A lively, readable and up-to-date guide to the Synoptic Problem, ideal for undergraduate students, and the general reader.

Reynolds Price pays tribute to his literary love of translation in this adaptation of the Gospels of Mark and John, in addition to a gospel written by the esteemed novelist himself. Esteemed novelist, dramatist, scholar, essayist, and poet, Reynolds Price turns his attention back to a literary love he had discovered earlier in his career: translation. But for Reynolds that didn’t mean abandoning his passion for writing original work; powerful and imaginative, Three Gospels offers eloquent translations of the Gospels of Mark and John as well as a gospel never before seen—an original one written by Price himself. These stunning triumphs of imagination tell and retell some of the most iconic ancient stories in Price’s unparalleled literary voice.

The publication of the King James version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature and is universally acknowledged as the greatest influence on English-language literature in history. Now, world-class literary writers introduce the book of the King James Bible in a series of beautifully designed, small-format volumes. The introducers' passionate, provocative, and personal engagements with the spirituality and the language of the text make the Bible come alive as a stunning work of literature and remind us of its overwhelming contemporary relevance.

The earliest of the four Gospels, the book portrays Jesus as an enigmatic figure, struggling with enemies, his inner and external demons, and with his devoted but disconcerted disciples. Unlike other gospels, his parables are obscure, to be explained secretly to his followers. With an introduction by Nick Cave

In this book respected New Testament scholar Pheme Perkins delivers a clear, fresh, informed introduction to the earliest written accounts of Jesus — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — situating those canonical Gospels within the wider world of oral storytelling and literary production of the first and second centuries. Cutting through the media confusion over new Gospel finds, Perkins s Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels presents a balanced, responsible look at how the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke came to be and what they mean.

In Three Gospels, Reynolds Price returns to the central story on which he has concentrated through thirty years of study, teaching, and translation - the fourfold account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, an observant Jew who taught, healed, and died obscurely in a small province of the Roman empire during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius Caesar. Bypassing the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as secondary, Price revises his earlier translation of the breakneck and vivid Gospel of Mark (the oldest gospel); he provides a literal but startlingly eloquent translation of the Gospel of John (the gospel derived from apparent eyewitness); and he adds an entirely new gospel of his own, An Honest Account of a Memorable Life. This new gospel, like the whole of the volume, is grounded meticulously in the earliest known historical and theological evidence; and it aims to render the highest possible contemporary justice to the acts and teachings of Jesus. To introduce his translations - closer to the original Greek than perhaps any other translations - Price has provided richly informative prefaces that probe the strategies and the inexplicable originality of the two prime gospel writers; and in a preface to his own gospel, he offers insight into his reasons for creating a modern gospel and his own restrained methods for proceeding.

Mosse combines a relentlessly logical assault on the Synoptic Problem with a radical treatment of New Testament history and chronology. Arguing for early dates and traditional authorship of the Synoptics, and against the redundant hypothesis of Q, he tackles also the major cruces in early church history, including the later career of Paul.

Anyone who reads the Gospels carefully will notice that there are differences in the manner in which they report the same events. These differences have led many conservative Christians to resort to harmonization efforts that are often quite strained, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Many people have concluded the Gospels are hopelessly contradictory and therefore historically unreliable as accounts of Jesus. The majority of New Testament scholars now hold that most if not all of the Gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography and that this genre permitted some flexibility in the way in which historical events were narrated. However, few scholars have undertaken a robust discussion of how this plays out in Gospel pericopes (self-contained passages). Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? provides a fresh approach to the question by examining the works of Plutarch, a Greek essayist who lived in the first and second centuries CE. Michael R. Licona discovers three-dozen pericopes narrated two or more times in Plutarch's Lives, identifies differences between the accounts, and analyzes these differences in light of compositional devices identified by classical scholars as commonly employed by ancient authors. The book then applies the same approach to nineteen pericopes that are narrated in two or more Gospels, demonstrating that the major differences found there likely result from the same compositional devices employed by Plutarch. Showing both the strained harmonizations and the hasty dismissals of the Gospels as reliable accounts to be misguided, Licona invites readers to approach them in light of their biographical genre and in that way to gain a clearer understanding of why they differ.

Why does the New Testament contain four Gospels—four different accounts of the same Man? And don’t the Gospels contradict one another? Masterful Bible teacher Arthur Pink explains how the four Gospels do not contradict but rather collaborate in order to provide us with a deeper, multifaceted description of the person of Jesus Christ. In Matthew, we see Jesus as Messiah and King of the Jews. In Mark, we are introduced to the Servant of Jehovah. In Luke, we see the human Jesus as the Son of Man, Adam’s descendant. Finally, in John, we thrill to the supernatural Jesus who is undoubtedly the Son of God. No believer can truly know Jesus without having an understanding of the four distinct roles He fulfilled in His time on earth. Pink’s in-depth look at the four Gospels will boost your faith and bring you ever closer to a Savior who is fully human, fully divine, and above everything, Lord of all.

This major work promises to move scholarship forward as the first approach to systematically look at the synoptic problem by employing textual criticism.