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>The Synoptic Problem: Complicated
>The Gospel of Matthew was not the only gospel to go through multiple sectarian updates before being canonized into the version that we are familiar with. Many of the same sayings and stories that are in the Gospel of Mark are repeated, more often than not word-for-word, in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and there are word-for-word sayings that are shared between Matthew and Luke that are not in Mark. The relationship that Mark, Matthew and Luke have in sharing so much of the same content is known in Biblical scholarship as the Synoptic Problem, named for the first three gospels, called Syn-optic by Biblical scholars because the three gospels see through one eye
>Many Biblical scholars believe that the earliest gospels that spread among Christians contained only the sayings of Jesus. This belief is especially prevalent among scholars like Crossan and the Jesus Seminar, who see the historical Jesus as a Hellenistic Jewish sage who preached a counter-cultural philosophy of social justice. This idea originally came about because of the way the sayings of Jesus common to Matthew and Luke are distributed into different contexts. Scholars assumed Matthew and Luke must have copied from a now-lost common source, dubbed Q for the German word Quelle, meaning “source”. Some but not all of these scholars also assumed non-Q sayings used exclusively by Matthew and other non-Q sayings used exclusively by Luke also came from hypothetical saying gospels, usually dubbed M and L after the names of the gospels that used them as sources. Both the Two-Source Hypothesis (Mark and Q) and the Four-Source Hypothesis (Mark, Q, M, L) were established by the British Biblical scholar Burnett Hillman Streeter in 1924, but only through literary criticism. There was no physical evidence that proto-gospels containing only wisdom sayings actually existed until the Gospel of Thomas was discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945
