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

The First Key: Hebrew

Working toward a Modern Hebrew translation of Mark, I developed four important insights or keys for understanding the sources and the interrelationship of the synoptic gospels. The first insight I call the Hebrew key. If a person knows enough Hebrew and Greek, he or she can take the Greek texts of the synoptic gospels and determine how easily they translate from Greek into Hebrew. One also needs to have a sensitivity to Mishnaic Hebrew (footnote 2), the type of Hebrew that was spoken in the first century. That person possesses a valuable key for understanding the synoptic tradition. One who does not have the linguistic expertise to undertake such an exercise forfeits an important key for exploring this material in depth and comprehending it. The ability to translate Koine Greek into Mishnaic Hebrew is one of the four keys for understanding Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is especially true for Matthew and Luke.

I will illustrate the first key with some examples. Often in the first three gospels, especially in Luke, we read passages which begin with "And it came to pass…" (footnote 3) This is a King James equivalent of the Old Testament Hebrew idiom vayehi. The idiom vayehi appears in Genesis 6:1, which in the Greek of the Septuagint (footnote 4) appears as "kai egeneto..." Compare this to the beginning of Luke 7:11, which reads, "And it came to pass…" The Greek of Luke 7:11 is the same as the Greek translation of Genesis 6:1 which is found in the Septuagint. The words kai and egeneto and their syntax (or order) reflect the Hebrew vayehi.

Sentences in the Hebrew of the Old Testament frequently begin with "and," followed by the verb and its subject. This order of words gives priority to the verb in the sentence. At the beginning of a new narrative the verb is preceded by a vav which means "and." So, we may speak of priority of the verb and the prefixed vav as being characteristic of Biblical Hebrew. This same characteristic is also found throughout the synoptic gospels where we encounter sentences like Luke 14:22, "And said the slave…"

We may see the Hebrew flavor of the synoptic gospels in other ways, too. The use of prepositional phrases in New Testament Greek differs from that of Classical Greek. In Classical Greek, prepositions rarely introduce prepositional phrases. Consider the sentence "He remained at home." In Classical Greek one could simply say "at home" by simply writing the noun "home" in a certain form (as a dative noun) to indicate location. As one can see from the Septuagint, however, ancient translators of the Hebrew Bible inclined toward representing each Hebrew word with a Greek equivalent, even when the sense was clear in Greek without the additional word. Genesis 8:1 contains the prepositional phrase "in the ark" or in Hebrew batevah. The prefixed ba comes from the preposition be and means "in." Tevah means ark. In the Septuagint the phrase appears as en tae kiboetoe. The preposition en is not necessary for meaning. It merely represents the Hebrew ba.

In the synoptic gospels, the Greek sometimes reflects influences from Hebrew so clearly that it can be rather amusing. For example, in the story of the Beelzebul controversy, some accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul. The Greek of Matthew 12:24, 27 and Luke 11:15, 18 literally reads en Baalzebul or in English "in Beelzebul!" (footnote 5) What a remarkable thing to find in the Greek of the gospels! In Classical Greek the preposition en functions like our English preposition "in." It normally signifies place where and not agency. The means by which something is done (or agency) is typically expressed otherwise. Yet the Hebrew preposition be can be used to express both place where and agency. The peculiar usage of the Greek preposition en suggests that a Hebrew text, which read bebaal zevuv, inspired the phrase en Baalzebul.

This particular meaning of the preposition be has fallen into disuse in Modern Hebrew, but in the type of Hebrew which Jesus spoke in the first century AD, it often conveyed the idea of agency. A few examples of the Greek en as a preposition-conveying agency may be found in the vast body of Classical Greek literature that has survived to our day. Consequently, I suspect that the Greek translator of the phrase bebaal zevuv felt comfortable making a very literal translation, even if it did include a rare usage of the preposition en.

Of course, an ancient Greek reader of Matthew 12:24, 27 and Luke 11:15, 18 understood this rather odd language; only style and not comprehension was forfeited. This and other Hebraisms in the synoptic gospels contributed to making the text less appealing stylistically to a learned and discriminating Greek reader (footnote 6). There are, however, places where a Hebraism that is embedded in the Greek text could have caused difficulties in comprehension, if a reader failed to recognize the Hebraism for what it really was.

Let me emphasize that the Hebrew key is of the utmost importance for understanding the Greek of the first three gospels. I have a large library that includes many commentaries, and few of them give adequate attention to this point. In the nineteenth century, scholars often spoke of the Semiticisms in the gospels, but such discussion waned considerably in the first half of the twentieth century.

Even today, in the vast majority of our seminaries, a gap exists between Old and New Testament studies. Professors of Old Testament receive specialized training in Hebrew while their New Testament colleagues receive specialized training in Koine Greek. When an Old Testament professor reads something in the gospels which sounds Hebraic, he or she may comment upon it; but the New Testament professor may respond, "You stay in your field, and I will stay in mine." Moreover, when students start a program in Biblical studies, the first semester they are often asked to declare concentration of course work in either Old or New Testament. It is most unfortunate that these areas of study are considered mutually exclusive.

One can find in the academic literature on the gospels the claim that the writers of Matthew, Mark, and Luke imitated the Greek of the Septuagint. This is an attempt to explain the numerous Semiticisms in the Greek of the gospels. They theorize that it is because the gospel writers mimicked the writing style of the Hebrew-to-Greek translators of the Septuagint that their compositions contain numerous Hebraisms—and not because they have been translated from an earlier Hebrew source.

I do not find this explanation convincing. First of all, if one encounters a Greek text that has been influenced to a large degree by Hebrew, one should entertain the idea that he or she is dealing with a text that has been translated. This is the most obvious and reasonable explanation. Nevertheless, a serious and honest student must examine each Semiticism of the text on its own merits and ask the question, "Is it possible that this Greek phrase, clause, or sentence could have been written in a way as to copy the language of the Septuagint?" In a number of cases this question will be very hard to answer in the affirmative, because several Mishnaic Hebrew (or post-Biblical) idioms appear in the synoptic gospels. In other words, how could writers who are supposed to have been mimicking the language of the Septuagint, have invented Hebrew idioms belonging to a stage of the Hebrew language that postdates Biblical Hebrew by hundreds of years?

Of course one can still claim that the gospel writers were Jews writing Greek as if they were speaking Hebrew (footnote 7). That claim is worth entertaining, and I do think that it is accurate in the case of the Pauline epistles and other books of the New Testament. But I do not accept it with regard to the synoptic gospels and the first part of Acts. For example, consider Luke, who wrote a gospel and Acts. In the later chapters of Acts, Luke’s prose contains few Hebraisms. In the first several chapters of Acts, however, Luke penned prose with a noticeable Hebraic character. This evidence suggests Luke relied on an earlier source when writing the opening chapters but abandoned or exhausted it by the time he started writing the later chapters.

In his gospel, Luke wrote in refined, polished Greek a prologue that is reminiscent of the classical period. The prologue spans four verses and is immediately followed by twenty-four chapters of Greek of which most may be described as Hebraic or Septuagint Greek. These chapters are filled with Hebraisms—lexical, syntactical, and grammatical. Clearly, Luke could write beautiful prose in Greek if he so desired. Faced with this evidence, I cannot but conclude that Luke 1:1-4 is a sample of Luke’s personal literary style. He penned these verses alone and did not rely on other sources. Beginning with verse 5, however, Luke relied on sources, which were written in Greek, but which had been translated from Hebrew. The hebraic character of these sources percolated through Luke’s composition wherever he consulted them.

The easiest way to explain Luke’s shifts in literary style is to say that parts of his gospel and Acts stem from earlier sources that had been translated from Hebrew. This seems particularly so when word after word, detail after detail, expression after expression of a given passage reflects Hebrew syntax and includes Hebrew idioms. Moreover, some of these idioms do not appear in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament nor in the Greek translation that they inspired called the Septuagint. Therefore, these Hebrew idioms embedded in the Greek of the synoptic gospels remain as faint witnesses to an older stratum of the synoptic tradition, which at one time had been written in the type of Hebrew spoken in the first century AD.

Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Bar Kochbah letters were written in this type of Hebrew. As an example of a Hebraism in the gospels that is not septuagintal, let us consider ballo. This Greek verb means "to throw." Our English words "ball" and "ballistic" originate from ballo. In the Septuagint, ballo can mean "to throw," and a number of times it serves as an equivalent for the Hebrew verb zarak. In the New Testament, however, it assumes an additional meaning. Used in this new way, ballo can mean "to place" or "to put." Combined with the prefixed preposition ek, ballo in the form of ekballo can mean "to extract" or "to take out" instead of "to cast out" or "to throw out." In the New Testament, ballo often carries a softer connotation than it does in the Septuagint.

In Mark 2:22 we read, "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins." Here ballo has not been translated as "throws" but "puts." Throwing wine into old wineskins would be ludicrous. Yet if we insist on following the pattern set by the Septuagint, we would need to translate Mark 2:22 as "And no one throws new wine into old wineskins." This suggests that the gospel writers (or those writing before them) were not trying to mimic the style of the Septuagint.

When the evangelists described Jesus ridding someone of a demon, they used the word ekballo. The English translators of our gospels have rendered this usage of ekballo as "to throw" or "to cast out." In Matthew 8:31 a horde of demons entreated Jesus, "If you are going to cast us out…" That sounds like an appropriate translation, but from Rabbinic sources we know that the Hebrew verb lehotsi apparently was used in New Testament times. Translated literally into English, lehotsi means "to take out" a demon and not "to cast out." The softer, New Testament connotation of ekballo is the exact equivalent of lehotsi. By the time the evangelists were writing, the softer connotation had displaced the harder one as the primary meaning of the Greek verb ballo. Thus, comparing the Greek of the gospels with other ancient texts and translating passages from the gospels into Mishnaic Hebrew, we acquire a most useful tool for refining our English translations and gaining insight into Jesus’ teachings.

The evangelists recorded other Hebraic expressions that do not belong to the Hebrew of the Old Testament. Kingdom of heaven or malchut shammayim cannot be found in a concordance of the Old Testament. It ranks among the fresh theological achievements contributed by Jewish sages during the post-Biblical period (footnote 8). The concept first appeared in writing during the intertestamental period. In the Book of Jubilees 12:19, where Abraham declared to God, "You and your kingdom I have chosen," we catch a glimpse of this concept early in its development. From the first century AD and onwards, the kingdom of heaven or malchut shaminayim assumed a technical term-like status in two bodies of literature—the New Testament and rabbinic writings.

Another post-Biblical Hebrew expression preserved in the Greek of the gospels is "repentance" or teshuva. The Hebrew noun teshuva, which comes from the verb shav or "to return," appears in the Old Testament, but with the meanings of "his return to Rama," "at the return of the year," and "a return (or answer) to a question." (footnote 9) Teshuva came to mean "repentance" only in the post-Biblical, Mishnaic period.

Two more examples of post-Biblical Hebrew idioms are found in Matthew 16:16 and 26:64. The first is the rabbinic expression "binding and loosing." (footnote 10)  The second represents an attempt on the part of pious Jews not to violate Exodus 20:7, which warns a person not to take the Lord’s name in vain.

In Jesus’ day there were various ways to speak about God without using his name, which apparently had been revealed to Moses at the burning bush. While being interrogated by the chief priests and their scribes, Jesus declared, "But from now on the Son of man shall be seated at the right hand of Power." (Here I have quoted a hybrid rendering of Matthew 26:64 and Luke 22:69.) Jesus referred to God as Gibor or Power as an allusion to Isaiah 9:5 and to avoid using the title YHWH (footnote 11). Note how Luke smoothed out this Hebraism by writing "the power of God." That certainly made better sense to a native Greek speaker.

The soft nuance of ballo, the kingdom of heaven, teshuva (repentance), binding and loosing, and the title Gibor all stand as excellent candidates for Mishnaic Hebrew expressions embedded in the Greek of the synoptic gospels. These examples and others tilt the scales in favor of postulating the existence of a Hebrew document that formed the basis of the synoptic tradition. Suggesting that these Mishnaic Hebraisms are Septuagintalisms is to adopt the more difficult explanation.

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11  See David Flusser, Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988), pp. 301-305.