Loading...Why couldn’t Matthew, Mark, and Luke just have the same stories? Why do we have to assume someone was copying someone else’s?
In yesterday’s post, I simply stated that copying must have been going on to explain the literary relationship among Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels, since they have so many similarities: they tell many of the same stories, often in the same sequence, and sometimes – lots of times – in the very same words. That is to say, someone must be copying someone else, or they are all using the same written sources.
But some of my students have trouble seeing that if two documents are word-for-word the same, one must be copying the other (or they both are copying a third source). Many older adults don’t seem to have any problem seeing that, right off the bat. But younger adults need to be convinced. And so I do a little experiment with them that more or less proves it. I do this every year in my New Testament class, which normally has 200-300 students in it.
I come to class a minute or two late to make sure everyone is there, and then
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Nice way to test the students. Very convincing. Dr Ehrman, are there any books on the traditions and perhaps practices of the Story Tellers? It would seem to me in the time of oral traditions that there would have been some people who could or would be better at remembering the story, then passing that skill on to others. I’m sure some scribes were better than others.
Thanks, RD
Yup, it’s the topic of my book Jesus Before the Gospels.
“But some of my students have trouble seeing that if two documents are word-for-word the same, one must be copying the other (or they both are copying a third source).“
An all too popular opinion among students I’ve caught plagiarizing over the years, I’m afraid:
“NO, I didn’t copy (and paste) multiple whole paragraphs in my essay/research paper/final exam, straight outta Wikipedia (typos and all!?). Just because it’s a 100% word-for-word identical match, through and through, doesn’t mean I plagiarized anything! Hey, there’s only so many different ways you can say the same things, ya know.”
Ha!!
I have a question Bart.
First i love that exercise. It’s obnoxious to me how little people understand about the unreliability of oral transmissions and memory itself. I Still remember playing the game telephone as a kid and a sentence couldn’t make it around the room without becoming something different. 40 odd years of stories passed around it’s wild people think this wouldn’t change things.
Here’s my question: What i’ve always wondered, if almost everybody was illiterate do we have a good idea of the function of these gospels as written documents? Were they recordings of stories people were just telling orally that finally got written down for the sake of recording or in the very very early church were they widely used at worship services by like, the one literate person in the group who would read them to the illiterate people in attendance?
I’ve had christians push back on me saying they were not authored by the actual apostles who say of course people were literate, why else would they write them down if not for the people to read them?! Well i can think of many reasons.
Yes, if a group of Christians wanted to “read” a book, then a literate member would read it to them. Seems weird to us maybe, but that’s how it happened everywhere in antiquity. A classic study is William Harris, Ancient Literacy, who argues that at the best of times 10-15% of the ancient world could read; and the readers were the upper class elite whose families could afford the expense and time to have them educated; weren’t many of that kind of person among the early Christians…
“Reader” is still an official order of clergy in the Eastern Orthodox Churches (bottom of the hierarchy)
I have another question Bart. I know it’s consensus that the apostles didn’t write the gospels in scholarship but is there any idea what geographic area they might have arisen in? Was it even in the exact area or reasonably close to where jesus had his ministry? I would think that if his message and stories had already spread some distance away by the time they were recorded that would be pretty decent evidence on top of the lack of authorship that they couldn’t have been written by the apostles.
The consensus is pretty much that they could not have been in the Levant (Judea, Galilee, Samaria). There are speculations that a lot of scholars accept (Mark in Rome; Peter in Antioch; John in Ephesus…) but I don’t think there’s a strong case to be made for one spot or another, other than they were probably in different places, almost certainy urban, in Greek speaking climes. In theory that doesn’t show they are unreliable, since an eyewitenss could travel to Rome (far away) as well as to Antioch (not so far). But I don’t see how they could be by any of Jesus’ own followers since they were lower-class uneducated day-laborers who spoke Aramaic.
Your recent articles makes me think when I read the gospels, and I ask myself, “are the people that are involved in the writing the books that they’re attributed to Marc Peter and Luke Paul, etc. do they actually understood all that they were writing about?” When they said the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God for example, do you think all of them understood completely what the two were if they were the same if they were separate the attributes of each if they were separate, I wonder if they wrote of things that they still after all that time, could still not quite grasp. And then on top of all that, we get all these source materials.
To me. The source material seems more understood by the source. I don’t know if you agree with that or not?
I wish we knew what they thought and understood! All we’ve got are their words…
If the Gospels are correct, Jesus performed more miracles and raised more people from the dead than all the OT prophets combined. Yet, no non-Christian contemporary said a word about “the greatest Jewish prophet” of all time!
So, what if the real Jesus was a nobody? Just another messiah pretender who the Romans snuffed out by crucifying him. Yet, for some odd reason, Paul came to believe this guy WAS the messiah and started preaching this “Christ” to people all over the Roman empire. He told his followers a few historical tidbits about this “Christ” but not much. Paul’s converts wanted to know more about their Savior! So decades later, a Pauline Christian {“Mark”) wrote a “biography” of this messiah pretender. It was a smash hit! Soon other authors were writing “Jesus biographies”, each borrowing (sometimes word for word, sometimes just the major themes) from the previous authors, while adding in their own material (out of thin air or from circulating legends/and rumors).
Isn’t that a much more probable and plausible explanation for the origin of the Gospels than appealing to hypothetical sources for which there is not one shred of manuscript or even reference??
Yes, I think during his lifetime Jesus was a virtual unknown. It was belief in his resurrection that elevated his importance. But Mark wasn’t just inventing things; he was basing his account on oral traditiions that had long been around. I talk about all this at length in my book Jesus Before the Gospels.
There is no surviving evidence that any stories about Jesus were circulating prior to Mark other than the few details found in Paul’s letters. I am not a mythicist. I know you are busy, Dr. E, but please provide ONE piece of evidence that proves me wrong. I don’t want to read another book.
I”d say there is masses of evidence. How were people converting to believe in Jesus if they never heard of Jesus?
Correction: there is no evidence that any of the stories found in Mark’s gospel were circulating prior to Mark, other than Paul’s Lord Supper Story. There probably was an insignificant messiah pretender named Jesus whom Paul and others believed in, but why assume Mark’s uncorroborated “biography” is anything but an anpologetic invention?
Since Matthew and Luke don’t cite any sources, I’d love to see a post on why you don’t think the “M” and “L” material can simply be the creations of their respective authors. As I understand it, ancient rhetorical training included the art of taking a source and expanding on it, so why couldn’t these authors be doing that?
Clearly at least *some* of the “M” and “L” material must be the the authors’ own creations, since it contains segues in and out of Markan material that wouldn’t make sense if stripped of the context in which we find them.
I’ll be saying a few things about it. Since our only evidence of their editorial activities shows they loved using sources, there would need to be some reasons for thinking they also loved makin’ stuff up (otherwise their tendency when they *can* be checked would suggestion their tendency when they can *not*. We can check only in places that by pure serendipity have come down to us independently, not because there is something distinctive about the particular materials that can be checked)
Hello, I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation that I’m missing here, and I don’t say this as a religious man.
But if we have no idea what’s in the original text of the bible because it’s obviously been changed by scribes consistently over the centuries as you described and showed in Misquoting Jesus, then how come the gospels are verbatim copies of one another in places? Surely they would have changed the same way the rest of the book has and not be sure fire copies for large portions?
Because scribes were for the most part simply copying the texts they had in front of them word for word, FAR more often copying accurately than inaccurately. They weren’t rewriting every line on a whim. Moreover, even though there are tons of changes, that doesn’t mean we are at a complete loss in knowing what the authors probably wrote originally. IN most places we’re pretty sure.
*That shows that he was not taking Matthew and condensing it.*
But what Mark would be condensing is the information content about Jesus himself. Mark’s longer versions of Matthew’s stories are mostly irrelevant detail or repetition.
Matthew “But Jesus was sleeping.”
Mark “Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion.”
Matthew “they met a man from Cyrene, named Simon, and they forced him to carry the cross.”
Mark “A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross.”
Irrelevant detail addition is the hallmark of secondary editions.
Is it? My editor often cuts my irrelevant detail; rarely does she add any.
Yes but your editor is not trying to create her own version, she doesn’t want to add her voice to your work.
Though Mark is the abbreviator of Matthew he doesn’t want to be a mere scribe. He’s creating his own work. But with nothing new to add to the Jesus account he merely adds irrelevant detail.
Matthew “Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up”
Mark “A woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.”
Ah, you don’t know my editor…. 🙂
My point of view is that neither the Gospel of Mark nor the Gospel of Matthew can be the original Gospels.
The initial Gospel should have been written in Hebrew by a team led by Maria after the death of Jesus.
Then the team members carried this Hebrew Gospel to Greece to spread the gospel.
Several scattered missionary teams each found someone to translate this initial Gospel into Greek, resulting in differences caused by different translated versions.
Alternatively, at the beginning of the mission to Greece, the Hebrew Gospel could be translated into Greek, and then team members could spread out the mission using the same Greek Gospel.
But in the process of dispersed preaching, due to the different preaching preferences of different team members, personalized additions or deletions have been made, further resulting in differences.
Eventually, four distinct Gospels were formed.
That is to say, the four Gospels are parallel to each other, they are from the same batch, not copied from each other. In the process of dispersed evangelism, the same initial Gospel underwent various changes, ultimately resulting in four different Gospels.
Dr. Ehrman,
No need to post this.
Thanks for what you do.
Two things. One, this new format of 4 posts on each NT book has me renewing my membership. I was about to let it expire this month. Maybe it’s part of the new format. I like it.
Second, you know how you’ve challenged us to come up with a 50 word synopsis of each gospel? Do you recall how over the years you’ve posted numerous times asking us what our thoughts are on various topics? Like the meaning of life, or our role in the universe…? Just an idea, a post or 2 asking members their 50 word synopsis on those “what do you think?” posts.
Great idea!
I love hearing about funny ways professors demonstrate things to students
It makes teaching so much more interesting!
While I know that a huge amount of the surviving manuscripts of antiquity are on religious topics – do we have any guesses on how often what happened with Matthew & Luke happened with secular documents in the pre-modern era? e.g. expanded editions of Plato with new stuff?
The closest example I can think of is maybe the Yosippon / Josippon, a Jewish edition of Josephus’s histories but with random other stuff mixed in created in the medieval era. (But I imagine it’s very difficult for many such works because we only have one copy of Suetonius or the like surviving anyway.)
Yes, the bulk of surviving ancient literature is not religious; we have epics, tragedies, comedies, histories, biographies, satires, essays, personal correspodence, philosophical treatiese and and and. So it is indeed possible to see if there are comparable trends in other areas. A recent dissertatoin by Ian Mills at Duke argued that hte closest thing to the kinds of copying practices we see in the Synoptics comes in technical writings of the time. (I guess these would be comparable to something like instruction manuels and the like?)
The real question is: Who was Mark’s source? The evidence indicates that “Mark” had two sources: himself (his own imagination?) and Paul!
Read here: https://lutherwasnotbornagaincom.wordpress.com/2025/02/07/who-were-marks-sources/
I don’t think Paul is a “source” for Mark in the way Mark is a source for Matthew. There do not appear to be any quotatoins of Paul’s work, and only a few theological simiarlities.
Mark quotes Paul‘s Last Supper Story almost word for word!
Not necessarily. If I say the Lord’s prayer and you say the Lord’s prayer and we both say it the same way that doesn’t mean I got i fom you or you from me. Liturgical phrasing spokein in contexts of worsihp tends to be consistent and if different churches have teh same phrasing because it has become popular, it does not mean that one is the direct source of another. Mark, e.g., could have been worshiping in a church that was founded by Paul years earlier and used this phrasing simply as what they said at their communiion meal. Also, it’s important to note the Paul himself says he got it from somewhere else. That means other people wold have heard it from the same or similar somewhere elses. (Paul says he “received it from the Lord” but that doesn’t have to mean it was a direct revelation; it could just as well be what I used to hear all the time in my evangelical days: “Today the Lord told me…. “
True, but it is also possible that Paul received both The Last Supper Story and The Eyewitness List in I Cor. 15 from “the Lord”: his delusional mind. There is no evidence either way, only speculation. There is no evidence that the Jesus of the Gospels existed prior to Mark. Please prove me wrong. An unknown messiah pretender named Jesus, probably, but not the Jesus of the Bible.
Dr. Ehrman: Why are the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke called the Synoptic gospels if they do not see eye to eye. Matthew and Luke recount irreconcilably different birth and genealogy stories whereas Mark mentions neither. Matthew has the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt whereas Luke tells us they went to Jerusalem within a matter of six weeks. In other words, Matthew has them fleeing from King Herod the Great whereas Luke has them going toward the very place the King resided. Matthew has Jesus telling his disciples to meet him after the resurrection on a mountain in Galilee whereas Luke makes it clear the same Jesus tells them to remain in Jerusalem; moreover, the Lukan Jesus ascended to heaven from Bethany within hours of his reported resurrection which meant he could never have gone near Galilee. Matthew recounts that Jesus’ body was entombed for three nights whereas Mark and Luke report that it was only two. Mark has his Jesus telling his disciples to meet him in Galilee post resurrection but Mark recounts in the spurious verses that Jesus could not have gone to Galilee as he had ascended to heaven near Jerusalem. There is more, much more.
They are called Synoptics because they can be “seen” (optic) “together” (syn) — that is, you can put them in a book of three columns and line up most of their stories and see how each one expresses it. John is more difficult that way since in Jesus’ ministry the bulk of the stories and teachigns of Jesus are not found in the others.
So, Dr. Ehrman, if I understand correctly, synoptic has nothing to do with “seeing the same or similar” or” being in harmony”? Is that close to the mark? Thanks.
It’s that you can put all three in columns and see them side by side since they tell many of the same stories often in thesame way.
Indeed! Glad I held onto my late parents’ copy of a 1970s edition of “Gospel parallels,” originally published in 1949, which does exactly that! Actually read through it last year. Quite interesting!
Are there any good general audience books on the early ecumenical counsels? Are there any church fathers writings that you consider worth reading beyond their theological usefulness? Thanks for all you do Bart.
You’ll find good informatoin on both areas in teh book I co-edited with Andrew Jabobs, Chrsitainity in Late Antiquity 300-450 CE.
Something I struggle with understanding is when to apply certain criteria for deciding what came first. In some cases, a passage is more “pithy” so it must have been elaborated on. In other cases, a passage is longer, so it must have been redacted. In some cases a saying is “harder” so it must have been glossed over later. In other cases it is “unorthodox” so it must have been from a sect. What am I missing?
Yes, that’s right. Length cannot in itself be a contributing factor; difficulty and tyeological tendency may be more helpful. But in my next post I explain an approach that is more data oriented, not nearly as subjective.
The problem with the younger students is that they were taught that God took hold of the hand of the authors and wrote the gosples. Such is the fundamental Christian dogma perpetrated within the US. Thus “God” would never contradict himself nor is it possible for God to commit any errors. Any percieved contradictions or errors are not the fault of God, but are in our understanding of his word. If there are historical conflicts with secular history then secular history is errant or “fake”.
That Peter nor any of the other authors of the canon needed to be literate as it was not them, but God who just took control over their hand that wrote it. After all, God took over their toungues on Day of Peticost didn’t he? Gods takes over a persons body and speaks at church meetings and services dosen’t he?
This is the teaching and witness that I would estimate that 70% of your “Intro” students come from. Their objective for taking your course was for further Christian Bible study or an easy “A”.
My question is – How many of your students think you have backslided and now possessed by Satan?
Roughly zero.
Well… That’s encourging… Times must be changing more than I thought in NC. I moved a while back from Southern California to rural Oklahoma.. If people here even knew I read one of your books they would say I was possessed by demon. I decribed the people here. Everywhere you go people tell you have a “blessed day”. Of course here in Oklahoma, the State Superintendent of Schools bought like a million Trump Bibles and wrote an order to all schools that teachers must integrate the Bible into all their lessons. The State also passed a measure to now fully fund Christian Charter Schools. Now there is a bill to fund more Trump Bibles.
Is there a reason to think that L and M are written sources, rather than just Luke and Matthew’s imaginations?
Again, is there reason to think that L and M are distinct sources, as opposed to just being a lost shared source, like Q? I mean, we know that they didn’t copy everything from Mark, so why not think they took bits and pieces from Q, so that sometimes only one of them preserved something from their, now lost, shared source?
I’ll be dealing with this in a post to come. One issue is that if Q had stories as well as sayings, it’s odd that MT and Lk didn’t both copy some of them (they have just one in common not in Mark);
It has not always been thought that way. In the early church it was often thought that Mark was a condensed version of Matthew, that Mark simply made a kind of Readers Digest version (back before there was a Readers Digest)
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The views of the early church should be given greater attention, as the early church knew the truth of things better than later generations.
The Gospel of Matthew is earlier than the Gospel of Mark, or the Gospel of Matthew is no later than the Gospel of Mark.
I used to think that way. Now I suspect the 1st Century Christians were as much a mystery to 2nd Century Christians as they are to us today. 1933 seemed like a million years ago to me even back in the late 1970s let alone 2025! Imagine that time distance when all you have is word of mouth and no schooling unless you’re in the rare elite class. The early Christian apologist Justin Martyr wasn’t even born until 100AD, which would be like 2000 in relation to 1933.
jbhodge asks above, How many of your students think you have backslided and now possessed by Satan?
You reply, Roughly zero.
Wow! If your students start out as believers in inerrancy (as I think you’ve said in the past), then how can they *not* think you’ve backslid if you teach these “outrageous” things?
Thinking the Bible has mistakes is not Satanic. It’s simply historical reality. Most people who abandon inerrancy continue to be Christian. I did and wsa, and virtually all my biblical scholar friends are Christian still.
What a neat way of teaching that concept. You should write a book about your experience teaching! Or, how to teach a subject like the New Testament.
“Yes, I think during his lifetime Jesus was a virtual unknown”
that’s why I was wondering & you answered it, if the Pharisees were an important part of the government, why did they bother with Jesus as there were many interent hacks!
And that he was sent to crucifixion for the ruckus at the Temple. Also I thought 25years ago, making promises that he could or would not fulfill.
On a different note, how could people be truly saved if the Bible wasn’t that until 400AD. And even the 7churches in Revelation 2&3, they needed to worship & live in a certain fAsHION.
I’m not sure what you’re asking? Being saved does not depend on the Bible in the Christian tradition. It depends on believing in Christ.
dear dr Ehrman:
I really appreciate you responding to my whimsy.
I never understood Jesus. How could I love somebody I didn’t understand.
I understood God the creator & the Holy Spirit [which I never had]
so I kept Pharisaic obedience.
and then Trump was elected twice!
that’s why I haven’t gone to any USA Church, as Wiersbe quoted another pastor- DON’T get me caught up in your SIN