Dungan, A History of the Synoptic Problem

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.

Stenmark, How to Relate Science & Religion

A book review of  Mikael Stenmark, How to Relate Science and Religion (Eerdmans, 2004).

This is one of those books where the reader has to want to read it in order to get through it.  Stenmark is a philosopher, and he writes like one—well, to be fair, better than many but still like a philosopher.  The prose is sometimes ponderous and in places requires multiple readings.  The author also backtracks a good deal as he seeks to make each argument logical and linked to what has gone before and what will come next. More largely, the author constantly walks through lines of reasoning, presenting multiple options for each question he considers, and then seeks to arrive at the logical best response for each question.  It gets tedious after awhile.  I personally found the book disappointing in one important sense.  Having waded through it all, I still don't know how Stenmark himself relates science and religion.  He tells us something of the theory about how the two ought to relate to each other, but he himself doesn't take the next step and actually do some relating himself.

That being said, How to Relate Science & Religion contains important points that make it worth the time if the reader is willing to do some of the work involved in getting to the points.  Central to his presentation is Stenmark's observation that the relationship between science and religion is complex and multi-faceted.  It involves several dimensions, and the two can have different relationships in different dimensions.  The relationship also changes over time.  Further complicating the relationship is the fact that science and religion are pluralistic entities in themselves, representing a variety of communities and approaches.  Once we begin to poke at the "nature of science" and especially at the "nature of religion" we find a wide variety of approaches, understandings, and even values.

Now, one knows that religion is incredibly pluralistic to the extent that we wonder if the word actually names anything at all.  Where Stenmark is particularly helpful is in emphasizing that science also is pluralistic.  He repeatedly points to weaknesses in the arguments of the anti-theist critics of religion who generally fail to take the pluralistic, mundane, and sometimes highly contested nature of science into account as they attack theism.  They also largely ignore the same pluralistic nature of religion.

Near the end of the book, the author does present a set of three matrices (pages 248-249) showing: (1) the approach that has traditionally been taken in the debate between religions and science; (2) an alternative proposed by those who take an ideological approach to the debate; and (3) his own more nuanced approach.  Now, my guess is that Stenmark would respond that his goal was to describe these three approaches so that he does show us how to relate science and religion; to which, I respond that a fair amount of his painstaking march to the matrices could have been abridged so that he could show how he makes use of his own approach.  As is so often the case in the debate over religion and science, Stenmark talks the theory, as I said above, but he himself doesn't go on to the application stage.

Prof. Mikael Stenmark

In any event, Stenmark argues that we can take two fundamental approaches to the relationship between science and religion.  We can either claim that religion in particular and other worldviews or ideologies more generally have no place in the conduct of science.  This is the approach that contends that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA).  Or, again, we can claim that religion or another worldview should shape the whole scientific enterprise.  The author describes in some detail Christian, feminist, and Marxist advocates of what he terms a "worldview-partisan science" based on the theology or ideology of the given partisan.  He also thinks that in most ways the worldview-partisan approach is inescapable for science.  He makes a good case demonstrating that scientists are always influenced by one worldview or another, often some form of scientism or empirical realism.

Yet, in his own configuration, Stenmark concludes that in one crucial phase, the "justification phase," science should remain "worldview-neutral."  That is, scientists should put aside their theological or ideological agendas when it comes to conducting research itself.  They should not pre-judge research results and should be willing to adjust their concept of the truth accordingly.  I'm not sure that Stenmark really needed 269 pages to get to this point, but even so it seems to be a fairly arrived at and important conclusion: religion and other worldviews can contribute to deciding what research subjects to pursue, articulating those subjects, and in the application of the findings.  In the actual research, however, religion and other worldviews need to be put aside.

Stenmark thus makes a modest contribution to the debate over the relationship of science and religion in at least a couple of ways.  First, he reminds us that the whole question of that relationship is complex and that any helpful contribution to the debate needs to take into account those complexities.  He shows us that there are many more moving parts to the science versus religion debate than is usually acknowledged, and that much of the debate is based on a failure to take into account the complexities involved.  Second, he himself approaches the debate with a reasoned, temperate attitude.  He is clearly a man of faith himself, and there are points at which he criticizes the anti-theists especially for their rhetoric and their over-simplification of what is a complex issue.  He does so, however, without rancor or a judgmental tone.  Perhaps a third contribution that Stenmark makes is to inject an attitude of careful reflection, a reasoned approach that seeks to work through complexities rather than ignore them.  The sad fact is that contributions such as this will receive little attention on the larger stage while much less well reasoned, reflective "offerings" will get media attention precisely because they are long on rhetoric and controversy, if short on careful thought and balanced assessment.

ab

Apart from the general comments above,  I would like to respond to one line of reasoning in How to Relate Science and Religion, which exposes some of the difficulties the whole subject of science and religion poses for its protagonists.  There is, I think, a real sense in which the debate between theists and anti-theists is futile given the state of our ignorance concerning both the nature of the universe and of God.  We might just as well suspend the argument for some centuries or longer until we know what we're talking about.

On pages 164-166, Stenmark considers the argument put forward by some anti-theists that evolution all but proves that there is no divine providence guiding the development of the human race.  It clearly takes place in a random way, and there is no inherent reason to think that a God is directing the process.  If we started over, it would come out differently.  Quoting various authors, Stenmark counters that God could well have created the process of evolution without planning for a specific outcome, planning only for the emergence of intelligent life of one sort or another.  Indeed, Stenmark argues there is no reason to limit God's plan to a single planet.  He writes, "I see no reason why Christians (or Jews and Muslims, for that matter) should think that they are committed to believe that the creation of the Earth was essential for God's plans." (p. 166)  In other words, the apparently random nature of evolution does not in and of itself give us reason to think that it is not part of a larger divine plan.

That's fine.  It is pleasant speculation.  And that is all that it is.  Stenmark is correct in arguing that evolution does not give the anti-theist skeptics actual reasons for arguing against God.  While evolution operates randomly, it has direction and an underlying rationale such as could suggest some kind of higher guiding force, principle, or divine "person".  Or maybe not.  Either way, it is pure speculation—apart from an underlying faith.  For those without the faith, there is no reason to think that God is behind evolution.  With faith, there is every reason to believe so.  The anti-theists for all of their vaunted rationality have no more reason to think there is no God than do people of faith to think there is a God.  This is especially the case because most of the time most of the hardcore anti-theist writers spend most of their time attacking a fundamentalist version of God that functions as a convenient straw man for them to knock down.

In any event, Stenmark's line of thinking about God maybe having a plan for the emergence of some kind of intelligence somewhere in the universe is just so much idle speculation—and a waste of time.  Those who do not believe in God are surely not going to be persuaded, and those of us who do find it entirely reasonable to think that God seeded the Earth with life fully intending that humanity would arise.  As an analogy, when we plant tomato seeds we fully expect that we will get tomatoes.  If God is God, then it is hard to believe that God would not know what would come of this vast garden God has seeded with life.

As people of faith, we begin with what is rather than what might have been.  We are theistic realists.  The Earth is.  We are.  Experience and reason persuade us that the universe has a "ground of being" to which we can pin the label of God.  This ground of being in some sense relates to us such that we feel that it is a personal relationship (we would because we ourselves are persons).  Christians see and experience this ground of universal being in Jesus Christ.  Jews experience it ("him") in the sacred history of God's people and in the Torah.  Buddhists don't believe in a personal god of any kind, but they know this ground of being in the Dharma especially as reflected in the teachings of the Buddha.  And so forth.

We do not have a clue what this "ground of all being" actually is.  What plans does it have?  Does "it" even have plans?  We don't know.  All we know is that "something" Beyond us touches us in ways that we can experience and that we find reasonable.  Others don't, but that is neither here nor there for us.  So long as we believe that God created the universe, it is reasonable to also believe that God created the Earth, life on Earth, and us.  If God did this through evolution, then there is probably a good reason that "he" did so.  Maybe we are programmed into evolution and what seems random is not actually as random as it seems.  It only seems random because of our ignorance.  Or, maybe God is running this thing as an experiment and programmed into it some general parameters and then stood back to see what would come of the experiment.  We don't know.  How could we?

My point is, all of this speculation is fine so far as it goes, but we should stop taking is so seriously.  A good deal of the debate concerning science and religion is just so much idle speculation.  It is ape chatter, we being the apes.  The best thing we can say for it is, it sells books.