David Laird Dungan. A History of the Synoptic Problem: the Canon, the Text, the Composition, and the Interpretation of the Gospels. New York: Doubleday, 1999.
Dungan's History of the Synoptic Problem is one of those books that prove that an important history book does not necessarily have to be a good history book. There are numerous irritating things about the book that might, ordinarily cause the reader to be done with it rather than plug along. Irritants include long digressions from the book's subject, some of which are never justified by the author, and a bothersome compunction on his part to tell us repeatedly what he's done and what he's going to do (the "I'm gonna" syndrome), which compulsion gives the book a self-important tone at times. That sense of self-importance is reinforced by the constant use of the first person singular pronoun, I, I, I. Readers are further distracted by Dungan's penchant for sarcastic attacks on those who hold opinions other than his own.
So, why read the book? Because Dungan also manages to place New Testament studies into the great sweep of Western thought since biblical times, showing how it changes with the times and reflects the shifting currents of Western thought. He has written a history of the interpretation of the Bible that puts it into larger historical contexts, especially for the modern era. In spite of its flaws, it is an important book.
Well, two books, actually. In Part One, "The First to the Fifth Century: Conflict and Consolidation," the author adheres closely to the subject of the book, namely a history of the Synoptic Problem. The problem is, why do the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke so closely resemble each other in content and yet diverge in many ways? If Dungan digresses, it is only to tackle the larger, related issue of why the Bible has four Gospels instead of just one. He points out that the existence of multiple Gospels was a source of endless problems in the early church, one it had to work at persistently to solve. He brings Part One to a climax with the arguments of St. Augustine, whose views became the standard way in which Christians viewed the Gospels for a thousand years.
With Part Two, "The Creation of the Modern Historical-Critical Method," Dungan launches into a critical, at times cynical history of modern thought, the tone of which indicates from the first that he doesn't like the way post-Renaissance philosophers and scholars have treated the Bible. His main bone of contention is with Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), the Dutch-born philosopher of Portuguese Jewish extraction. The author's sense of the significance of Spinoza for the history of biblical interpretation may be measured by the fact that he requires just 130 pages to describe the first four centuries of that story. In contrast, Chapter 16, entitled "Baruch Spinoza and the Political Agenda of Modern Historical-Critical Interpretation," runs to 61 pages, by far the longest chapter in the book. His argument is that Spinoza consciously wanted to destroy the dictatorial, life-killing political power of narrow-minded religionists and bigoted clerics, and one tactic he used was to transform the study of the Bible into a nit-picking exercise in the historical study of each book, each author. Spinoza thought supposedly that if he could undermine the authority of the Bible in this subtle way, he would topple one of the main ideological props supporting religious intolerance.
Having named and described in detail his protagonist, Dungan proceeds to show how Spinoza and those who followed him, being the vast majority of biblical critics down to the present, have undermined the study of the Bible by subjecting it to an endless stream of historical-critical questions regarding, among other things, authorship, text, and historical background. He frequently so overstates the conspiracy theory he is arguing that the reader tends to discount the whole thing as almost silly. Yet, there are points that strike home. His contention that Enlightenment epistemology causes its adherents to believe that they have god-like powers to judge and understand the Bible is correct, although one winces at the spite he heaps on the achievements of the Enlightenment. His argument that the historical, scientific approach to biblical studies obscures the central message of the Scriptures is one worth pondering. His point that Fundamentalist Christians have been as taken in by the Enlightenment 's destruction of the Bible as have the liberals is well stated (and persuasive to a liberal, although surely not to Fundamentalists).
It is only in Part Three, "Current Trends in the Post-Modern Period," that the author's agenda becomes starkly clear. Dungan is a fierce opponent to the current Two Source Hypothesis of the relationship of the Synoptic Gospels, which holds that Mark was written first and that the authors of Matthew and Luke drew heavily on Mark for writing their own gospels. This hypothesis further argues that Matthew and Luke also used a second common and now lost source, called the "Q" source. The author thinks that the Two Source Hypothesis is intimately related to the whole "Spinozist" (his term) program for destroying the meaning and authority of the Bible. Without providing the details himself, he claims that a number of modern biblical scholars have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Two Source Hypothesis is riddled with fallacies.
The book comes to an ironic end. For 300 pages Dungan pans modern biblical scholarship's habit of falling into Spinoza's trap and, thereby, ignoring if not utterly destroying the biblical message. Then, having shredded some 300 years of biblical interpretation, he closes his book with an angry rebuttal of the Two Source Hypothesis, a subject that 99.99% of practicing Christians around the world surely never even heard of! It is as if he's taken a howitzer to demolish an anthill. Having previously argued that contemporary biblical scholars devote their attention to peripheral issues rather than the heart of the Good News contained in the Bible, he falls into the same trap in a major way.
Even here, however, the reader benefits in spite of all of the anti-"Marcan prioritist" rhetoric. Dungan, especially, notes that when viewed historically the Two Source Hypothesis proves to have been built mostly out of thin air. He claims that its proponents started out by simply proposing the possibility that Mark came first and then, without providing any solid data, repeated the proposition so frequently that it became an accepted fact without ever having been proven. This observation rings true at two points. First, biblical scholars really and truly are prone to this form of argumentation. They, frequently, have so little sold evidence to work from that they are forced to build theories, and sometimes, as page follows on page, those theories magically turn into facts without ever having been demonstrated. Second, more largely, this magical transformation of theory into fact plagues the study of the past in matters small and large. Historians of 19th century American Presbyterian thought, for example, repeatedly stress the influence of Princeton Theological Seminary; but few of them devote more than a page or two repeating the assumption. None have demonstrated in any detail the reality of that supposed influence.
Dungan, in sum, fails to see the accomplishments of the Enlightenment. He fails to give due credit to the ways in which modern biblical scholarship help us to better understand the Scriptures as Scriptures. One has only to think of Walter Bruggeman or of Raymond Brown to appreciate how important biblical scholars can be for the rest of us. He fails to convince the reader that he is a fair, balanced judge who can be trusted. He fails to realize that one's position on the Two Source Hypothesis is not the ultimate litmus test of the faithful interpretation of Scriptures—or that the vast majority of us have no position on which Gospel came first. Dungan also fails to cast scholarly biblical studies in its proper place as an academic field, which produces food for theological and historical reflection. He seems to think that none of the rest of us out here can pick and choose what we take from the biblical scholars, whether it is for personal Bible study or the preparation of sermons or Bible studies. New Testament scholars may feel swamped by all of the details of their craft (which Dungan thinks was Spinoza's intention), but that does not mean that the rest of us feel so intimidated.
And yet, for all of these failures there is real value in this book. It raises basic questions about how we interpret the Bible and whether we give due place to the authority of the Bible. It alerts us to the way in which the modern Greek text of the New Testament has been patched together and still perhaps does not make adequate use of all of the ancient sources there are to draw on for it. It reminds the reader in the most vivid terms that 2000 years of history stand between the authors of the Gospels and us, and a great deal has happened to their writings in all of those years. They've been miscopied, "edited," translated over and over, contextualized repeatedly, and the New Testament text we have today never existed in ancient times at all. Dungan describes the way in which it has been pasted together over the centuries and some of the questions that remain about it today.
Dungan's A History of the Synoptic Problem, in sum, is a strange book. It is flawed, yet its very flaws force the reader to reflect. Would I recommend it to those who are concerned about issues in biblical hermeneutics? Absolutely. For those who enjoy wrestling with a book, alternately rejecting and then reassessing its contents, this is a fun book.
A Postscript
Raymond E. Brown's brief summary treatment of the Synoptic Problem in his An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997, pp. 111-16) stands in marked contrast to Dungan's diatribe against "Spinozism" and "Marcan prioritism." Brown concludes, first, that "no solution to the Synoptic Problem solves all difficulties," and, second, that the priority of Mark in the framework of the Two-Source Theory is the simplest and still most satisfactory solution to the relationship of the Synoptic Gospels. Brown's scholarship is widely respected, and even Dungan himself commends Brown for being one of the few New Testament scholars not taken in by Spinoza. Brown's more balanced summary may help explain Dungan's frequently almost angry, bitter tone. It surely must be frustrating to be so utterly convinced that one is right about a burning issue in biblical scholarship, and yet to have the most respected colleagues in the field disagree. In the end, personally, I must admit that Brown's brief, balanced summary is far more persuasive to a non-specialist than Dungan's hundreds of pages of rhetoric. Mark (almost surely) came first.
And a note: I wrote this review originally for my personal research journal, HeRB (Herb's Research Bulletin) on line at my website. I'm now in the process of redoing the 13 issues of HeRB and have decided to drop this review from it because it has nothing to do with church history in Thailand, the subject of my website. RPKR is a good home for it.
