Growing up in church, the dichotomy between the “Gospels” and the “Synoptic Gospels” was never emphasized. I had no idea who wrote what beyond the names on the front of the book. My church just said they were divinely inspired and they were all eyewitnesses and called it a day. You can imagine how surprised I was when I found out there’s a whole diagram for the sources of Gospel writings. The JEDP sources were mind-blowing to me, and the Q source was the icing on the cake. The idea that the authors may not entirely be just Mark or just Matthew is still pretty novel to me (who knows why I thought it was just a bunch of modern Bibles copied from a piece of scroll that Mark wrote and hid away, ask my church). This makes me wonder why churches don’t do more contextualization in terms of culture or history of how we got the books in our hands. Who translated, copied, and edited the sources is becoming much more important to how I understand the Bible, which was never ever mentioned in my church services. The divide between academic study and everyday Bible study is very steep (in my own experience) and becoming increasingly evident as well.
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