Four Important Insights or Keys for Understanding
the Sources and the Interrelationship of the Synoptic Gospels

By Robert L. Lindsey, PhD

[ Introduction ]       Key 1     Key 2      Key 3     Key 4

Introduction

There are several distinct and important features of the first three gospels of the New Testament. In a seminary or university environment, professors and students refer to these three gospels as the synoptic gospels (footnote 1). Our discussion will be about the sources behind our gospels, and, therefore, it will touch upon the broader and highly relevant subject of how we read the gospels and, ultimately, how we formulate a mental perception of Jesus. Although we will be dealing with issues that may seem scholarly and to hold little practical relevance, I believe that in the end we will see emerge from our discussion four helpful keys for attaining an improved picture of Jesus as he really was.

Many years ago, I spent a year at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. There I began working intensely on the gospels as part of an undertaking to produce a new translation in Modern Hebrew. Some of the time I worked with several professors, but most of the time I spent alone, laboring in the Greek texts of the gospels. My objective was simple: from the standpoint of a Hebrew speaker, I wanted to translate the Gospel of Mark into attractive Modern Hebrew prose. Although this was my first serious attempt at translation,. I had studied Hebrew a number of years and was speaking and preaching in it. Consequently, my command of the language was much more effective than when I first arrived in Israel to serve as a Southern Baptist pastor. So, there at the seminary, focusing on the Gospel of Mark, I worked diligently for a year trying to make a good translation from Koine Greek into Modern Hebrew.

As an undergraduate student at the University of Oklahoma, I majored in Classical Greek because the university did not offer a course in New Testament (or Koine) Greek. We mainly read texts which had been written in Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, about the time Ezra and Nehemiah were busy rebuilding Jerusalem. Later, in seminary, I studied New Testament Greek. Nevertheless, I have often thought that my training in Classical Greek cast a significant influence over the way that I read the Greek of the synoptic gospels. Classical Greek had not absorbed lexical, syntactical, and other grammatical elements from Semitic languages as did New Testament Greek.

Up to this point, I would have been like most other seminary-trained translators trying to translate the Greek of the New Testament into some modern language. However, I happened to be trying to make a clear and accurate translation into Modern Hebrew, and that made a tremendous difference.

At the beginning of my work, I had some notion of the Semitic style or Semiticisms of the Greek New Testament. My limited understanding of this subject had come mainly from observing the peculiar order of words (or syntax) in Mark and the other two synoptic gospels. The syntax of ancient Greek may be described as being relaxed. Meaning is not as dependent upon the position of words in a sentence as it is in English or Hebrew. This is true for classical as well as for Koine (or New Testament) Greek. Both display a word order that is not rigid, but in the older Classical Greek, this feature stands out as being more pronounced. Translating the Greek of the synoptic gospels, I encountered a syntax that was remarkably rigid. In other words, in numerous sentences the verb and its subject and object would typically occupy the same positions. Interestingly, this consistency in word order reflected the syntactical structure of Hebrew. This Hebraistic quality first made me wonder whether our gospels had been recorded originally in Hebrew.