Book Review: The Fourth Synoptic Gospel by Mark Goodacre
Mark Goodacre, The Fourth Synoptic Gospel: John’s Knowledge of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2025). Pp. xiii and 191. US$29.99
New Testament studies always suffer from the fact that their core material is a very small body of literature: twenty-seven short texts written, I would suggest, in the first century CE. The demands of academic publishing mean that there is always an impetus to provoke some novel theory. Often we might call these “gee-whizz theology”: ideas that are deliberately provocative to boost sales and demand.
Sponsored
A Bold Reassesment?
Frequently, poking a theological bear results in a counter-volume with equally high publishing hopes anticipated. It is, after all, potentially big business. But it is also more cyclical than it may care to admit. Stick around long enough, avoid the Orwellian (1984) tendency to forget everything before the current orthodoxy and consensus, cultivate the habit of reading work that is not just the flavor of the month, remember it—and you will find that many of the supposedly provocative new theses are simply re-iterations of the insights of previous scholars.
So it is with Mark Goodacre’s “bold reassessment” (as the publisher’s blurb puts it) of the relationship between the Gospel of John and the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) in The Fourth Synoptic Gospel: John’s Knowledge of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The weasel word here is “bold,” which draws attention away from the “re–”.
A quick dive into the first chapter reveals what “reassessment” always really meant: this is no new thesis. Indeed, the opening chapter makes it clear that the view of the Fourth Gospel as isolated from the Synoptics was, in many ways, a construct of the great Cambridge scholar C.H. Dodd and an element in his wider enthusiasm for realised eschatology. For him, John was independent of the Synoptics but drew on shared oral traditions about the life and teachings of Jesus.
The Louvain School and Aland’s Synopsis
There are two elephants in the room here. The smaller and lesser known one is that there have long been scholars who have argued for John’s knowledge and use of the Synoptics, notably in the Louvain school. But the bigger, noisy, trumpeting one, as Goodacre rightly points out, is the widespread availability and use of Kurt Aland’s Synopsis of the Four Gospels. Talk about hiding in plain sight. Of course, Goodacre’s work will step beyond the mere recognition of parallels to posit a genealogical relationship. But the parallels seem to be a given.
In no time at all, it becomes evident that the possibility of John’s engagement with the Synoptics is an older idea being brought back to life. What is valuable here is the case Goodacre makes, based on textual agreements, which may just as well point to the Synoptics as to elusive shared oral traditions. This is done through references to linguistic parallels such as shared phrasing and vocabulary, shared order of material, and cases where knowledge of the Synoptics elucidates passages in John.
Old Thesis, New Packaging
There is, however, an unnamed problem here: the fact that we only have the Synoptics does not mean that they alone were available to the Johannine community. We may wield Occam’s razor to eliminate what is unnecessary, but that is very different from knowing all that was actually there, and only then beginning surgery.
I must note that the print layout clearly sets out the claims through a judicious use of parallel formatting. I commend the author and publishers for this clarity.
As noted, Goodacre has paid attention to the modern debate. There are, however, omissions. He does not appear to have considered the advocacy of Johannine priority, or at least an early date (as seen, albeit in different forms, in the work of Matson and J.A.T. Robinson), in the mix. They might offer the more outré theory that the Synoptics copied from John. Now there is a potential “gee-whizz” book…
The Gospel of John’s Historicity
What is the reader to make of all this—the “so what?” question?
The study of the four Gospels reveals that they share common characteristics and points. Attempts to use the diversity of the canonical witnesses to undermine their credibility can always be countered by evidence of their mutual agreement. Here we are on ground well-articulated to me once by a fellow priest who had previously been a police officer: witness accounts that agree in every detail provoke suspicion of a set-up. Accounts that differ in detail yet still reveal commonalities may serve as a check on too much certainty.
However, there are two significant consequences of this work. First, the claim advanced in some quarters that the Gospel of John is not historical but merely a theological construct needs to be set aside. It is, arguably, on this reading as historical as the Synoptics.
But this does not mean that we have found enough parallelism to identify with certainty the historicity of Jesus. Here, the question of the dating of Jesus’s death strikes a cautionary note. The Synoptics recognizably set up a picture of Jesus eating the Passover with the disciples and dying after that meal (Mark 14:12–25; Matthew 26:17–30; Luke 22:7–28), even if the accounts differ in detail. John’s Gospel notoriously makes no mention of Passover in the last meal (John 13:1–30), which explicitly occurs before the feast (John 13:1), and places Jesus’s death on the Day of Preparation (John 19:31).
But even this is not a simple matter of choosing John or the Synoptics. The Synoptic accounts of Jesus’s burial place it on the Day of Preparation (Mark 15:42; Matthew 27:62; Luke 23:54) despite identifying the Last Supper — already eaten — with the Seder (Passover) meal, which could only have followed the Day of Preparation.
Challenging the Consensus
Then comes the cui bono? question—who might benefit from reading this?
First, seminarians and biblical scholars may gain two insights:
- that John should not be considered an isolated text or trajectory within emerging Christianity; and
- that there is a need to read beyond “consensus” positions.
Goodacre makes a strong reassessment of the relationship between the Synoptics and John. Does he definitively resolve the question? No more than has any other theory. Considering the discrepancies in dating, authorship, and mode of composition (how many stages of writing or “editions”: one, two, or more?) of John, this work addresses only a few strands in a Gordian knot. The identity of John, the date, the provenance, and the sources of the Gospel still defy easy answers. If nothing else, Goodacre’s reiteration of the complexity of these matters (and his proposed alternative) is a salutary reminder of the provisionality of such claims.
Who else might benefit? Any who have been misled into thinking that the putative differences between John and the Synoptics compromise their authority and reliability as testimony to Jesus may also find this helpful: the depictions, like objects in a rear-view mirror, are closer than they appear. The “simple Bible-believing Christian,” as one of my most erudite professorial colleagues describes herself, might well find that Goodacre’s work adds little, as it is concerned with questions they have never asked—nor needed to. It is possible to read all the Gospels profoundly without ever pondering such matters. In this regard, it is a classic academic discussion.
The ‘Spiritual’ Gospel Endures
Goodacre makes a strong case for the links between all four canonical Gospels, even if the case may not be as “bold” as the publisher’s hyperbole suggests. In that regard he identifies a useful convergence, indicating that the Gospel witness resists any “divide and conquer” mentality. However, establishing this point does not bring us any closer to proving the exact details of Jesus’s life, since the individual Gospels (as indicated above) may preserve these divergently within themselves.
In this sense, the book unintentionally reminds us that Christian confidence does not rest on the latest scholarly fashion—semper mutanda—for the Gospels are far more substantial than the interpretive strategies we bring to them.
Image: Cover art of The Fourth Synoptic Gospel, © Eerdmans.
Book Review: A Walk Through the Prayer Book
Klukas, Arnold W. A Walk Through the Prayer Book: The 2019 Book of Common Prayer Explained. Anglican House, 2023. 118 pp. As the Anglican Church in North America celebrates its fifteenth year, its 2019 edition of the Book of Common Prayer likewise celebrates five years of use. Fittingly, Anglican House Publishers has released a helpful…
Book Review: J.C. Ryle’s Expository Thoughts on the Gospels (Evangelical Press)
Ryle, J.C. Expository Thoughts on the Gospels. Eds. Graham Hind and Mary Davis. Evangelical Press, 2024. Seven-volume set. Where does one begin reviewing a set of books that have existed for over 150 years? The first Bishop of Liverpool, J.C. Ryle, published his set of commentaries, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, between 1856 and 1873. As a…
