Statistical Studies of the Verbal Agreements and their Impact on the Synoptic Problem *

Abstract

The patterns of verbal agreement between the gospels have long been considered a key for solving the synoptic problem, and a subdiscipline within gospel source criticism of tabulating and interpreting these patterns of agreement has slowly emerged in the name of gathering the most objective evidence available. Studies of the verbal agreements have steadily grown in their sophistication (esp. in combinatory analysis), as well as in their appreciation for the nature of the gospel text as something more than a mere compilation. The question of whether this approach can substantially further the field, however, has yet to be answered. This article surveys and critiques all published statistical studies of the verbal agreements known to the author.

A Deep-Language Mathematical Analysis of Gospels, Acts and Revelation

“…Statistics of the Greek language used in the New Testament have been widely calculated by counting words and establishing their frequencies of occurrence (Van Voorst 2001;Poirier 2008;Brodie 2004;Abakuks 2015;Mealand 2016;Gareiou and Zervas 2018).…”

The Synoptic Problem: On Matthew’s and Luke’s use of Mark

“…An outline of this work together with some background material is given in Abakuks (2006b), and good introductions to the synoptic problem more generally are provided by Goodacre (2001) and Kloppenborg (2008). A comprehensive survey of statistical approaches to the synoptic problem is provided by Poirier (2008). Although the triple-link model essentially includes as special cases a number of models that are currently being advocated to describe the relationships between the synoptic gospels, it does not include what is still the most commonly accepted model, the two-source or twodocument hypothesis, according to which Matthew and Luke had two sources in common, Mark and a hypothetical "Q", both of which Matthew and Luke used independently of each other.…”