Finding the Shards #9
And yet, like a Chinese puzzle, the question of which gospel was the first to be written kept teasing the more critical minds. All scholars agreed that one of the four had to be the first, and most scholars had their favorite to propose. The problem was that arguments sup- porting the priority of one or the other gospel were so difficult to find. The problem could only be resolved by a rigorous study that used a single set of critical criteria to compare the four with one another. Johann Griesbach provided the tool to do this in his synopsis of the first three gospels published in 1776. Griesbach recognized that the fourth gospel was distinctly different from the first three. In this gospel, Jesus sounded like a passionless god on a temporary mission from another world merely frustrated with the ignorance of humankind in a dull world. The ethereal tone of Jesus' voice in the Gospel of John set it apart from the first three gospels and gave it little claim as historiography. Griesbach therefore placed only the first three gospels side by side for comparison (or synopsis, meaning "view together") and thus introduced what was later to be called the "synoptic problem," the question of the order and interrelationships among the three similar accounts.