Sean Boisen

The Composite Gospels is a new kind of tool for studying the parallels and differences that exist in the Gospel stories. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all tell the same story of Jesus’s life, teaching, death, and resurrection, but they each present that material in different ways, even among the three Synoptic Gospels.

Arranged by similarities in the content of the narrative and then annotated with additional information about the people and events involved, the goal of the Composite Gospel is to bring together accounts which are common to one or more Gospels. Efforts to present a unified or harmonized account of the four gospels go back at least as far back as the 2nd century. But the Composite Gospel is not a harmony per se. The purpose is not to bring the different accounts into agreement, or address places where the narratives appear to be in conflict, but to suggest the best possible coordinated arrangement of the sources as they have come down to us. In that context, the Composite Gospel helps lay out a new perspective on the larger story of Jesus’ life beyond the individual Gospels.

“In contrast, the Composite Gospel is best understood as an index and a reference system: it identifies and points to passages in their original sources, without attempting to produce a single linear text. As such, it is an alternative to the traditional reference scheme of chapter and verse references, but one that is based more strongly on topical content and coherence. One important sub-goal is to be able to look up and refer to pericopes based on conventional descriptions of the content, like the Parable of the Soils. Since it is an index rather than a new text, the Composite Gospel is independent of any particular Bible version: it displays the text from your preferred Bible version in Logos.” (source)

“The intent is to identify the smallest meaningful groupings above the verse level” (source)… (altro)