The Synoptic Gospels problem: preparing a phylogenetic approach

This is the second part of my series on phylogenetics and a specific case of textual criticism, the Biblical one. The first part appeared as Another test case for phylogenetics and textual criticism: the Bible, and covered the background to the textual problem — that post should be read first. Here, I provide a preliminary genealogical analysis of some specific data related to the problem.

The synoptic gospels and phylogenetics: how to code data?

Just like in the cases of general stemmatics and historical linguistics, our immediate problem for a phylogenetic approach to Biblical criticism is one of data. Upon investigation, the field proves itself desperately in need of an open access mentality — a great deal of work would be needed to turn the few aggregated data I could find into datasets that could feed the most basic analysis tools.

No open dataset proved either adequate or correct enough. They are mostly quotations or subjective developments of the scientific sources, available only in printed editions and in software for Biblical studies, sometimes at exorbitant prices, and frequently with licenses that explicitly prohibit extracting and reusing the data. This forced me to postpone an analysis of families of manuscripts, as unfortunately there is no complete free edition of the Novum Testamentum Graece (the reference work in the field, usually referred to as Nestle-Aland after its main editors).

However, I could explore the problem of the synoptic gospels in a way and with a dataset closer to the ones of the 19th century analyses, by sitting with a printed Bible and compiling my own synopsis of episodes. My work in this field ends with this second post, but it seems like a good approach to the development of a phylogenetic investigation, to start by reproducing the old analyses with new tools.

After some bibliographic review and inspection of the solutions presented to the problem, my understanding is that there would be three fundamental ways of coding for features of these texts.

(i)
The first and simplest is to compile a list of episodes, themes, and topics found in each gospel (a proper “synopsis”), without considering semantic differences or relative positions, coding for a truth table indicating whether each “event” (i.e. “character”) is found. For example, the imprisonment of John the Baptist is mentioned in the three synoptic gospels (Matthew 4,12; Mark 1,14; Luke 3,18-20) and would be coded as “present” in all of them, even though in Luke the relative order is different (it is narrated before the baptism of Jesus, in a flashforward). On the other hand, the priests conspiring against Jesus is only narrated in two gospels (Mark 11,18; Luke 19,47-48), and the “character” of the meek inheriting the Earth is only found in one of them (Matthew 5,5), as shown in the table below.

Character/Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke
Imprisonment of John	✓	✓	✓
Priests conspiring		✓	✓
Meek inheritance	✓

This kind of census approach is what most descriptive statistics on the synoptic relationship consider when demonstrating how much there is in common among the gospels, including the graph reproduced back in the first part of this post. As in the case of the statistics of genetic material shared between species, like humans and other apes, caution is needed to understand what is actually meant — the percentages usually reported refer to episode coincidence (in a loose analogy, like the presence of a protein), not text coincidence (like the sequences of genetic bases). This is the reason why these analyses should equally consider “episode homology” and “episode analogy” — one must remember that all gospels as we have them evolved from initial versions, and to be missing an episode favored by the public or the clergy, which denounced other gospels now lost as “uninspired”, could have resulted in pressure to incorporate such episode.

(ii)
A deeper level of coding would be to map the text of episodes and events into “semantic” characters, ignoring textual differences (like synonyms) but coding for differences in intended meaning. For example, the event of Jesus being tested in the wilderness, while narrated in all three gospels (Matthew 4,1-2; Mark 1,12-13; Luke 4,1-2), is really only equivalent in Matthew and Luke, where he is tempted by "the Devil", while in Mark he is tempted by "Satan", which is a figure closer to the Hebrew meaning of "enemy, adversary; accuser". Likewise, while Matthew and Luke both narrate Jesus’ most famous sermon, they are semantically different: the setting is a mountain in the first and a plain in the second.

Character/Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke
Temptation	by the Devil	by Satan	by the Devil
Sermon	mountain		plain

This kind of mapping is harder, due to the expertise required to subjectively distinguish meaning, as in the case of the mountain / plain, which scholars in Biblical hermeneutics seem to agree to be more than merely a change of setting for narration. The difficulty is aggravated by the eventual need to quantify the semantic shifts (how far is "the Devil" from "Satan (the adversary)", especially when the episode is missing from the non-synoptic gospel of John?). These three states ("null", "Devil", and "Satan") should not be considered equally different, especially when the texts of the three synoptic gospels are clearly related. Luckily, while not necessarily in a systematic way for phylogenetic purposes, this kind of coding has already been conducted by many Biblical scholars, and we might thus appropriate it in the future.

(iii)
The third way of coding, partly solving the difficulties of the second solution, would be to compare the Greek text for each event, using some distance metric. For strings, there is the common Levenshtein distance, or, in a blatant self-promotion, my own sequence similarity algorithm. For linguistic texts, there are dozens of possible Natural Language Processing solutions, but usually with no model for Koine Greek (apart from purely statistical ones that can overfit, because in general they are actually trained on the text of the gospels, in the first place).

Character/Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke
Prologue	Βίβλος γενέσεως Ἰησοῦ... (1,1)	Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ... (1,1)	Ἐπειδήπερ πολλοὶ ἐπεχείρησαν... (1,1-4)
Birth of Jesus	Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ ἡ γένεσις... (1,18-25)		Ἐγένετο δὲ ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις... (2,1-7)
Healing of possessed		καὶ εὐθὺς ἦν ἐν τῇ συναγωγῇ αὐτῶν ἄνθρωπος ἐν πνεύματι... (1,23-28)	καὶ ἐν τῇ συναγωγῇ ἦν ἄνθρωπος ἔχων... (4,33-37)
Parable of tares	Ἄλλην παραβολὴν παρέθηκεν αὐτοῖς λέγων... (13,24-30)

By comparing all distance pairs for all characters, we could build a matrix of pairwise distances, similarly to what David frequently does in the EDA analyses posted to this blog. Considering that most synoptic lists have already mapped each event to their texts (sometimes in discontinuous blocks), with a copy of the reconstructed Greek original, from Holmes (2010) in the table immediately above, it should not be too hard to perform such a study.

A simple Splits Graph analysis

For the purpose of this post, I decided to proceed with the first of these three possible solutions, listing whether an event is found in each Gospel or not, ignoring semantic and textual differences. I modified the synopsis by Garmus (1982), itself apparently modified from some Nestle-Aland edition. This produced a final list of 364 characters and their presence in each of the four gospels — I decided to include the non-synoptic John to test where the analyses would place it.

As expected, the data are to a large extent arbitrary and subjective. Garmus has obvious limitations in the way of dealing with events narrated out of the expected chronological sequence (i.e., flashbacks and flashforwards, as in the case of the beheading of John in relation to his actions), as well as with theological excursuses. None of these limits, however, seem to impact the general shape of a network or tree generated from these data, at most strengthening more feeble signals.

Splits tree, modified from the one generated by Huson & Bryant (2010)

As also expected, the graph supports what is by now a general consensus. Mark is likely to be the gospel closest to a hypothetical root (in this case, nearest to the mid-point). John is the most distinct of the four gospels, being closer to Mark than to the Matthew-Luke group (due to the “core” events narrated and the fewer innovations in Mark). Considering edge lengths, Luke seems to be the most innovative taxon of the synoptic gospel neighborhood / group. Such a network could never demonstrate the existence of "Q" (see the first post) as a stand-alone and actual document, but this tentative analysis does support the hypothesis that Matthew and Luke share a common development, overall supporting Marcan priority.

While probably obvious, it is important to remember that phylogenetic methods are tools that imply the existence of users — it should be an additional instrument for investigation, possibly promoting the collaboration of serious Biblical critics and experts in phylogenetic methods. Let’s consider two examples of the need for such expertise.

First, there is much historical, textual, and theological evidence supporting a hypothesis that the gospel of Mark originally ended with what is now Mark 16,8, with the twelve following verses as later additions (something common to many Greek texts, including the Odyssey). If these supposed additions, only known to whoever delves into Biblical scholarship, are marked as missing in our data, as we should at least test, the distance between Mark and all other gospels, including the unrelated Gospel of John and especially in the edge length between Luke and Mark, increases considerably for such an apparently minor change.

Second, if conducting the third and especially the second type of coding that I described above, a researcher should have at least a basic knowledge of the language they are dealing with. Adapting the explanation of Smith (2017), Matthew and Mark might seem to use the same vocabulary for the “parable of the harvest” when read in English translation, but there is a concealed change of meaning (whose theological importance and implication I'm not debating here), as the single English word “seed” tends to be used in translation of two different Greek words: in Matthew, “sperma” (the kernels of grain, in a more agricultural sense) and, in Mark, “sporos” (which carries a connotation of generative matter to be released).

Conclusion

My dataset is available in preliminary state (for example, labels are in Portuguese) here.

In conclusion, phylogenetics still has much to offer to the field of textual criticism, and this should include Biblical criticism, especially if we are able to support analyses of textual development based on trees / networks of manuscripts. I hope this pair of blog posts will motivate Biblical scholars to collaborate. If so, please write to me.

References

Garmus, Ludovico (ed.) (1982) Bíblia sagrada. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes. [reprint 2001]

Goodacre, Mark (2001) The Synoptic Problem: a Way Through the Maze. New York: T & T Clark International. (available on Archive.org)

Holmes, Michael W. (ed.) (2010) SBL Greek New Testament. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature.

Huson, Daniel H.; Bryant David (2006) Application of Phylogenetic Networks in Evolutionary Studies, Mol. Biol. Evol., 23(2):254-267. [SplitsTree.org]

Smith, Mahlon H (2017) A Synoptic Gospels Primer. http://virtualreligion.net/primer/

Another test case for phylogenetics and textual criticism: the Bible

This is a two-part blog post. Here, I will introduce a particular stemmatological problem, along with the studies of it to date; and in a subsequent post I will discuss possible phylogenetic analyses that might be applied (see The Synoptic Gospels problem: preparing a phylogenetic approach).

Introduction

This year marks the celebration of 500 years since Martin Luther famously proposed his 95 religious theses, thus presaging the Protestant Reformation of the Western Christian Church. In line with this, it is worth discussing a subfield of textual criticism and stemmatics deeply influenced by the Reformation: Biblical criticism. While the importance of written texts to Christianity begins at least in the 2nd century, the theological doctrine of the sola fide (“by scripture alone”, regarding the infallible and final authority in all matters), along with translation work and individual study of the Bible, paved the way, sometimes unwillingly, to scientific approaches of Biblical criticism equivalent to those of secular literature.

The seminal figure in textual criticism of the New Testament was Hermann Reimarus (1694-1768), apparently the first to apply the methodology of literary texts to religious ones. As in the case of literary criticism, it is hardly a coincidence that Biblical criticism developed in the same cultural framework that would support and promote the idea of biological evolution and the tools for establishing genealogical trees and networks. This is especially so when considering the secularization of that society, in which proving the human origin and transmission of sacred texts was deemed an important act of civic freedom. Along with this was the parallel radicalization of some religious positions, such as denouncement as heresy of scientific studies of religious texts (nowadays objected to by most Christian doctrines that stated the imperative of serious research on the sacred texts).

A concrete problem: the synoptic gospels

The most important problem in the textual criticism of the New Testament is the “synoptic gospels" one, involving the three Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. These gospels have strikingly similar narratives that relate many of the same stories, with similar or identical wording. Like the other canonical gospel, John, these texts were composed around the last quarter of the first century by literate Greek-speaking Christians, only becoming canonical at least a century after their composition.

The synoptic gospels differ from similar sources, such as the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, in being biographies with a clear religious motivation, and not just a collection of sayings. When compared to the Gospel of John, the three synoptic gospels are distinct in apparently being written by and for a Jewish community that was not on the verge of breaking from the Jewish synagogue, also favoring short and simple sentences.

However, the most important proof of their genealogical relationship is the text itself. The table below shows the reconstructed Greek original of each gospel for the episode of Jesus’ recruitment of a tax collector (an episode missing from the non-synoptic Gospel of John). The text in blue is the material shared by any two of the gospels, and the text in red is common to all three of them. [This is adapted from Smith (2017); on Wikipedia there is a further example, referring to the episode of the cleansing of a leper, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#Example.]

Matthew 9,9	Mark 2,13-14	Luke 5, 27-28
Καὶ παράγων ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἐκεῖθεν εἶδεν ἄνθρωπον καθήμενον ἐπὶ τὸ τελώνιον, Μαθθαῖον λεγόμενον, καὶ λέγει αὐτῷ· Ἀκολούθει μοι. καὶ ἀναστὰς ἠκολούθ ησεν αὐτῷ.	Καὶ ἐξῆλθεν πάλιν παρὰ τὴν θάλασσαν· καὶ πᾶς ὁ ὄχλος ἤρχετο πρὸς αὐτόν, καὶ ἐδίδασκεν αὐτούς. καὶ παράγων εἶδεν Λευὶν τὸν τοῦ Ἁλφαίου καθήμενον ἐπὶ τὸ τελώνιον, καὶ λέγει αὐτῷ· Ἀκολούθει μοι. καὶ ἀναστὰς ἠκολούθ ησεν αὐτῷ.	Καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα ἐξῆλθεν καὶ ἐθεάσατο τελώνην ὀνόματι Λευὶν καθήμενον ἐπὶ τὸ τελώνιον, καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ· Ἀκολούθει μοι. καὶ καταλιπὼν πάντα ἀναστὰς ἠκολούθ ει αὐτῷ.

The relationships between the gospels, such as the so-called “triple tradition”, is summarized by the graph below, from the Wikipedia article on the synoptic gospels. Mark, the shortest text, has almost no unique material (only 3%, in part superfluous adjectives and Aramaic translations) and is almost entirely (94%) reproduced in Luke. Matthew and Luke have their share of unique material (20% and 35%, respectively), which suggests independence, except for a "double tradition" of common material of about a quarter of the contents of each one, including notable passages such as the “Sermon of the Mount”. The parallelisms of these two gospels are found not only in their contents, but also in their arrangement, with most episodes described in the same order and, in case of displacements, with blocks of episodes moved together while preserving their internal order.

Previous studies

Such similarities were already noted in the first centuries of Christianity. This raises typical genealogical questions regarding topics such as priority (which gospel was written first) and dependence (which gospel was used as a source).

As for the first question, due to textual and theological evidence, a well-established majority of commentators favors the hypothesis of Marcan priority — that is, that the gospel of Mark is the oldest, and both Matthew and Luke used it as a source. As for the second question, a major point of dispute is the double tradition of Matthew and Luke, which can only be properly explained in terms either of descent or of a common ancestor. The two leading hypotheses are the one of a lost gospel (referred as “Q”, after the German Quelle [“source”]), and the one by Austin Farrer, according to whom Matthew used Mark as its source and Luke then used both of them. But these are not the only hypotheses that have been proposed, as shown in the next set of diagrams (also from the Wikipedia article above).

Augustinian Theory	Q Hypothesis
Farrer Theory	Jerusalem School Hypothesis

The first fully developed theory was actually proposed by Augustine of Hippo back in the 5th century, which is essentially the one by Farrer, but with Matthew in place of Mark (i.e., supporting a Matthean priority). Given Augustine’s authority as a “Father of the Church”, his view was not disputed until the late 18th century, when Johann Jakob Griesbach published a synopsis of the three gospels and developed a new hypothesis, swapping Mark and Luke in the dominant explanation. Griesbach’s scientific approach led to the first application to Biblical problems of textual criticism, then in development in the German towns of Jena and Leipzig where he lived.

In 1838, Christian Weisse proposed the “Q” Hypothesis, mentioned above, asserting that Matthew and Luke were produced independently, both using Mark plus a lost source. This source was described as a lost collection of sayings of Jesus, along with feeble indirect evidence of its existence. This hypothesis was further developed by Burnett Streeter in 1924, with the proposal of “proto-versions” of both Mark and Luke — the wording of the canonical versions we have today would then be the product of later revisions, influenced by all of the texts.

During the past fifty years, due to advances in textual criticism and new manuscript analyses, the independence of Luke in relation to Matthew has been questioned, with diminishing support for the Q Hypothesis. A now leading position holds for Farrer’s hypothesis, along with alternative trees such as the one by the Jerusalem School, according to which a lost Greek anthology “A” (postulated as the translation of a collection of sayings either in Hebrew or in Aramaic) was directly or indirectly used by all gospels, including John.

Phylogenetics

Considering the analogies between literary and genetic texts that we have already discussed on this blog, it is clear that this topic should be an interesting anecdote to share around phylogenetic water-coolers. The four texts can be divided into two “families” of gospels, the synoptic (taxa: Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and non-synoptic (taxon: John). Their similarities suggest a distant common ancestor, probably oral traditions, as reported by Christian writers of the first and second centuries such as Papias.

The relationship between the taxa of the first family, however, is far from clear, as their relative dates cannot be determined with confidence. We might be faced with processes that, by analogy with biology, can be explained as gene pool recombinations and horizontal gene transfers – even though the most likely explanation is the one of direct descent, possibly from unknown taxa.

In literary terms, we must also consider features such as Matthew clearly being written by someone highly familiar with aspects of Jewish law, possibly asserting the Jewish component of the preaching while perceiving a universal tendency for the new faith. We must also consider the fact that Mark provides no ancestral lineage for Jesus, while Matthew traces him from a line of kings and Luke from a line of commoners — clearly stating the theological point of view of each gospel. Other aspects are worth consideration, such as the idea that what we today identify as the Gospel of Luke is likely to have been the first part of a once single document that included what is now the book of the “Acts of the Apostles”.

While I must admit that my research has been limited to some googling of keywords, it is curious that a topic that has attracted so much attention for millennia, from serious academic scholarship to conspiracy theories, and from impressionistic reviews to advanced statistical modeling, does not seem to have been covered by phylogenetic analyses, so far. Given the range of data and literature, it should actually look like a prime candidate for such application, even from an outsider point of view. This viewpoint is in fact discussed in a review by Christian P. Robert of a book called The Synoptic Problem and Statistics by Andry Abakuks:

The book by Abakuks goes […] through several modelling directions, from logistic regression using variable length Markov chains [to predict agreement between two of the three texts by regressing on earlier agreement] to hidden Markov models [representing, e.g., Matthew’s use of Mark], to various independence tests on contingency tables, sometimes bringing into the model an extra source denoted by Q. Including some R code for hidden Markov models. Once again, from my outsider viewpoint, this fragmented approach to the problem sounds problematic and inconclusive. And rather verbose in extensive discussions of descriptive statistics. Not that I was expecting a sudden Monty Python-like ray of light and booming voice to disclose the truth! Or that I crave for more p-values (some may be found hiding within the book). But I still wonder about the phylogeny… Especially since phylogenies are used in text authentication as pointed out to me by Robin Ryder for Chauncer’s [sic] Canterbury Tales.

We can certainly list among the reasons for such omission the diffidence of the textual community towards phylogenetic methods, especially when performed by people from outside the field; but the potential reception problems for texts of enormous religious significance cannot be ruled out. However, one of the reasons might be far more trivial: the fact that, just as in the case of historical linguistics, we don’t have digital structured databases of the trove of data about this topic. Most of the literature is not even properly digital, at best with scanned PDFs. Furthermore, the data are usually far from perfect for such usage, as in the case of the synopsis by Smith (2017), which looks more like a typed table than a true database.

Next

In a future post, I will explore the problems of the synoptic gospels from a phylogenetic point of view, also releasing a minimal dataset (see The Synoptic Gospels problem: preparing a phylogenetic approach). Until then, those interested in the topic can find a lot of discussion on a mailing list devoted to the scholarly study of the synoptic gospels, Synoptic-L.

References

Abakuks, Andris (2014) The Synoptic Problem and Statistics. London: Chapman and Hall / CRC.

Goodacre, Mark (2001) The Synoptic Problem: a Way Through the Maze. New York: T & T Clark International. (available on Archive.org)

Robert, Christian P (2015) The synoptic problem and statistics [book review]. https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/the-synoptic-problem-and-statistics-book-review/

Orchard, Bernard; Longstaff, Thomas RW (1979) J.J. Griesbach: Synoptic and Text - Critical Studies 1776-1976. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Mahlon H (2017) A Synoptic Gospels Primer. http://virtualreligion.net/primer/