|
U p F r o n t
By Karl Keating
|
This Rock
Volume 5, Number 3
 March 1994 
|
|
|
THIS month's lead article is by Bernard Orchard,
O.S.B., one of today's top biblical scholars. He proposes a new solution
to the vexing synoptic problem.
As even a cursory reading of the first three Gospels
shows, Matthew, Mark, and Luke seem to be working with the same script.
(John has a story of his own to tell.) Since antiquity it has been
assumed that in some way the synoptic Gospels are dependent upon one
another, but which is the chicken, which the egg?
The traditional view was that the order of listing
in the New Testament was the order of composition. First Protestant
scholars in Germany discarded this position. Then English Protestants
joined the Germans and adopted the hypothesis of Marcan priority.
Today Catholic scholars are on the bandwagon. They insist that Mark
came first and that Matthew and Luke are expansions of Mark. (A subplot
says the expansion depended on "Q," a never-discovered collection
of Jesus' sayings.)
Dom Bernard disagrees. He gives a solution that, he
maintains, better accounts for the facts and doesn't rely on conjuring
up something like Q. Our publishing his essay does not mean we concur
with every element of it, but it does mean we applaud his effort to
free biblical scholarship from what has become a logical dead-end.
In a companion essay I outline recent trends concerning
the syn optic Gospels, my purpose being to show that the "assured
results of modern biblical scholarship" are not really as assured
as some people think.
|
