This course is an introduction to the three Synoptic Gospel accounts: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The course will follow a two-fold Christological hermeneutic. The first hermeneutic presupposes a prior act of faith that sees the person of Jesus Christ as the key to understanding the whole of the Gospels. The second hermeneutic uses a Canonical exegesis that involves reading the individual texts of the Gospels in the context of both the unity of the Gospel tradition and the wider biblical tradition. The first describes the interpretive science which guides the student, the latter describes the method or technique which the student applies to the Gospel text.

The course will examine preliminary questions like genre, the so-called “synoptic problem”, and historical-critical methods of research, although not focusing on these.