Lexington Books / Fortress Academic
Pages: 296
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-9787-1308-6 • Hardback • May 2022 • $110.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-9787-1309-3 • eBook • May 2022 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Mike Duncan is a professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown.
Introduction
Chapter 1: The History of the Synoptic Problem: Preferring the Worst Explanation, Except For All The Others
Chapter 2: Competing Narratives: What Happened After The Resurrection?
Chapter 3: The Farrer Hypothesis, the Universality of Writing, and Unsolvable Problems
Chapter 4: Mark the Originator: John the Baptist and the Invention of the Gospel Genre
Chapter 5: The Rebranding of the Twelve Apostles in the Gospel of Matthew
Chapter 6: How Luke Destroyed the Sermon on the Mount: The Physical Composition of the Gospel of Luke
Conclusion
Appendix: Dating the Gospels
Bibliography
If you are looking for a serious, easy־to־read and up-todate study of the question of how the gospels came to be written, what sources their authors used, what their authors were trying to achieve, and for the most part is delivered in conversational style, then you will have found it in Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem by Professor Mike Duncan…. Mike Duncan's style is, as I have mentioned, largely conversational and readily keeps the reader engaged — as is surely appropriate from a professor of communication!
— Vridar: Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Mike Duncan provides a refreshing new take on the debate of how to explain the many passages shared in the first three canonical gospels. Instead of asking who copied what, he explores the possibility of competing narratives, a phenomenon that can be observed in the numerous extra-canonical narratives about Jesus and his first followers. As a student of the field of rhetoric, he understands the phenomenon of creative writing in antiquity and doesn't hesitate to apply his insights to the holy grail of New Testament exegesis, the so-called Synoptic Problem.
— David J. Trobisch, author of The First Edition of the New Testament