“SALT” Exercise_ The Synoptic Problem Assignment
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“SALT” Exercise: The Synoptic Problem Assignment
New Testament (D07)
Darrian Graves
December 7, 2023
“SALT” Exercise: The Synoptic Problem Assignment James Bryant
2
Summary
One of the more confusing times in a young christians life is when they open the
BIble and they flip to the New Testament and find the first three books of the Bible are
telling the same story, but yet oddly different. They likely ask the question “why” and
“how” did this happen? That young christian would not be alone in asking. For years
christians and non-believers have tried to debunk and support just exactly what happened
with the Gospel writing. This brings a problem … A Synoptic Problem, Stacey explained
this problem: “The problem – really more a puzzle “.The Gospel of Matthew, Mark and
Luke are known as the synoptic Gospels because of how many similarities they share in
structure, writing and details and how much different they are in comparison to the fourth
Gospel of John. Over the years many have made large attempts to understand how these
three authors arrived at three different books but only three theories have stood the test of
time, the Oral tradition, the Ur-Gospel, and the Literary interdependence theory. Of the
three theories for this paper I have chosen to break down the Literary interdependence
theory. Inside the Literary interdependence theory holds several different hypostasis. The
Augustinian Hypothesis states that the canonical order of the Gospels was also the
chronological order in which they were written. The Two-Gospel Hypothesis believes
that Matthew was written, then Luke, then by Mark who took both previous writings and
put them together to write his own. The Two-Source Hypothesis states Mark was used as
a baseline source for Matthew and Luke, but Matthew and Luke used other sources to
help write their words. Lastly the Farrer Hypothesis states that Matthew wrote his Gospel
on Mark’s writing, and Luke had wrote his Gospel using Mark’s and Matthew’s,
concluding that there was no need for any extra sources
“SALT” Exercise: The Synoptic Problem Assignment James Bryant
3
Application
In addition to the many church fathers in the faith I personally take truth in the Two
Gospel Hypothesis, stating the proper order of the Gospels as Matthew, Luke, Mark, then
John. Logically it makes sense that Matthew, who was a former Jew, would have written
his book in a way that would have been linked to the jewish audience. Then Paul would
have called Luke to write his book for using Matthews as a reference for the
gentiles.Luke 1:1-3 creates a strong argument for this. Another point to add for Luke's
writing would be how Luke chose to appeal to the gentiles rather than Jews when he
talked about Jesus' bloodline. If he were appealing the the jews like in Matthew he would
have referenced David and Abraham but instead he chose to God and Adam. (Luke 3:38)
Personally and when I look at the scriptures for myself I, the Two/Four Source
Hypothesis do not make sense to me theologically. While God can do what he wants, we
don't have much evidence that supports that God would leave out large sources that
would then cause questions to the validity of the Gospels.
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