Goodacre, Mark
(2025) The Fourth Synoptic Gospel: John’s Knowledge of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids
This stimulating book has arrived just as I have been working on a podcast series on the reading of the Bible. Goodacre’s thesis is that the gospel of St John is indebted to the Synoptic Gospels. When B.H. Streeter wrote The Four Gospels, in 1924, he was able to assert: “That John was familiar with the first three Gospels was taken for granted by the early Fathers, and was until recently assumed as axiomatic by modern critics.” (395) Ehrman, in the fifth edition of his The New Testament, circumspectly states that: “… many scholars continue to be persuaded that he (John) did not utilize the Synoptics.” A little later he writes: “… John does not appear to have used the Synoptic Gospels as sources.” (185) Goodacre is challenging this.
The Fourth Synoptic Gospel is a manageable volume of 165 pages plus bibliography and indices. There is a preface, seven chapters, and a conclusion. The preface states, with admirable conciseness: “This book … argues that the author of John’s Gospel knew, used, presupposed, and transformed the Synoptics.” (ix) Here, with one glance, we see the parameters of this study: Goodacre is pursuing only the thesis that St John’s Gospel can fairly be considered to be a “fourth Synoptic,” as the title proclaims; but also, he is not asserting that St John the Apostle wrote it, and he says nothing here about its dating. In fact, taking his thesis as a whole, he rather undercuts the historicity of the Gospel, because he consistently treats St John (whom I accept as the evangelist) as developing the picture of Our Lord, His words and actions, by creatively expanding on the Synoptics. As we shall see in future instalments, it does not seem to occur to Goodacre that St John may have elaborated on them by reference to what he remembered Our Lord to have said and done.
First, the conclusion. This is given in little more than two pages. Once more, I must commend Goodacre for his precise and economical writing. He says that the reader of the gospel will naturally have read the three Synoptics, and understand St John’s gospel in terms of those. Today, however, we – and by this he means academic scholars in what I call the “Bible studies establishment” –overstate John’s differences from the Synoptics. However, there are similar words and phrases, parallel passages, similar sequencing, and structure, with the motif: “the story of a hidden Messiah who is properly understood only by insiders, and only retrospectively after the experience of the resurrection.” (161) Goodacre has also demonstrated that St John wrote his gospel in such a way that he himself assumed his audience had already read the Synoptics (161-162).
Goodacre concludes that the similarities with the gospel of Saint Mark are quite significant, in structure, conception and sometimes in details; but it also has good connections with Matthew and Luke in their reinterpretation of Mark. On the hypothesis that the Gospel of St Mark was the earliest, he provides five examples of where Ss Matthew and Luke each reshaped Mark’s Gospel, and what is more, St John followed them. If this is so, then we can entirely dispense with the idea that St John was writing for a specific Christian community isolated from the others. On the “community” thesis, each gospel was produced within and for a different community; but if the evangelist assumes his audience has read the other Gospels, then – even on that view – he must be writing for all Christians (to use Bauckham’s phrase). (162)
By reading St John’s Gospel as self-consciously with the tradition of the other three, then the beloved disciple is seen at once to be St John the apostle. (162)
Goodacre also makes an interesting point concerning the so-called “Johannine thunderbolt” in Mathew and Luke (“All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” Matthew 11:27, paralleled in Luke 10:22). This passage is strikingly similar to the ideas expressed to greater length in the gospel of St John, and is evidence not of some strange anomaly, but that the theology of John is in continuity with that expressed in those gospels. (162-163)
St John’s declared reason for the composition of his Gospel (John 20:31-32) is likewise “deeply embedded in the Synoptic Gospels …” with the result that “The Fourth Gospel might begin with the Johannine Word made flesh, but it ends by bringing us back to Jesus, Mark’s Messiah, the Synoptic Son of God.” (163)
In future posts, I shall explore more of this valuable book. However, I reiterate that I do not agree with all of his conclusions and in particular, his presuppositions about the dating and authorship of the Gospel. In particular, I will suggest that we have at least two unaddressed issues in New Testament studies: first, that we simply do not have enough early gospel texts to be able to come up with a satisfactory hypothesis about their development. For example, it seems quite possible to me that, assuming the Gospel of Saint Mark was written first, Matthew and Luke as we have them now may have been formed in dialogue, as it were, one with the other, so that it is not a question of whether Luke had Matthew, or Matthew had Luke, but it is quite possible that both influenced each other for a period of time until they took their known shape. The second major issue is the fact that our Lord himself did not write the gospel or anything of a doctrinal nature. I would suggest that the early church was aware of this and that the gospel could only ever be approximate, and for that reason, they were prepared and even willing to have multiple perspectives in their sacred scripture, embracing the inconsistencies and even contradictions as an inevitable part of the tradition.
But there is a great value in this book: it shows both the weakness of the Bible studies establishment, and the hope of rational correction.
To be continued …