholars studied the Gospels, they noticed that Matthew and Luke had much material in common outside of Mark. There were 2 possible reasons for this common material:

1. the latter writer borrowed from the first writer; or
2. the 2 writers used a common source for the common material.

In the 1800’s, German scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher proposed that a common source existed from which Matthew and Luke drew their material on the sayings of Jesus. Schleiermacher called this source “Q” (from the German word Quelle, which means “source”).

The advantages of the Q theory are:

1. The similarities between Matthew and Luke are not as great as they should be if Luke copied Matthew.
2. Luke did not gather the entire “Sermon on the Mount” material in one place as Matthew does. Why does Luke scatter this material throughout his Gospel if he copied it directly from Matthew?
3. Q can be reconstructed from Jesus’ teachings about wisdom, the demands of the kingdom, the power and authority of Jesus, and an eschatalogical hope for the coming end.
4. There is Patristic evidence (Papias, as quoted by Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History in the 4th century A.D.) that Matthew himself may have composed a work in Aramaic before he composed his Gospel. This work may have been Q.

The Q hypothesis does have a major weakness: No copy of it has ever been found. Nonetheless, most New Testament scholars now accept that Matthew and Luke used another source besides Mark for much of their common material.

Why does it matter how the Gospels were composed? The answer to this question takes us to the reliability of the Gospels. When were they written? Who wrote them? Are they reliable as witnesses to Jesus’ ministry, teachings, death, and resurrection?

Dating of the Gospels

If there was a period of oral transmission, how long did the Church wait for someone to write everything?

To date the Gospels, we actually must go to Acts, the second book of Luke after his Gospel.

Luke states in Acts 1:1-2 that he had already composed a book of Jesus’ life. We know this book as the Gospel of Luke. In Luke 1:1-4, Luke writes to “Theophilus” that he composed his book using:

1. other narratives of Jesus life (v. 1).
2. eyewitness accounts (v. 2).

Luke ended Acts with Paul in prison in Rome. If he wrote his books after Paul’s release, why didn’t he include this vital information? Therefore, we must assume Luke wrote his Gospel and Acts before Paul appeared before Caesar and was released from custody. This gives us a date of no later than 62 A.D. for the dating of Acts. Given Luke’s ending of Acts, Mark must have been written in the 50’s to 60 A.D., with Luke coming around 60 to 62 A.D. Patristic evidence states that Matthew was also written during Peter and Paul’s ministry in Rome, which would place the book’s composition in the 60’s A.D.