The Relationship Between John And The Synoptic Gospels Revisited -- By: William B. Bowes

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 66:1 (Mar 2023)
Article: The Relationship Between John And The Synoptic Gospels Revisited
Author: William B. Bowes


The Relationship Between John And The
Synoptic Gospels Revisited

William B. Bowes*

* William B. Bowes is a PhD student in New Testament and Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Abstract: In a 1998 JETS article, James Dvorak examined scholarly perspectives on the relationship between John’s Gospel and the Synoptic Gospels. Since then, significant shifts in interpretation on this question merit a re-examination. In 1998, the perspective of most scholars reflected the long-held consensus throughout the twentieth century that John’s Gospel was independent and separate from the Synoptics. Recent decades, however, have seen an increased openness to a closer relationship between them, especially with Mark but also with Luke and Matthew. In his evaluation of the relationship, Dvorak opted for a mediating position between independence and dependence. The present article examines trends in scholarship over the last twenty-five years, evaluating whether a relationship closer to dependence (especially on Mark) has more explanatory power than independence or a mediating position.

Key words: Gospel of John, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Luke, Gospel of Matthew, Synoptic Gospels, literary dependence, literary independence

Is the Fourth Gospel really “the maverick Gospel,”1 or does its author2 write a text that is more similar to the Synoptics than has been assumed and even possibly dependent on them? The thorny paradoxes that arise from the Johannine coalescence of similarity with and difference from its Gospel forebears are part of what makes the long-debated Johanneische Frage so embattled and far from resolved. In this article I hope to provide further insight into this question by surveying the most important scholarship on this question within the last twenty-five years, picking up where Dvorak’s 1998 study for this publication left off.3 While I reach a somewhat different conclusion than Dvorak did, room for debate remains and the question of John’s relation to the Synoptics continues to be fundamentally important to the study of early Christianity.

While the last quarter-century has not brought a revolutionary sea change on this question, I suggest that there has clearly been a shift in scholarship away from the idea of John’s total independence or non-interaction with other Gospels. This may be attributable to a simultaneous move away from

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