All right, like I know you're smart and I know you study hard and I know you were ready for that exam, but come on, we both know that that one time in that one class when you were a kid and you were sitting next to the really smart girl who never gets anything wrong, that you just happened to glance over on the question you didn't know what you were doing, you just happened to see her answer, and then you were like, Well, what am I supposed to do now? I don't want to cheat, but I already saw her answer. Am I supposed to just tank it to make a point? Like, I can't help it. That's probably what I was gonna say anyway. And then you just wrote it down and you happened to get it right. And probably you then went home and you were like, mom, dad, I can't live with myself anymore. I looked at the super smart girl's test, and they were probably like, Well, I think you've learned a valuable lesson, but you still have to make that right with your teacher and with the super smart girl, and they made you go back to school and admit everything to everybody, and then you got punished there as well and got a zero on a test, and then you were too afraid to ever cheat again. Probably that happened to you. And if you're in a room with somebody who still need to respect you after this, I'm cool if you want to deny that right now. But deep down at the level of your heart, probably, because it's just really easy to cheat off of somebody else's paper sometimes, even though it's super wrong. Well, there's an accusation going around. Somebody cheated off of somebody else's paper when it comes to the three synoptic gospels in the New Testament. You got Matthew, Mark, and Luke, sin, optic, sin, same, optic, eye. They get lumped together because they kind of tell the same story. They just do it with a little different flourishes, and there's a whole lot of overlap. And in the early days of church, that was not a big deal, right? Because, you know, for like the first 500 years, all of the people in charge were saying, well, Matthew was clearly the first gospel, Matthew is the gospel of the church. They quoted, it gets quoted way more than any of the others. And then, you know, 500 years in or so, we start to see a real uptick in the use of the book of Mark. But for the most part, it looks like Matthew kind of dominated, Luke and Acts were taken as one big document, John deals with those I am statements and the deity of Christ, and so they all kind of fit in their little place and they all work. Well, this existed in pretty good harmony for a really long time until somewhere in the modern age, the early modern age, 17th, 18th, 19th century, a few very, very intelligent, I think, good-willed people start looking at the Gospels and they're like, wait a minute, if you go through and you scientifically add up who said what and when they said it, this gets a little bit weird. It's kind of hard to tell who got their ideas from where. And people start to theorize that it looks like maybe Matthew and Luke cheated off of Mark's paper a little bit. And they get to look in a little bit closer and they're like, you know what? Not only did Matthew and Luke cheat off of Mark's paper, it looks like there might have been some other secret mystery document that they also cheated off of. And we're going to call that Q. Or maybe there was also a sayings document. And so there starts to be all of these theories about how all of these known documents, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, relate to these unknown documents, Q or Q and an additional sayings document, or who knows how many more. And the most accepted, most repeated solution to the synoptic problem is that Mark came first, way first, and that Matthew and Luke drew off of his stuff as well as some extra documents that were floating around, meaning that Matthew and Luke effectively are an exaggeration. Now, lots of people who have a very high view of the Bible hold to this idea that Mark came first. They call this Mark and priority. Lots of other people who have high and low views of the Bible would say, I don't know about this. I get some questions as well. But the Mark thing is what you'll hear repeated the most often. For a lot of people who are more skeptical of the Bible, I think one of the things that comes with the assumption that Mark came first, Mark and priority, is the idea that Jesus and the whole Christianity kingdom thing is a legend. It's a myth. And the way legends and myths work is that they grow by orders of magnitude as storytellers and campfire sessions with a little bit of booze get a bit carried away. And over the years, little stories turn into big stories. I mean, the earliest stuff in Norse mythology is very, very simple. But there are a billion different things that Thor and Loki and Odin and that whole crowd went and did. There's this whole cosmology, this whole catalog of stories, and a lot of them are mutually exclusive. These are just characters that you could play around with, kind of like comic book characters. Well, Thor is a comic book character, maybe it just works really well. And so I think the assumption is Mark gave you the basic version of Jesus, and then Matthew and Luke came along, and they were like, oh, I could do better than that. And so they start fleshing the thing out and coming up with more things and exaggerating a little bit. And then John takes it to this whole other level with Jesus being God and all of this other stuff. And that's how the Christian myth took off. Now, again, there are people who believe in Mark and priority who would say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, we don't think anything like that. The Bible's legit and there's a kingdom, and Jesus is the king of that kingdom. It just looks like the evidence points to Mark coming first. So, all right, we've set the table there. But over on the YouTube channel the other day, I was talking with Professor David Allen Black. He's a doctor of New Testament and Greek at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina. And this guy's just a genius. He's written a couple books that I really appreciate. I use his New Testament Greek, uh, what's it called? I got on the shelf here. It is Learn to Read New Testament Greek by David Allen Black. I use that as my post-seminary Remember How on Earth Greek Works book. The guy's just great and he makes a lot of sense. And in sitting and talking with him, in case you didn't go and see the video over on the YouTube channel, he makes a case that Matthew really did come first. And his case for it is really, really clever. And you'll have to go read his book to get it all fleshed out. But instead of arguing that Mark grabbed some cursory details and made a very simple, action-packed version of the gospel that then got expanded on later, he argues that Matthew would have been the first to feel the need to write a gospel. And he makes the case that all the letters in the New Testament are occasional documents. They were all written for a reason. Paul didn't just sit down and write letters with no point and no agenda behind them. He wrote them in response to situations to address things that were weird or screwed up or backwards or questions. And David Allen Black argues that the Gospels are the same way. Each of them were written for a purpose, and he argues for a phase in the unfolding of the early church. So the first phase of the church is, of course, Jerusalem. It's the part where this is entirely for Jewish people. Maybe there's some fringe Gentiles, but the question is: is the church legitimate? Is it a valid expression of Judaism to say Jesus is the king and the Messiah? And so Matthew then becomes an apologetic. It was interesting. David Allen Black used the same word I use for the Sermon on the Mount to describe all of Matthew. He said it's a manifesto about the validity of Jesus as the Messiah, the reality of Jesus as King and Messiah. And so that squares with what we've encountered, right? This looks like a document that's really targeted at Jewish people. And he argues that Matthew would have been the one that was in circulation. And people carried this around on scrolls and that this was the record of what Jesus had done and what he was up to. But as Paul comes along and he starts going on missionary journeys, remember he took his first missionary journey that involved Mark, and Mark kind of flamed out on the journey. Barnabas ended up buddying up with him, and Paul ended up siding with Silas, and they kind of went in two separate directions eventually. But Paul, he keeps coming back to the Eastern Mediterranean, to Jerusalem and stuff, and like, uh, it seems like the whole God thing is real, that the gospel, the message of Jesus is for everybody. And so the Jerusalem church affirms it, and they send Paul back out with their blessing. And now that creates a new occasion, right? We're going to need a new document to explain the gospel in a way that's going to make sense to a Greek brain, a non-Jewish brain. And that gospel, it's going to have to fill in some gaps in terms of how Judaism works, whereas Matthew could just assume that the whole audience knew it. Well, the guy that Paul pegs to do this is a dude named Luke. And Luke never met Jesus, and he's a Greek guy. And so it looks like, again, this is all according to Black's hypothesis, that Luke had time while Paul was in prison in Caesarea to go around, do some homework, talk to a whole bunch of people. And in fact, Luke says that he did that at the beginning of his gospel and at the beginning of the book of Acts. So Luke's got this thing, and it's mostly done, but it doesn't have any approval from the people who actually knew Jesus. Well, where's Paul headed? Rome. So he takes Luke along with him. Paul and Luke show up in Rome because, well, one, Paul didn't have a choice, he was under arrest. But two, there's someone very, very authoritative in Rome who could lend his blessing to Luke's gospel, which would allow Luke's gospel to go into circulation. And that is Peter. Well, Peter had a traveling companion in Rome at this time as well, and it's Mark. And we know from the accounts of the church fathers that Peter was giving these open-air messages where he's recounting everything about what Jesus did and said. And according to the church fathers, Mark is sitting there writing stuff down, like almost just bullet points, and then this and then that, and then that, and then that. And so when Luke and Paul show up, they would have been carrying around the scroll of the Gospel of Matthew, according to Black's hypothesis. They would have had this yet unpublished manuscript that Luke has, and they put this thing in front of Peter, with Mark presumably in the room, and Peter goes over it. And I don't know if he offered any changes or didn't. That'd be an interesting thing to think through. But the end result is that clearly Luke received the blessing of the leaders of the church, and it goes into circulation. Well, Black then theorizes that Mark would have had access to Matthew. It looks like Matthew, using his clerical skills, took tons of notes on Jesus' actual words. That's why we get five big speeches in the Gospel of Matthew. So Mark has access to that. Mark has access to the details that Luke has gathered from other people. And most of all, Mark has all of his bullet points from everything he's heard Peter saying in public that he's written down. So David Allen Black argues that Mark wasn't so much of an occasional gospel that was written to make a great big point. It was the reminiscences of Peter. And then John, of course, comes much later after the fact, addressing, I think, two sets of questions that came up in the church. That is the nature of Christ's humanity and his deity, and an external question that was pressuring the church, that coming from the Gnostic dualistic crowd who were trying to fuse Greek thought and Christian thought, and it didn't quite totally jive. And so John writes his epistles and those are his letters, and John writes his gospel, I think in pretty close proximity of each other to try to tamp out that fire and straighten out the deal with who Jesus actually is. So it would be occasional as well. So what you have then is really two takes on the synoptic problem, if you can even call it a problem. Take number one is Mark did a small thing and the legend grew. Not everybody would say that they think it was a legend, but but the alternative view then, which Black calls the fourfold gospel hypothesis, goes with this different order. Matthew, then Luke, then Matthew and Luke inform Mark along with Peter, and all three of those go into circulation, with Matthew being the most favored among the early church, because it seems to have answered the questions that were most commonly being asked. Why does this matter for our conversation? The first reason it matters is because we are comparing three similar accounts, and what order they happened in and how we envision that unfolding, yeah, it really does shape how we reconcile the uniformity and even the stylistic differences between them. Matthew and Luke, it does look like arranged their stories in a slightly different manner to make different points. Yet if they overlapped with each other and they had each other as a source, what are they doing? Well, my informed guess is that theological history worked a little bit differently in the first century than your straight up school textbook history works today. They're trying to accomplish different things and we can do a disservice to the Bible if we expect it to look like it follows all of the formats that I learned doing history school and college. The second reason is that these documents are just very important. And thinking through where they came from and how they relate to each other is not a question that's to be asked by liberals who hate God. I mean, that's a nonsense characterization. This is a reasonable question for anybody of any theological stripe to want to know. These things hold themselves out as being important and from God and having a bearing and a claim on our lives. It's reasonable to ask how they unfolded when they happened, and just to wrestle with the question, because the question's important, before we even get into the implications in thinking through what that means for how each of these individual books reads. I've gone really long there, so I'm just gonna hit pause and we'll pick it back up in Matthew chapter 5 tomorrow. I'm Matt, this is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Catch you soon.