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Updated: June 9, 2025
When we come to examine closely its verbal relations to the other two Synoptics, its normal character is in the main borne out, but still not quite completely. The number of particulars in which Matthew and Mark agree together against Luke, or Mark and Luke agree together against Matthew, is far in excess of that in which Matthew and Luke are agreed against Mark.
But he is a biographer of the first century, a divine artist, who, independently of the information which he has drawn from more ancient sources, shows us the character of the Founder with a happiness of treatment, with a uniform inspiration, and a distinctness which the other two synoptics do not possess.
In the next section, the healing of the withered hand, twenty points are found alike in all three Gospels, twenty-seven in Mark and Luke, twenty-one in Mark and Matthew, and five in Matthew and Luke. Many of these coincidences between the first and third Synoptics are insignificant in the extreme.
But even granting most of Renan's assumptions, it must still follow that the authority of this gospel is far inferior to that of the synoptics, and can in no case be very confidently appealed to. The question is one of the first importance to the historian of early Christianity.
The first fruit of this entrance into the intellectual world of the time was the Fourth Gospel or the so-called Gospel according to John. Scholars have begun to interpret this gospel as an attempt to combine the older Christian tradition with the theological speculations of the age. The beginning of the gospel strikes a new note which separates it immediately from the synoptics.
If even Papias had not taught us that Matthew wrote the sayings of Jesus in their original tongue, the natural, ineffable truth, the charm beyond comparison of the discourses in the synoptics, their profoundly Hebraistic idiom, the analogies which they present with the sayings of the Jewish doctors of the period, their perfect harmony with the natural phenomena of Galilee all these characteristics, compared with the obscure Gnosticism, with the distorted metaphysics, which fill the discourses of John, would speak loudly enough.
John and those of the Synoptics, the external differences are exceedingly striking, and it is not at all to my present purpose to keep this fact out of sight. The plan of St. Now this will greatly facilitate the investigation of the question as to whether any author had St. John before him when he wrote.
"It is impossible that Jesus can have had two such diametrically opposed systems of teaching; one purely moral, the other wholly dogmatic; one expressed in wonderfully terse, clear, brief sayings and parables, the other in long, involved, and diffuse discourses; one clothed in the great language of humanity, the other concealed in obscure, philosophic terminology; and that these should have been kept so distinct as they are in the Synoptics, on the one hand, and the Fourth Gospel on the other.
On the other, it puts into the mouth of Jesus discourses of which the tone, the style, the treatment, and the doctrines have nothing in common with the Logia given us by the synoptics. In this second respect, the difference is such that we must make choice in a decisive manner. If Jesus spoke as Matthew represents, he could not have spoken as John relates.
The author of "Supernatural Religion" devotes a large portion of his second volume to setting forth the discrepancies, real or alleged, between the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel. In many of these remarks he seems to me to betray extraordinary ignorance of the mere contents of the Fourth Gospel.
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