Daniel John

When I first read the Gospel of Matthew, I thought, "Wow! That was interesting!" And then there was another Gospel, of Mark, after that. So I read that and said, "That was almost the same but different..." And then there is a third Gospel, and a fourth... And in the end, although I had read all that Jesus Christ said and did in the Gospels, I was unsure of many details, and confused about the sequence of what happened. Then I learned about Gospel harmonies, that display the synoptic and parallel sections of the texts in columns side-by-side, and that was useful, but because no harmony merged the duplicate words, I still had to read the words from three or four Gospels. I thought about this and decided to create a single Gospel text from the four. Eventually, I saw a way to notate the pieces of the original Gospel verses, which allowed for a true word-for-word merger. So, I created The Synoptic Gospel to be a complete and accurate account, because it is not only much faster to read, but with the events of the four Gospels aligned against a single timeline, it is now possible to follow the sequence of the events from the life and ministry of Jesus - like why Jesus did this or why He said that to these people at this time.

Yes. Long before there were the four Gospels as a collection, they were first used together as a merged harmony called, the "Diatessaron", in about 160 CE. That was the Gospel for the Roman and Byzantine churches for more than 250 years, until the Roman church released the Vulgate version of the New Testament in Latin in 405. The Vulgate used the same four Gospels as the Diatessaron, except that it presented them as the four separate accounts. So, there has almost always been a type of merger of the four Gospels, because before these four Gospels were read together, there was the Diatessaron. Since then, there have been several 4 column harmonies, and very few mergers, but there has never been the precision of a harmonious merger like The Synoptic Gospel.