reply to RichardCarter, timbushell8640, _jared, et al at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laXcJyx9xCc&lc=UgwDgpIktVi8yFDjEVZ4AaABAg

I see you @timbushell8640 and @RichardCarter. ;)

Let's be clear that synoptic (meaning "seen together") is certainly a useful word apart from syntopic. Quite often it's used to describe the books Matthew, Mark, and Luke of the New Testament which are sometimes placed together on the same page to compare the stories, particularly for historical analysis. This sort of reading, not too dissimilar to syntopical reading, is a fantastic analytical tool as well and is described well by Bart Ehrman in one of his more scholarly works. Reading these books this way shows that the so-called synoptic gospels are anything but consistent (talk about crosses to bear....) Given the increase in the number of biblical scholars in the late 1800s doing this specific sort of reading (synoptic) may have influenced Adler's choice of neologism to describe that particular reading method. For those that haven't seen a synoptic book presentation, Throckmorton's version is a fairly good/popular one, though others certainly exist, including versions for translators which have side by side versions of books in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, etc. These can be found by searching for books with "interlinear", "parallel" and/or "polyglot" in their titles, especially with respect to bibles. They're somewhat similar to the layouts of the Loeb Classics collection, though those only have Greek/English or Latin/English in parallel.

Ehrman, Bart D. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Second Edition. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Chapter 6, "The Synoptic Problem and Its Significance for Interpretation", pp76-83.

Throckmorton, Jr., Burton H. Gospel Parallels: A Comparison of the Synoptic Gospels, New Revised Standard Version. 5th Revised edition. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1992.

Zinn, S., & Gnambs, T. (2020, April 18). Analyzing nonresponse in longitudinal surveys using Bayesian additive regression trees: A nonparametric event history analysis. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/82c3w