Gospel Harmony - Overview

Overview

A 'Gospel harmony is an attempt to merge or harmonize the canonical gospels of the Four Evangelists into a single gospel account. Gospel harmonies are constructed and studied by scholars to establish a chronology for the events of the life of Jesus depicted in the four canonical gospels to better understand how the accounts relate to each other, or to establish events in the life of Jesus.

The terms harmony and synopsis have been used to refer to approaches that aim to achieve Gospel harmony, although they are different approaches. Technically, a "harmony" weaves together sections of scripture into a narrative, merging the four Gospels. There are four main types of harmony: radical, synthetic, sequential and parallel. A "synopsis", much like a parallel harmony focuses on key events and brings together similar texts or accounts in parallel format, usually in columns. Harmonies may also have a visual form and be undertaken to create narratives for artistic purposes, as in the creation of picture compositions depicting the Life of Christ.

To illustrate the concept of parallel harmony, a simple example of a "synopsis fragment" is shown here, consisting of just four episodes from the Passion. A more comprehensive parallel harmony appears in a section below.

Unlike the example above, a textual approach to harmony does not use tables and columns but combines the verses in the gospels into a merged narrative, producing a piece of text longer than any individual gospel.

The gospels accounts show a great deal of overall similarity, but the scholarly process for constructing a detailed harmony is complicated by issues of text or the uniqueness of material in each Gospel. Specific issues at times resists distillation into a single harmonized chronology, as the variety of readings that appear in multiple harmony efforts attests. An example is determining whether Jesus cursed the fig tree before or after the Cleansing of the Temple. However, the construction of harmonies remains an important element of biblical study and to gain a better understanding of the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus.