History of the Synoptic Problem: The Canon, the Text, the Composition, and the Interpretation of the Gospels

Provides a close-up analysis of the synoptic gospels of the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, and Luke--to explore the varying accounts of Jesus's life and discusses the history of biblical interpretation, including the argument that the gospels are based on a hypothetical Gospel of Q.

A laborious intellectual history of the origin and interpretation of the Gospels. New Testament scholar Dungan (Religious Studies/Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville) here traces the history of the synoptic problem from the 1st century to the 20th. One part of the problem refers to the priority of Mark's gospel (generally thought to be written around 70 c.e., before Matthew or Luke). Dungan questions the conventional wisdom that Mark had to be written first because its the most sparse of the three, with no original resurrection account and terribly written Greek. Elsewhere, Dungan challenges scholars' theory of ``Q,'' the hypothetical source which, in addition to Mark, allegedly formed the basis for Matthew and Luke (materials found in the latter two gospels that are not present in Mark have long been imagined to trace back to a lost gospel source named Q). These renegade arguments are very promising, but it takes Dungan nearly 350 pages to actually get to them. The preceding sections develop an overly lengthy and tedious history of gospel interpretation through the centuries. Dungan's writing style is unimaginative, essentially following an annotated outline complete with bullets and ubiquitous subheadings. His constant use of ordinal numbers is confusing (``Part Two concludes with . . . the fourth component of the Third Form of the Synoptic Problem,'' he writes, in a hopeless attempt to clarify the course of his argument). That said, one gets the sense that Dungan's heart is in the right place; he asks provocative questions of the text and, more importantly, his fellow critics. He is quite rightly convinced that biblical scholarship has been mired in a Euro-American, white male paradigm for far too long and that there is no such thing as value-neutral textual criticism. Fellow biblical scholars may appreciate the first 350 pages, but general readers who were not aware that the synoptic ``problem'' was indeed a problem will only gain insights from the last section, if at all. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

By the second century, believers saw the difference among the four Gospels as a scandal, and pagan philosophers were focusing their counterattack on it. Dungan (religious studies, Univ. of Tennessee) considers the problem of the three Synoptic Gospels in terms of four components: the composition and sources of the Gospels, the question of the canon, text criticism, and hermeneutics. Others have given sketchy accounts of the debate over the synoptic gospel before 1800, but Dungan sets forth a structured history from its inception in the second century and elucidates for the first time the political and economic agendas that informed biblical interpretations. He systematically discusses each of the basic components of the problem, indicating the cultural, political, economic, and technological presuppositions in every historical period. This work will be somewhat controversialADungan challenges the priority of the Gospel of Mark and the very existence of "Q," a hypothetical source document. An important book for any collection of New Testament studies.AEugene O. Bowser, Univ. of Northern Colorado, Greeley
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.