Who Has the Good News Straight?

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger. --from the Gospel According to Luke

This week, Christians around the world will hear the familiar words of Luke's Christmas story: the decree from Caesar Augustus, the shepherds in the fields, the "glory of the Lord" shining suddenly around them. But how accurate are those cherished images surrounding Jesus' birth? Luke, after all, comes third in the conventional sequence of the Gospels in the Bible--Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. That is also the order in which most churchgoers assume the Gospels were written. But if so, why would Matthew, who comes first, pass off the Nativity scene with a single sentence? Why does Mark, who comes next, not mention it at all? Whose Gospel, indeed, is the most accurate in telling the "Good News" of Jesus Christ's life and message?

The question has long troubled biblical scholars, and today it is arising anew in learned conferences and treatises. The scholars assume that the earliest Gospel is the most authentic version of what Jesus actually said and did. Thus the question of accuracy could be at least partly answered if they could decide how, and in what order, the four evangelists came to set down their stories. A solution would have a vital bearing not only on Bethlehem's shepherds and angels, but on more fundamental Christian beliefs and attitudes.

Suppose Mark came first instead of Matthew: Mark fails to report a miraculous virgin birth and does not mention Matthew's famous "keys of the kingdom" passage, upon which papal claims to authority rest. Mark plays down the Jewish moorings of Christianity that are evident in Matthew and important to Jewish-Christian relations. Moreover, since Mark's is the simplest and briefest of the Gospels, stories appearing only in the other Gospels might seem more suspect as pious legends, making the Jesus of history a vaguer, perhaps less credible figure.

Lost Sayings. In the 4th century, St. Augustine opted for the conventional biblical order; it prevailed as Catholic and, later, Protestant teaching until the 18th century. Then biblical scholars of the Enlightenment, becoming concerned about disparities in the internal chronology of the Gospels, reopened the issue. German Scholar Johann Griesbach, in 1774, performed one service by eliminating the Gospel of John from the dispute. He showed that John is distinct in style and content, whereas the other three share many parallel passages and signs of interdependence. Griesbach called them the "synoptic" Gospels, meaning that they should be "viewed together."

The name stuck, and the battle was rejoined. Another German researcher, Gotthold Lessing, advanced the idea that a lost Aramaic gospel had been the source for the evangelists' texts in Greek. Theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher suggested the existence of a lost collection of Jesus' sayings that he called the Logia. In the mid-19th century, Heidelberg's Heinrich Holtzmann synthesized the two ideas, proposing that both a protoGospel and an early, now lost collection of Jesus' sayings lay behind the Synoptic Gospels. The Holtzmann theory was crystallized in 1924 by Britain's B.H. Streeter--with an important modification. The protoGospel, said Streeter, was in fact the Gospel of Mark, or a document virtually identical to it, which Matthew and Luke used along with a separate collection of sayings to write their own Gospels.

Streeter's theory, sacrosanct in liberal Protestant scholarship for four decades, has come under some attack in recent years. Southern Methodist's William R. Farmer, in his book The Synoptic Problem, maintains that the Mark theory was based not so much on conclusive proof from the Gospel texts as on a desire for a neat, scientific solution to satisfy a scholarly predilection for evolution: the more primitive Mark evolving into the smoother, more elaborated Matthew and Luke. Farmer returns to a sequence proposed by Griesbach: Matthew, then Luke, then Mark. Farmer's critics ask why Mark would have omitted so much of importance, such as the Sermon on the Mount and so many of the parables. Defenders reply that Mark's could have been simply a special-purpose Gospel for a particular community, or perhaps a selective rewrite job done on Matthew and Luke by 2nd century Gnostics.

Many Writers. Robert L. Lindsey, a scholarly Southern Baptist missionary in Israel, believes that Luke came first, followed by Mark, then Matthew. While translating Mark from Greek into modern Hebrew, Lindsey kept encountering words and phrases without Hebrew equivalents. Luke, on the other hand, translated so easily into Hebrew that Lindsey decided he must have used an earlier--hence more reliable--Hebrew source than the others. Markus Barth, son of the late Karl Barth, advances an even more unorthodox theory in his classes at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary: that the Gospel of John came first. Barth sees John's Gospel as a kind of guide for a pilgrimage in Jesus' footsteps to Jerusalem, and insists that it must have been written before the Temple's destruction in A.D. 70.

The most open-ended solution to the whole question is E.P. Sanders' work, The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition, which concludes that none of the three Synoptic Gospels can be proved to have come first. Sanders, of Ontario's McMaster University, makes a systematic test of the usual criteria for what is early or late in Christian documents. Material is generally considered to be later, for instance, as it increases in length, detail, and direct discourse, and decreases in Jewish influence. Sanders contends that none of these tests is conclusive. As each Gospel developed, he found, descriptions of individual incidents "became both longer and shorter, both more and less detailed, and both more and less Semitic."

Sanders and a growing number of young biblical scholars believe that when the dust has settled none of the simpler theories will survive. Reviving the ghost of some complicated 19th century theories, they argue that the existing Gospels were more likely compiled from a complex network of earlier documents and oral tradition. Indeed, Luke himself gives some support to this view in the beginning of his own Gospel, where he notes that "many writers have undertaken to draw up an account of the events that have happened among us."

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