Theology: New Testament and Related Literature: Synoptic Gospels

When Mark, Matthew, and Luke decided to give a written account of Jesus Christ, they were faced with a formidable challenge. How could they tell the story of the man who spoke and acted like God? They used several titles, such as 'prophet', 'Messiah', 'Son of God', 'Son of Man', 'Servant of the Lord', and even 'Lord' itself. But none of these really did justice to the person of Jesus. Through a carefully crafted narrative, the synoptic evangelists painted pictures of Jesus that went beyond all of Israel's expectations and showed a man who was God's humble, suffering servant and at the same time God's equal. Sigurd Grindheim shows how the Synoptic Evangelists reinterpreted Israel's hopes in light of the Jesus story. He shows how they went beyond Old Testament and Jewish material regarding the messiah, drawing heavily upon the expectations of God's own intervention in history. The result is a picture of Jesus who fulfills all of Israel's hopes, not only those relating to God's eschatological agent, but also those pertaining to God himself.

The argument of this interesting monograph is that hostility to wealth exists independently of socio-economic circumstances as a fundamental religious-ethical tenet consistently expressed in the Synoptic Gospels. Part one offers a critique of the view that economic conditions determined the origin and/or extant form of the relevant texts. Part two considers the ideological background of the Synoptic teaching by tracing the development of the tradition from the earliest written sources to the New Testament era. Five stages locate expressions of hostility to wealth in logical and general chronological sequence. The tradition is shown to have developed primarily among aristocratic, established groups. Part three examines the relevant Synoptic texts. Several important passages in Mark establish the existence of the tradition of hostility to wealth and its primary significance as a way of expressing trust in God. This significance distinguishes the tradition from economic resentment and from sympathy for the economically poor. Matthew shows continuity with Mark, while Luke evinces a fuller expression of the tradition.

New Testament scholars routinely claim that verbal agreement among parallel Synoptic pericopae is a reliable indicator of literary borrowing by the Synoptic Evangelists. In Oral Tradition and Synoptic Verbal Agreement, T. M. Derico presents a critical assessment of that claim through a consideration of the most recent empirical evidence concerning the kinds and amounts of verbal agreement that can be produced among independent performances of oral traditions.

The problematic literary relationship among the Synoptic Gospels has given rise to numerous theories of authorship and priority. The primary objective of Rethinking the Synoptic Problem is to familiarize students with the main positions held by New Testament scholars in this much-debated area of research. The contributors to this volume, all leading biblical scholars, highlight current academic trends within New Testament scholarship and updates evangelical understandings of the Synoptic Problem.

This volume collects the best articles on the Synoptic gospels from the first fifty issues of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament. The range of the volume reflects the breadth of the journal itself. Here the reader will find ground-breaking studies that introduce new critical questions and move into fresh areas of enquiry, surveys of the state of play in this particular topic of New Testament studies, and articles that engage with each other in specific debates. For undergraduates this book offers an invaluable critical introduction to Synoptic Gospel studies. More advanced students and scholars can use it to find background material or to gain an overview of the research in this area of scholarship. This builds on the reputation of JSNT as a conduit for first-class research and a major influence within the scholarly community.

Leading scholars articulate and debate the major views of the Synoptic Problem, one of the most contested topics in Gospel studies.

In Verbal Aspect in Synoptic Parallels Wally Cirafesi argues that the Synoptic Gospels at times employ different tense-forms to communicate the same action for the purpose of constructing discourse according to various levels of linguistic prominence.