First Week of Advent: Critical Studies

 Luke is with me.

   Get Mark and bring him with you…

   also, bring my books. (2 Timothy 4:11-13)

 

Dear Priscilla,

So you learned all about “Q”—something you never learned in Sunday school. It was a delight to discuss it face-to-face with you during our family beach house Thanksgiving Week. You return from your first stint at college discussing the “Synoptic Problem.”

That’s what happens when you study the Bible critically. Critical studies are good. It’s to the church’s credit that it has raised more critical questions concerning its sacred text than the world has ever raised concerning its claims. Why do Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell a similar story (synoptic)? Yet, not altogether similar? Matthew and Luke follow Mark, but then go their own way as in their genealogies of Jesus, for example. Or, sometimes Matthew and Luke stick together but leave Mark behind as in the story about the foxes; or, Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem (word for word, Mt 23:3-39 & Lk 13:34-35). How come? Could it be Matthew and Luke made use of a common source—something like “Q” perhaps? It is hypothetical, but a Computer Science major like yourself would find such musing interesting—like piecing together a program that works.

The Apostle Paul’s last recorded words concern a literary project that required his books along with the presence of Mark and Luke—a collaboration. Luke lets us know from the beginning that he makes use of such sources:

Since many have undertaken to

            -write down an orderly account

of the events that have been fulfilled among us,

just as they were

            -handed on to us by those who from the beginning

were eyewitnesses

and servants of the word, 

I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed (Lk 1:1-4).

 His sources are both written like Mark and maybe “Q”; as well as eyewitness accounts like Mary, Peter, James and John. All that work just for Theophilus? Maybe Luke “investigated everything carefully,” for all of us who, like Theophilus, can’t help but wonder, “Can it really be true?”

Love Papa