James W. Barker, Writing and Rewriting the Gospels: John and the Synoptics

Barker, James W. Writing and Rewriting the Gospels: John and the Synoptics. Foreword by Mark Goodacre. Eerdmans, 2025. xvi+188 pp. Pb. $22.99   Link to Eerdmans

James W. Barker serves as an associate professor of New Testament at Western Kentucky University. He wrote his PhD dissertation on John’s use of Matthew (Vanderbilt, 2011; Amy-Jill Levine, advisor), now available as John’s Use of Matthew (Fortress, 2015). In addition to many essays and journal articles, he also published a monograph, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Composition, Redaction, Recension, and Reception (Oxford Academic, 2021).

For many years, one of the few things Gospel scholars agreed on was that John was written last and that John wrote more or less independently of the three Synoptic Gospels. P. Gardner-Smith and C. H. Dodd made this case early in the twentieth century, and it held strong until at least the 1960s. Since then, there has been a slow erosion of John’s independence from the Synoptic Gospels, but solutions to the Synoptic Problem rarely (or ever) included the fourth Gospel. One notable exception is Mark Goodacre, in his recent The Fourth Synoptic Gospel (Eerdmans, 2025, reviewed here).

Barker’s method can be fairly summarized as “snowballing” (a word he uses in this book). “The central thesis of this book is that each subsequent gospel writer knew and used every gospel that came before it” (41). Why is this a case? Because this was how writing was done in the ancient world. Barker uses evidence from Oxyrhynchus papyri of Homeric epics, recensions of the Septuagint, Tatian’s Diatessaron, and Joseph’s use of canonical Samuel and Chronicles. He suggests, “Josephus could not compose this section of his history without scrupulously and continually comparing both his biblical texts” (49).  Since “all writers are readers” (52), he suggests the gospel writers “usually maintain visual contact with their source texts, and that each subsequent evangelist could easily reposition within every previous gospel” (55).

In terms of the Synoptic Problem, Barker’s book is a defense of the Farrar Hypothesis extended to include John’s gospel (chapters 2 and 3). Mark wrote first, then Matthew and Luke both revised Mark. Luke also revised Matthew (dispensing with the need for the hypothetical sayings source, Q). Like many scholars, Barker thinks John wrote last, but he argues that John knew Mark and its revisions in Matthew and Luke. Essentially, the author of the fourth gospel had the three previous gospels available. This means no Gospel writer was independent except Mark (or at least this book is not interested in hypothetical pre-Markan sources or oral tradition). This means how John wrote his gospel is an extension of the Synoptic Problem.

Barker wants to avoid two “paths” in this book. First, this book is not a historical Jesus study. He thinks “literary dependence and creative writing can be explored without regard to his historicity” (14). Second, he does not speculate on how or where any Synoptic material originated (oral tradition, M-Source, L-Source, etc.).  But he does want to consider the role of textual criticism, because copies of the gospels were harmonized so they would agree verbatim. He thinks Gospel authors revised their sources to fit their theological emphasis, but this book does not engage in Redaction Criticism. Barker thinks Redaction Criticism went too far by creating “communities” for which the gospels were written. A major emphasis in his method is the Greco-Roman practice of imitation and rewriting. This was ubiquitous in Greco-Roman literature. After providing many examples, he concludes, “I find the same literary techniques to play as John rewrote the synoptic” (25).

In the first chapter of the book, “How to Write a Gospel,” Barker suggests that the gospel should not be considered an oral traditional composition. He doesn’t deny that Oral tradition existed, only that it is “utterly unrecoverable” (28). The gospels “are not transcriptions of Oral performances” (52). The Roman orator Quintilian (c. AD 35-100) provides evidence that the gospels were extensively drafted and revised before publication (31). He seriously doubts any author wrote a book from start to finish (38), using the analogy of the Beatles writing their song Get Back. As Peter Jackson’s documentary has shown, there are over 150 hours of tape documenting the writing, revising, and recording of this simple song. The Gospels are far more complicated than a three-minute pop song.

In chapter 3, Barker offers evidence of John’s intentional rewriting of the Synoptic Gospels. Where there are parallels to the Synoptic Gospels, they can be compared. Barker argues John is using oppositio in imitando, a literary practice found in Quintilian. Although this practice is recognized in classics studies, Barker is one of the first to apply oppositio in imitando to biblical studies.

His “quintessential example” of oppositio in imitando is John 5. Barker argues John rewrites the story of Jesus healing the paralyzed man from Mark 2:1-12 (and revised in Matt 9:2-8 and Luke 5:18-26). John has moved the story from Galilee to Jerusalem and made it into a Sabbath controversy. John’s gospel never actually states that the man was paralyzed (he was merely sick, using ἀσθένεια). When Jesus says, “Pick up your bed and walk” (5:9), John is imitating Mark’s gospel. A key feature of Mark’s version is the authority of the Son of Man to forgive sin, which appears to be missing in John 5. However, 5:14b implies that Jesus did forgive the man’s sin. Something Barker omits that would strengthen his case is Mark 2:7. When Jesus claims to forgive the man’s sin, the scribes think to themselves that Jesus is blaspheming since only God can forgive sin. In John 5:17, when questioned about healing o the Sabbath, Jesus says “My Father is working until now, and I am working,” followed immediately by John’s observation that the Jews “were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.”

The problem is, is John 5 really an imitation of Mark 2, or is it a completely different story? What Barker identifies as creative adaptations of the earlier story are indications that this is an entirely different event. The same could be true for his argument that Jon has rewritten Luke 16:19-31 (Lazarus and the rich man) as the resurrection of Lazarus and John 11. The main parallel is the name Lazarus, a common one in the Second Temple period. Although it is tempting to see the poor man in Luke 16 as the dead man in John 11, the only parallel is the name.

In both examples, Barker thinks anyone who does not see the parallels simply is not taking oppositio in imitando into account.  It seems to be a better example of oppositio in imitando is miracle stories that are parallel in all four gospels, such as the Feeding of the 5000 (98-99) and the walking on the water, or perhaps the reason why Judas betrayed Jesus (100-03). Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem is in all four gospels, providing data that can be compared with the Synoptic Gospels. In these examples, Barker’s “snowballing” is evident. I need more evidence to convince me that John radically rewrote Mark 2 in John 5, or that the Lazarus resurrection in John 11 rewrote the Lazarus story in Luke 16.

 Conclusion. Barker’s book is an engaging challenge to the (eroding) consensus view that John’s gospel was written independently of the Synoptic Gospels. His introduction of oppositio in imitando into the discussion is a significant contribution to New Testament Studies. Along with Mark Goodacre’s The Fourth Synoptic Gospel, Writing and Rewriting the Gospels is a considerable step forward in Gospel research.

NB:  Mark Goodacre interviewed Barker on his NT Podcast (I did not listen to the podcast before writing this review). This book was the subject of a review session at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in Boston, 2025, in the Johannine Literature section. Once again, this review was published before this review session.

NB: Thanks to Eerdmans for kindly providing me with a review copy of this book. This did not influence my thoughts regarding the work.