Synoptic Gospels

Imagine a time in your life when you were the one being told the rules. This could have been when you were younger and your parents were telling you what you can and cannot do, or a time when you started driving and you were educated on the rules of the road. Either way this serves as an excellent metaphor for the Conditions of Discipleship from the Synoptic Gospels found in the passages Mt 16:24-28, Mk 8:34-9:1, Lk 9:23-27. Mark’s Gospel is the earliest of the aforementioned passages and was written in 50 A.D. to the suffering Jews of the time. Next, came Matthew around the year 75 A.D. who was writing to the Jewish Christians of the time. Finally, there was Luke, the last of the synoptics, who wrote to the Gentiles at about the same time
Examining the audiences reveals even more about how the Gospel’s build on one another. Again since Mark was written first, it makes sense to start off with his Gospel. The audience of Mark is the suffering Jews of the time. Many of these people failed to believe in the Messiah as they were uncertain if he was the true fulfillment of the prophecies found in the Old Testament. Jewish people. Perhaps this is where Mark is directing his words to, the fact that people still weren’t certain in Jesus Christ. Therefore, what Mark is telling us through his audience, is that one must fully believe in Jesus and no other concepts or deities. While the same message still applied to the Jewish Christian audience of Matthew; since they were established as Jewish Christians it seems as if they already had a belief in Jesus. However, many of these Christians were not exactly living by the book, participating in activities that today would be scrutinized, and thus Matthew may have been telling his audience to rid themselves of these activities in order to become a true disciple. Along these lines, Luke is again using the same language to perpetuate a different meaning to his audience. Since Luke’s audience was the Gentiles, he needed his meaning to be much more open and less focused on immediate and full commitment. With this in mind, it
While these teachings build off one another to portray what it means to be a disciple, taking individual teachings away from this is not the worst thing in the world. If you were to think about how many of these instances could be effective in a non-faithful way, there are plenty of them today. For example, many people today are very addicted to their electronics, if we were to take up one of the teachings of Matthew, giving up our electronics is truly a good