Gospel Synopsis Commentary, Part 4
Matt 3:1–17 // Mark 1:2–11 // Luke 3:1–9, 15–18, 21–22 // John 1:19–34
(avg. read time: 44–87 mins.)
Part 1: Matt 4:23 // Mark 1:39 // Luke 4:44
Part 2: Matt 4:18–22 // Mark 1:16–20
Part 3: Matt 4:1–11 // Mark 1:12–13 // Luke 4:1–13
Part 5: Matt 7:28–29 // Mark 1:21–22 // Luke 4:31–32
This entry may be the most complicated one I will post this year (depending on whether or not I post about the Olivet Discourse), as we are dealing with a total of nearly 1,100 words between all four texts (as well as the variants). The parallels of Matt 3:1–17 // Mark 1:2–11 // Luke 3:1–9, 15–18, 21–22 // John 1:19–34 provide the first story found in all four canonical Gospels. It involves John the Baptist and Jesus’s baptism. The parallels provide a fascinating blend of high degrees of similarity in some areas with remarkable variation throughout.
The placement of the story varies in each of the Gospels. In Matthew, it appears after the account of Jesus’s genealogy, birth, and infancy in Matt 1–2 and before the temptation. In Mark, it also appears before the temptation, as well as before every other narrative in Mark, since this begins right after Mark’s unique opening in 1:1. Luke 1–2 broadly parallels the function of Matt 1–2 in being an account of Jesus’s birth and infancy (as well as John’s), while also including a story from his adolescence, and it also appears before the temptation. Yet Luke interrupts the story with a much earlier reference to John’s arrest than other Gospels, and he includes a different genealogy of Jesus from Matthew between this story and Jesus’s temptation. John’s version comes immediately after the end of his Prologue and precedes Jesus being joined by his first disciples, as the temptation narrative does not appear here. For all the structural variations surrounding the different versions of the story, this text provides a higher degree of similarities between the different texts than anything immediately before and after.
For all texts, plain font words are absolute similarities between texts, regardless of where they appear in word order and without repetition (if one word appears once in one text and twice in another, it is only counted once, and so on). Italics signify either a different form of the same word or a synonymous word paralleled in each text. Bold font signifies what is unique to each text. For texts with four parallels, double-underlined words signify elements shared between three texts while single-underlined words signify elements shared between two texts. The Greek is taken from NA28 and the similarity scores outlined below are based on this text. Brackets include variants attested in at least five Greek witnesses that make the text closer to parallels. Alternatively, brackets may feature text-critical notes on what the majority of texts include or lack.
For each text, I will give two scores of similarity to each of the other Gospels: one will be cases of absolute matching and the other will be cases of “weighted” matching, not counting variants (assigning a value of 1 to absolute matches, 0.75 to alternate forms of the same word and 0.5 to synonyms). There is no easy way to account for variation in word order in these similarity scores, thus my only solution to make note of these variations is to put a < symbol next to scores to signify that the verbal similarity is actually less than the calculated score would indicate because of the difference in word order where the wording is otherwise similar. Because of how Substack is not optimized for posting large tables, as I can only post screenshots of the same, I cannot properly post the full comparison table here. As such, I will post the attachment for the full table, followed by the attachment for the segmented tables, followed by the segmented tables with commentary for paid subscribers.
