Did John Know the Synoptics?

John... the Fourth Synoptic Gospel

For nearly two millennia, Christians believed that John knew the Synoptics.

This view, once so ubiquitous it was almost a dogma, can be traced as far back as the late second century.¹ According to Clement of Alexandria, “John, the last of all, seeing that what was corporeal was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel.”²

In the second half of the last century, however, this relationship faced heavy criticism. Under the impression that the Gospels were a compilation of oral traditions, it became common to think of similarities between John and the Synoptics in terms of shared ‘tradition’ rather than literary dependence. It seemed obvious that if John knew the Synoptics, it did not know them in the same way they knew each other.

Yet in the past decade, the tide of critical opinion has begun to turn back. In 2018, a conference of world-leading scholars came together to discuss the relationship between John and the Gospel of Mark. What they found surprised the hosts: without exception, scholar after scholar argued that John had re-worked the earlier Gospel.

In my doctoral research, I also assumed that John knew one or more of the Synoptic gospels. So in this post, I want to briefly unpack three reasons for holding this view. To draw from recent scholarly discussions, my primary focus will be on Mark.

1. Re-Writing Practices in Classical Antiquity

One reason why scholars came to think that John was independent of the Synoptics is because of their obvious differences. When we read Mark, Matthew and Luke, we find a clear literary relationship between them. A lot of copying has clearly gone on. But when we turn to John, it is not as clear that John has copied from another source.

What this simple observation fails to recognise is that the close relationship between Mark, Matthew and Luke is itself an anomaly in ancient literature. When employing ancient sources, most texts do not simply copy them out – as Matthew copies out 600 of Mark's 660 verses. When there is literary dependence upon a base text, the base text is not typically included in any extensive way in the new work.³

Consider an example of the first century historian, Flavius Josephus. He wrote a twenty-book history of the Jews, and the first eleven books have the Jewish Scriptures as their primary source. One might therefore expected he would stick closely to his source, especially since it was Scripture. But he does not. He paraphrases, he expands and omits, and he rarely cites it verbatim. The one thing he takes over from his scriptural source into his own text is the structure of the biblical narrative.

Similarly, 4 Maccabees quite clearly follows the overall structure of 2 Maccabees. Yet there is very little in the way of linguistic parallels.⁴ This pattern is also followed by John and Mark. John follows the structure of Mark in striking ways. It opens with John the Baptist (certainly not a necessary place to begin a life of Jesus) and tracks the events of Jesus’ ministry, before devoting around 40% of the work to the passion.⁵

We therefore find our first reason for thinking that John might be dependent upon the Synoptics, partly on Mark: If John used Mark, the overall level of structural similarity and verbatim agreement fits the literary conventions of Jewish writings of the same period.

2. What John and the Synoptics Share

John and Mark share an overall literary structure. This is extremely important for positing a literary dependence, for it seems unlikely that John would strike upon the same narrative structure if all he knew were common shared traditions.

Yet is not only narrative structure they share. John also shares with the Synoptics a number of the same (or similar) episodes. To name just a few prior to the substantial similarities in their passion narratives, we find Jesus calling disciples, a temple cleansing (relocated in John), the healing of a paralytic, the feeding of five thousand, Jesus’ walking on water, the demand for a sign and Peter’s confession.⁶

John therefore shares a substantial number of episodes with the Synoptics. But John also contains around 27 sayings with specific linguistic similarities to the Synoptic Gospels.⁷ For example, both John and Mark refer to ‘the hour’ as the moment of Jesus’ death (2.4; cf. Mk. 14:35, 41), reference Jesus’ Temple logion (Jn. 2:19; Mk. 14:58) and include Jesus’ consolation, ‘It is I, fear not’ (6:20; Mk. 6:50; pars.)

At times, John can even be seen as a “fourth Synoptic Gospel.”⁸ These are pericopae where there are strong verbal similarities between John and the earlier Gospels. Perhaps the most extensive example is Jesus’ anointing at Bethany, where we find a series of verbal overlaps. The longest is Jesus’ saying: ‘Leave her, the poor you will have with you… But you will always have me’ (12:7-8; cf. Mk 14:6-7).⁹

While it may be possible to see some of these overlaps as fixed in oral tradition, the extent of both thematic and verbal similarities may be better explained literarily.

3. John’s Correction of Mark?

A final reason for thinking John knew the Synoptics is his transformation and correction of them. Just as Matthew and Luke can be seen to ‘improve’ on Mark – a fact pointing to their posteriority – so John can also be seen to correct the earlier Gospels.

In another post, Ancient Apologetics in the Empty Tomb, I explored one example of this in John’s resurrection account. While in Mark the tomb is not unequivocally empty - for tombs often contained multiple bodies – Matthew clarifies that Jesus’ tomb was ‘new’, and Luke goes further to say that no one had been laid inside it. John combines both of these accounts, stating that it was ‘a new tomb in which no one had been laid.’

Here I focus on another extended correction: Jesus’ approach to his death.¹⁰ In Mark, Jesus wrestles with the will of God over his death. He prays in the Garden to be saved from ‘the hour’ (14:35). By contrast, Jesus in John has long before said: ‘Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour’ (12:27). When he gets to the garden, his prayer is removed.

The sense that Jesus is in total control is seen in what does take place in the garden. In Mark, Jesus is ‘distressed and agitated’ and ‘deeply grieved, even to death’ and he throws ‘himself down on the ground to pray’ (14:33-35). Yet in John’s garden scene, there is no sense of Jesus’ despair. When he comes to be arrested, he identifies himself with an ‘I am’ (egõ eimi) statement which throws the guards onto their knees.

Jesus’ total resolve to ‘to drink the cup the Father has given’ (18:11) – another contrast with Mark’s language – is also seen on his journey to the cross. In Mark, Simon of Cyrene is enlisted to carry Jesus’ cross. Yet John informs us, emphatically, that Jesus carried the cross ‘by himself’ (19:17). Once again, it seems that John is not merely independent, but has refashioned and responded to Mark on the matter of Jesus’ death.

A Tentative Proposal…

When we free ourselves from a Synoptic paradigm – the idea that for one Gospel to know another, it has to copy it out verbatim – we can see anew the reasons for thinking that John knew one (or more) of the Synoptic Gospels literarily: John matches Mark’s peculiar structure, copies it out in places verbatim, and transforms its content.

None of this is to say that we know exactly how John knew or used the earlier Gospel(s), or what early form of the text he was employing. Yet the old idea that John was completely independent of the Synoptic Gospels seems to be on shaky ground. I suspect this is one area in which more scholars will revert to something like the traditional view.

1. See C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 449.

2. Origen’s words are cited in Eusebius, Ecc. His., 6.14.

3. See Catrin H. Williams, “John’s ‘Rewriting’ of Mark: Some Insights from Ancient Jewish Analogues” in John’s Transformation of Mark, eds. Eve-Marie Becker, Helen K. Bond, Catrin H. Williams (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 51-65.

4. Williams, “Jewish Analogues” 60-61.

5. See Mark Goodacre, “Parallel Traditions or Parallel Gospels?” in John’s Transformation, 85.

6. See Harold W. Attridge, “John and Mark in the History of Research” in John’s Transformation, 10-11.

7. Attridge, “John and Mark,” 12.

8. Goodacre, “Parallel Gospels?,” 79-84.

9. See also Goodacre, “Parallel Gospels?,” 81-84.

10. See Steven A. Hunt, “Jesus in Sharper Relief: Making Sense of the Fourth Gospel’s Use of Mark 1.2-8 in John 1.19-34” in John’s Transformation, 123-124.