The synoptic gospels are 3 accounts of Jesus' life and death. They are so similar in parts, that scholars believe that there was a bit of copying going on.
You find the same basic story in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Sometimes, within the basic story, you have exact accounts in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There are verbatim agreements: you’ll have the same story, word-for-word agreement.
The only explanation as to why you can have this word- for-word agreement, in the opinion of most scholars, is that one of these Gospels is being used as a source for the other two. In other words, there must be copying going on.
I sometimes have difficulty convincing my students that if you have three accounts of the same event that are in the same words, somebody has to be copying somebody else.
The way I try to convince these 19- and 20-year- olds of his is, I do this little exercise where I come into class a couple of minutes late to make sure everybody’s there; I fiddle around in front of the class; I turn on the overhead projector; I put down my briefcase; I roll up my sleeves; and I do a few other things.
Then I ask everybody in the class to write down everything they’ve seen me do in the last three minutes. The students, all 400 of them, write down what they’ve just seen me do.
Then, I collect four of the papers and say, “Now, I want you all to do a synoptic comparison. I’m going to read what each of these sources has to say, and I want to know whether you have a single sentence that is exactly like someone else’s.”
In all of my years of doing this—15, 16 years of doing this—I’ve never had anybody with two sentences exactly the same.
So I ask my students, “What would you think would happen if I took up two of these pieces of paper and I had two paragraphs that were verbatim, the same, exactly alike?”
I typically get the answer, “Well, somebody copied off from someone else.” Exactly, somebody copied from someone else.
Then I will ask, “Now imagine we didn’t do the writing part of this exercise today. Suppose we waited 30 or 40 years, and, instead of asking you to write down what happened that day in class, I asked friends of yours that you had told about what had happened in class. If I then got two accounts that were exactly the same, what would you assume had happened?”
There’s always some wise guy in the back row that raises his hand and says, “It’s a miracle.” Right. Well, those are the two options, actually: it’s either a miracle, or else somebody’s copying somebody else.
What If It’s a Miracle?
If you explain the similarities on the basis of a miracle, then you have trouble explaining the discrepancies.
People don’t typically notice the discrepancies among the Gospels because of the way they are read. The way people read the Gospels is they read Matthew, it’s about the life and death of Jesus; then they read Mark, and it sounds a lot like Matthew sounded; then they read Luke, and that sounds a lot like Matthew and Mark sounded.
When you read them this way, vertically, one at a time, they all sound very much alike. Yet when you read them horizontally— one story in Matthew, then the same story in Mark, and the same story in Luke—you begin to notice discrepancies that are very hard to reconcile with one another.
What scholars think today is that Mark was the first Gospel written, and that Matthew and Luke both had access to Mark, and used Mark as one of their sources. Matthew and Luke had other sources available to them as well.
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The Gospel of John does not contain most of the stories found in the synoptic Gospels. For example, in John there’s no account of Jesus actually being baptized. There’s no account of his birth either. There’s no account of him going to the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil. Jesus never tells a parable in the Gospel of John. Jesus never casts out a demon in the Gospel of John. Jesus does not go up to the Mount of Transfiguration in the Gospel of John. Jesus does not have his last supper, in which he gives out the bread and the wine and says, “This is my body, this is my blood,” in the Gospel of John. Jesus is not put on trial before the Jewish Sanhedrin in the Gospel of John.
There are wide-ranging differences where John doesn’t have the same stories as the synoptics. John has a different set of stories; it has a different set of miracles, including the first miracle in the Gospel of John where Jesus turns the water into wine. John has many dialogues betweenJesus and someone else that are found only in John.
For example, there is Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus in chapter 3, or with the Samaritan women in chapter 4. Many of Jesus’ sayings are found in John, only in John.
The term “Gospel” comes from the Old English word for “good news.” These books do not claim to be objective histories; they claim to be proclamations of good news. In other words, these books are not historically accurate accounts of things that Jesus said and did. These are books that are proclaiming information about Jesus that is meant to provide information needed for salvation. These books are the good news of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
Most Xtians don’t seem to know that the “bio” genre as accurate historical record is only a recent phenomenon of the last couple of hundred years. The historical purpose of biographies was to provide stories and legends to create inspirational characters, not to verifiably document the subject. This makes sense when you notice that the bible is written in the third person, and includes stories when he was alone or with “Satan.”
“Jesus” is a historical figure in the same way Odysseus and Paul Bunyan are historical figures, and Slender Man and the Hanako-san will be in the future.
The bible is a sales brochure for an imaginary product. Like an ad for a time-share that claims you won’t regret it.