What is the synoptic problem?

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels because the word synoptic means seen together, and these three books share so much overlapping content, structure, wording, and sequence that they can be laid side by side and compared verse by verse. John's Gospel, by contrast, follows a largely independent path, with different material and a more explicitly theological structure.

The synoptic problem refers to the scholarly question this overlap raises, how do these three accounts relate to one another in their composition? Did the authors write independently under the Spirit's guidance, did they draw on shared oral tradition, or did they use each other's written material? This is a question about the human process behind the writing, not a challenge to the Gospels' truthfulness.

Roughly ninety percent of Mark's content appears in Matthew, and a large portion appears in Luke as well, often in strikingly similar wording. At the same time, each Gospel contains material unique to itself, Matthew's genealogy and infancy narrative emphasizing Jesus as the promised Jewish Messiah, Luke's parables of the lost sheep, lost coin, and prodigal son emphasizing Jesus's compassion for outcasts, John's extended theological discourses.

This combination of extensive agreement and genuine independence has fascinated careful readers of the Gospels since the early church, and various proposed solutions have been offered. Augustine, writing in the fourth century, was among the earliest to address the question directly, proposing that Mark abbreviated Matthew, an early example of Christians engaging this puzzle without any sense that it threatened their confidence in the Gospels' truthfulness.

The most widely held view among modern scholars, called Markan priority, holds that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source, along with additional material unique to each and a hypothetical shared sayings source often labeled Q. Other scholars hold to Matthean priority, the traditional view held by many early church fathers, that Matthew was written first, with Mark condensing Matthew and Luke drawing on both.

Still others emphasize the role of shared oral tradition, the well-documented ancient practice of carefully memorizing and transmitting teaching, alongside limited literary dependence. None of these theories are stated explicitly in Scripture, so Christians hold them with varying degrees of confidence as reasonable historical hypotheses rather than doctrinal certainties.

It is worth noting that first-century Jewish culture placed enormous value on careful memorization, rabbis and their students routinely preserved lengthy teaching with remarkable accuracy through disciplined oral transmission. The disciples, trained in this tradition, were well equipped to preserve Jesus's teaching faithfully long before any of it was committed to writing, which means the synoptic problem is ultimately a question about the specific literary path this reliable material took, not about whether it was reliably preserved at all.

A related proposal, sometimes called the Farrer hypothesis, still holds that Mark was written first but argues that Luke used Matthew directly, which would remove the need for a separate, now-lost sayings source altogether. Scholars continue to weigh these proposals by carefully comparing wording, sequence, and theme across the three Gospels, and reasonable, faithful interpreters land in different places. What matters for the ordinary reader is that every major proposal, whatever its differences, affirms that all three Synoptic Gospels faithfully preserve the words and works of Jesus.

A natural objection follows from all this, if Matthew and Luke borrowed language from Mark, does that mean they weren't really drawing on eyewitness testimony, or worse, that the Gospels grew through some kind of collaborative invention rather than honest reporting? The early church did not see it that way. The second-century writer Papias, whose testimony is preserved by the historian Eusebius, recorded a tradition that Mark had carefully written down the eyewitness preaching of the apostle Peter. If that tradition is accurate, then Matthew, himself an apostle and eyewitness, consulting Mark's record of Peter's testimony is not fabrication at all, but the ordinary, responsible use of a reliable earlier witness, exactly what a careful historian should do.

This is also simply how ancient biography worked. Luke tells us directly that he consulted existing accounts and eyewitnesses before writing his own orderly narrative (Luke 1:1-4), and ancient readers regarded that kind of careful research, not pure isolated originality, as the mark of trustworthy history. What should strike readers is not that the Synoptics overlap, but that amid such extensive overlap, each Gospel still preserves genuinely distinct material, Matthew's attention to fulfilled Jewish prophecy, Luke's careful physician's research among named sources, evidence of real access to independent testimony rather than a single, uncorroborated account invented from nothing.

Some worry that acknowledging literary relationships between the Gospels somehow undermines their divine inspiration, as though inspired writers must work in total isolation from each other or from existing sources. But Luke states plainly, in his own introduction, that many had already undertaken to compile a narrative of the things accomplished among them, and that he investigated everything closely before writing his own orderly account (Luke 1:1-4). Luke openly acknowledges using sources, and the Holy Spirit guided him in selecting, arranging, and writing accurately regardless.

Using shared material, whether written or oral, no more undermines inspiration than a modern historian using archival documents undermines the truthfulness of the resulting history. What matters is that the finished, Spirit-guided text accurately conveys what God intended it to teach (2 Timothy 3:16).

The synoptic problem is ultimately a question for historians and textual scholars to investigate, not a doctrine essential to Christian faith. Whatever the precise process of composition, the church has always received Matthew, Mark, and Luke as reliable, complementary, Spirit-inspired testimony to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, rooted in eyewitness testimony (Luke 1:2; 2 Peter 1:16).

Rather than a threat, the overlapping and distinct material among the Synoptics gives readers a richer, more textured picture of Jesus, confirmed by multiple, independent lines of testimony converging on the same central truth, He is the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16).