Early in my doctoral program in the history of Christianity, I was required to take a graduate seminar on the first century after Jesus. We were training to become historians, and so I was introduced to the methodologies of late antiquity historians who dealt not only in surviving manuscript sources, but also in pericopes (pronounced peh-RI-co-pees). A pericope was a kind of literary unit in late antiquity that corresponded to the oral culture of the time and place. Literacy rates were quite low compared to today, and most villagers and middle-class folk transmitted and preserved their collective memories, their histories, via recitation.

Imagine assembling with your neighbors for church, and instead of sermons and testimonials, people arise to relate their memories of past events. Only, it’s not supposed to be extemporaneous retellings: usually, the person adopted the posture of another, respected person, and made their telling according to that person’s voice. It would be like me standing before my congregation and saying something like, “As Abraham Lincoln said of the Civil War: Fourscore and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” (I intentionally did not verify whether I got the words correct; this was from my own memory of having heard these lines from the Gettysburg Address many times, which is the point of my analogy: ancient folks heard again and again certain stories, and they made a social value of repeating those stories with word-accuracy, even though they often didn’t reproduce exact word-for-word copies of earlier sayings or stories.)

OK, so, the pericope is a story unit that had origins in oracular tellings and recitations before being committed to writing. Much of the narratives from the late Hellenistic period were passed down in recitations and retellings before being written as pericopes.

Historians have established on good sources that several pockets of Jesus’s believers coalesced all throughout the Mediterranean within a hundred years of Jesus’s death, and that these small communities carried their own discrete narrative traditions about Jesus’s life and teachings before those traditions were written to become the various gospels of early Christian literature.

To give you an idea of how many “gospels” were in circulation orally before literarily in early Christianity, here’s a list (not including epistles and other Christian literature):

  • Gospel of Matthew
  • Gospel of Mark
  • Gospel of Luke + Acts of the Apostles (commonly referred to by historians as “Luke-Acts”)
  • Gospel of John
  • Gospel of Thomas
  • Gospel of Peter
  • Acts of Paul and Thecla
  • Infancy Gospel of Thomas
  • Secret Gospel of Mark
  • Unknown Gospel (Papyrus Egerton 2)
  • Gospel of the Ebionites
  • Gospel of the Nazareans
  • Gospel According to the Hebrews (not to be confused with the Letter to the Hebrews)
  • Martyrdom of Polycarp
  • The Didache
  • Gospel of Mary of Magdala (not always classified as a gospel about Jesus)
  • Gospel of Judas
  • Gospel of Marcion
  • Gospel of Basilides
  • Gospel of Valentinian
  • Gospel of Four Heavenly Realms
  • Greek Gospel of the Egyptians
  • Gospel of Philip
  • Gospel of the Twelve
  • Syriac Infancy Gospel

There’s a bit more I could list. You get the idea. Quite a lot of Christian collective memory being told and retold, then written and copied, for decades and then centuries. Reading these sources and understanding them properly requires that we work out and contextualize the pericopes behind the documents.

Unfortunately (for my part at least), Christians have imposed apparatuses all around the pericopes. They’ve divided gospel narratives into chapters (a literary unit not used in the late antique period) and verses; adopted irregular transliteration patterns (e.g., “Elijah” and “Elias” for Eliyahu); changed place names and personal identities; assumed narrative voices in the singular rather than original plural (e.g., the four gospels except maybe Luke were composed by communities of believers, not single authors); cross-referenced verses with other verses using additional notations, sometimes obscuring quotation from commentary (e.g., John 3:16 is not Jesus speaking, but rather a lecturer in a late 1st-century Syriac church); chapter headings and summaries interpret gospel texts often along later theological concerns rather than bringing accurate context; and so on.

If we want to read the four gospels using our typical Bible editions, we’re left with separate books arranged in chapters and verses. I can’t emphasize enough how totally foreign this format would be to the people reponsible for the narratives themselves. Those ancient believers and narrators would be quite confused at our textual and legalistic culture citing narrow passages of their words to justify whole theological concerns and argumentation. No, they gathered in intimate settings, sometimes in secret, to retell the stories of Jesus, and their stories weren’t necessarily chronological or coherent. In a way, the pericope functioned as a standalone story unit.

Synopsis for Accessibility

I don’t entirely rail on textual apparatuses… On one level, textual apparatuses are necessary if we Anglophones wish to access the ancient texts and narrative traditions. I suppose what I caution against is the kind of apparatus that perpetuates misinformation or misunderstanding, and boy are there plenty of those kinds of Bibles out there.

Scholars look to synopses of gospel pericopes for studying the narrative units. Such synopses tend to reach a technical audience trained in Greek, semantics, history, and textual criticism, and so over the years, I’ve been slow to recommend such resources to my friends who I can tell really would like a readable, accessible format that nevertheless presents the pericopes rather than books, chapters, and verses.

I have been long at work reviewing the various scholarly synopses for a readable and accessible set of pericopes that would accomplish a few benchmarks:

  1. The whole text of each of the four gospels must be covered.
  2. Two or more pericopes shouldn’t overlap out of convenience; in other words, the pericope must be clearly distinct from all others.
  3. Must observe Markan priority (because Mark was the first text produced).
  4. Favors Matthew over Luke (because Luke was prepared by Greek-speaking converts with an overt theological agenda to correct Mark and Matthew).
  5. Favors Mark + Matthew + Luke over John (because John was prepared by Syriac Christians decades after the Synoptic gospels who imposed highly subjective Neo-Platonic philosophical commentary in between narrations of Jesus’s life and teachings; and in several places is manifestly inaccurate to history).

These are just a few of my own preferences for reading the gospel pericopes. I’m working now on developing a parallel-column formatted version of the King James texts, since my fellow Latter-day Saints will be reading from the King James next year in their Sunday School classes. (Although the King James makes me wince nearly every time I read it for its flourishes, ornamentations, and sometimes outright mistranslation, it’s not looking like Latter-day Saints will adopt another English translation anytime soon, so, we gotta work with what we got, right?)

Here’s a little preview of what this will look like:

Synopsis Of The Four Gospels128KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload

While I’m busy typesetting the rest of the pericopes, you can still access them using this table, the meat and potatoes of the whole project:

Table Of Pericopes500KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload

Differences between Synopsis and Harmony

You have probably seen the study resource the Church prepared for its 1981 edition of the standard works called “Harmony of the Gospels.” This table is very similar to synopses of the four gospels, except it has some issues historians would critique. The narrative units are arbitrarily arranged, meaning, the verses assigned to each “event” aren’t a pericope or even an accurate representation of the event, but serve more as the reference to verses that 20th-century church leaders considered useful for study. The locations associated with the events aren’t always accurate. The order assumes a clear chronology based on assumptions James E. Talmage had made in his famous work Jesus the Christ and that Bruce R. McConkie gathered from his own verse-by-verse reading of the gospels. The actual source materials behind the original texts of the gospels are ignored, steering some of the descriptions, locations, and event order away from the historical sources that are our only conduit for these events. The titles for the events are sometimes misleading of the events they describe, especially when one properly contextualizes the gospel narratives and properly translates the texts.

The harmony also projects a sequence onto Jesus’s ministry: that he first ministered in Galilee, then undertook an early Judaean ministry, followed by a second Galilean ministry, followed by a North Galilean ministry, then a journey to Peraea and a final Judaean ministry before traveling to Jerusalem for the last week of his life. Historians are generally agreed that the pericopes do not offer a strong biography of Jesus such that we can with confidence describe a sequence of ministries so neatly. What we can conclude on evidence is rather more probabilistic and less specific: that Jesus came of age in Nazareth and visited Jerusalem during pilgrimage festivals with his family; that he visited villages throughout the greater Galilean region and performed healings and exorcisms while also teaching and conversing with regular folk; that he visited villages throughout pockets of Judaea before attending a final Passover season in Jerusalem and being executed by Roman officials. That’s about it, really, for a biographical sequence of events. And even so, some historians like John Meier in A Marginal Jew point out yet more technical issues with this modest sequence.

The harmony attempts to “harmonize” the gospels, as though the four should agree with each other. Synopses rather attempt to delineate pericopes regardless of agreement. John can be totally separate from Mark in theology, philosophy, and historical reporting in a synopsis; in a harmony, the two are considered equally accurate, which can create some convoluted interpretations, like Jesus cleansing the temple two times. (He most certainly did not cleanse the temple more than once, especially since the act of cleansing the temple did ignite the ruling establishment against him and achieved his execution.) Anyhow, I offer the synopsis/table as merely an approximation of a sequence of events, an arrangement of pericopes that facilitates reading about Jesus one narrative unit at a time. I hope it’s useful. Consider it a Christmas present from one history nerd to another :) Merry Christmas, friends.