If you are looking for a serious, easy?to?read and up-todate study of the question of how the gospels came to be written, what sources their authors used, what their authors were trying to achieve, and for the most part is delivered in conversational style, then you will have found it in Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem by Professor Mike Duncan…. Mike Duncan's style is, as I have mentioned, largely conversational and readily keeps the reader engaged — as is surely appropriate from a professor of communication!

Vridar: Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science

Mike Duncan provides a refreshing new take on the debate of how to explain the many passages shared in the first three canonical gospels. Instead of asking who copied what, he explores the possibility of competing narratives, a phenomenon that can be observed in the numerous extra-canonical narratives about Jesus and his first followers. As a student of the field of rhetoric, he understands the phenomenon of creative writing in antiquity and doesn't hesitate to apply his insights to the holy grail of New Testament exegesis, the so-called Synoptic Problem.

David J. Trobisch, author of The First Edition of the New Testament

Duncan is an excellent communicator and a skilled rhetorician himself. For biblical scholars who have long questioned ‘assured results’, this book further substantiates this scepticism. Although he disarmingly acknowledges that he might be wrong about everything he advocates, he, nonetheless, thinks that the FH is the ‘best working and least wrong solution’ (p. 88). He calls for ‘blended abduction’, an open conversation between different solutions.

Journal for the Study of the New Testament