It has just occurred to me (duh) that some blog readers who are enjoying these "In a Nutshell" posts on the books of the New Testament may like to see a more extended exposition of the various issues I address, and I've devoted entire lectures courses for some of these books (and will be doing more).  You might be interested in them. One of the first I did was on the Gospel of Matthew, an eight-lecture course (50 minutes or so each; with two Q&A's; and additional materials provided).  You can find it here.  https://courses.bartehrman.com/matthew   Blog members get a discount with the code Blog5. Whether you want to get the course or not, I thought it would be valuable to explain what I cover there, lecture by lecture.  And so here is a summary! ****************************** The Genius of Matthew Lecture Descriptions   Lecture One:  How Do You Study a Gospel?  Take Matthew For Example. After a brief overview of the Gospel of Matthew – its contents, date, language, author, and sources of [...]

I've discussed how John differs strikingly from the Synoptics, especially considering the stories and sayings/discourses in each.  I've also indicated that they differ strikingly even when they tell the same *kind* of story, but I haven't been able to illustrate that yet.  Here is one of my favorite examples. How does Jesus raise from the dead? In Mark 5 Jesus raises an unnamed young girl, the daughter of Jairus, from the dead; in John 11 he raises a (young?) man from the dead, Lazarus, sister of Mary and Martha.  How do these stories compare and contrast? The following discussion is based on what I say in my textbook (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 7th ed. Oxford University Press), expanded and edited a bit here. ****************************** The differences between John and the Synoptics are particularly striking in stories that they have in common. You can see the differences yourself simply by taking any story of the Synoptics that is also told in John, and comparing the two accounts carefully.   Try [...]

I have devoted two posts to major features of the Gospel of John, one that lays out its major themes and emphases, the other that deals with who wrote it, when, and why. Now I can provide some suggestions for further reading, important works written by scholars for non-scholars.   The list is annotated to give you a sense of what each book is about and so help you decide which, if any, might be worth your while. I have divided the list into three sections: Books that provide important discussion of John in general or with respect to a particularly key topic Commentaries that give lengthy introductions to all matters of importance about the Gospel and then go passage by passage to provide more detailed interpretation, where you can dig more deeply into what does a particular word actually means; that the real point of a passage is; how the passage relates to what John says elsewhere or to other parts of the New Testament; where you can we find similar ideas expressed in other [...]

Now that I’ve summarized the major themes and emphases of the Gospel of John, I can turn to the historical questions of who wrote it, when, and why.  In this case, the biggest mystery is Who? To start with, the Gospel is anonymous – the author chose never to name himself.  The first author to attribute it to John the son of Zebedee is Irenaeus (around 185 CE).  Later readers found hints in the text to confirm this identification.  The matter may seem a bit convoluted at first, but there is a clear logic to it.  It was thought that the author was identifying himself in John 19:35 and John 21:20-24 as an eyewitness to the life of Jesus, one Gospel calls “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”  And so the question was: which disciple would that be? The figure is mentioned several times earlier in the account, where he is clearly one of Jesus’ closest companions: he is the one leaning on Jesus’ breast at his last meal (John 13:23).  That would [...]

What is the Gospel of John all about, in a nutshell?  It’s worth knowing:  John continues to be one of the favorite books of the Bible and is the (only) source of many of the well-known sayings of Jesus: For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16) I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep (John 10:11) I am the Way the Truth and the Life: No one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6) It is also the Gospel that gives us some of the most memorable miracles of Jesus: Turning water into wine (ch. 2) (the favorite miracle of college students everywhere) Raising Lazarus from the dead (ch. 11)   Have you read John’s Gospel all the way through, or even studied it?  If so, try to summarize it in one sentence of fifty words.  If you don’t know the Gospel well (or at all): keep [...]

I have now finished my short thread on the Synoptic Problem and here would like to provide some guidelines for additional reading for anyone who, well, just can’t get enough!  These are books written by experts dealing with various aspects of the problem and its solution; I’ve indicated which ones are most suitable for beginners and non-specialists.  This is taken from my textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (New York: Oxford University Press).  The eighth edition was co-authored with Hugo Mendez. ****************************** Allison, Dale. The Jesus Tradition in Q. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997. An intriguing attempt to reconstruct the history of the Q tradition, which disputes the influential conclusions of Kloppenborg. For advanced students. Farmer, William. The Synoptic Problem: A Critical Analysis. New York: Macmillan, 1964. One of the best attempts to argue, against the majority of scholars (and against the perspective found in this chapter), that Matthew was the first Gospel to be written. For advanced students. Goodacre, Mark. The Case Against Q: Studies [...]

We have seen that most scholars agree that the problem of the close similarities and striking differences among our Synoptic Gospels -- the "Synoptic Problem" -- is best solved by thinking that Mark was copied (to a greater or lesser extent) by both Matthew and Luke, the view called "Markan Priority."  The majority continues to believe there was a "sayings source" available independently as well to Matthew and Luke, that gave them many of the sayings of Jesus that they record but are not found in Mark (the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, some of the parables, lots of his memorable one-liners).  Others, as I've said, maintain that Matthew copied Mark and that Luke copied both Matthew and Mark. Even if we agree there was probably a Q source  and even if we don’t, we are still left with the fact that a good number of Matthew's stories are not found in either Mark or Luke (Herod's slaughter of the innocents, the visit of the Magi, a bunch of his parables), just as there are a [...]

In my previous post I gave a simplified illustration to show why it is problematic to get rid of the Q source (the hypothetical  collection of sayings found in both Matthew and Luke but not in Mark).  Having this hypothetical source does not actually complicate the solution of the Synoptic Problem, it makes the solution simpler.  Supposing there was a Q is not a perfect solution, but it is better than the alternatives, in my opinion.  As my Doktorvater Bruce Metzger used to say (about Q and other things), "It is the least problematic solution." The reason it makes simplest and best sense is because of the sequence of the sayings of these "double traditions" (the technical term for the sayings materials in the TWO Gospels of Matthew and Luke but not in Mark).  Unlike many of the narratives of these texts, these double-tradition sayings invariably occur in different places in the two Gospels.  Why is that? It would make sense if both of them have a source with a collection of Jesus' sayings of [...]

Why should we think there was a Q, the hypothetical document that contained principally sayings of Jesus, that was (according to this hypothesis) used by Matthew and Luke (but not by Mark) in constructing their Gospels? It is an issue because if Matthew and Luke both used Mark, as almost everyone agrees (for reasons I laid out in my earlier post), then one has to explain why they have so many other materials (mainly sayings) in common that are *not* found in Mark.  They didn’t get them from Mark!  Where then? In my earlier post I claimed that Matthew does not seem to have gotten those sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew, and so they both most have gotten them from some other one-time-existing source.  That is a source commonly called Q (for the German word Quelle: Source). But some readers have asked exactly why it is unlikely that Matthew got these sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew?  In particular, isn’t the best theory the one that has the least hypotheticals?  Why invent [...]

In my previous post I indicated that one of the reasons for thinking that Matthew copied Mark instead of the other way around is that there are passages in Mark that can be read in ways (or maybe even were meant in ways) that could be seen as problematic -- they might be worded in an awkward way, for example, or they might say something that cold be seen as confusing or just wrong -- but that in Matthew are worded differently so that there is no longer a problem. That would make sense if Matthew was copying Mark and just reworded something to "correct" it or at least to get rid of the problem.  It would be harder to explain why Mark would create a problem that wasn't in the story he was copying.  If that's right, it would suggest Mark is the source of Matthew. Here's one example to consider out of many.  I choose this one because, well, it's one of my favorites! It comes in the opening of the story [...]

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 [...]