Why are Matthew, Mark, and Luke are so similar to each other and yet have so many differences, lots of them minor but some of them significant?

In my previous posts I’ve given “Nutshell” explanations of each of these Gospels.  Before moving on to John – which is remarkably different in many ways from these three, both individually and as  group – I want to devote a series of posts to their relationship to one another. How could they be so alike – often word for word the same – without some copying going on?  And how do we account for the (sometimes serious) differences?

This has long been known as the “Synoptic Problem.”  It is not a problem connected with John because the features that create the problem for Mathew, Mark, and Luke (their extensive similarities often in extensive verbatim agreements) do not apply to John.

I have just reread my explanation of the problem in my textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings 7th ed. (Oxford University Press) and have decided that I simply am not able to explain the problem or its most widely held solution any better than I do there.  So a good bit of this thread will be drawn from there, including this post.

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