One objection you will hear about the Gospels: they were written and circulated anonymously. We have no idea who wrote them. How can we be justified in saying that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote them? It is an interesting objection, but its mostly false. For one, there is no evidence that they circulated anonymously because every manuscript that we have has the same title. Take Johns Gospel for example. The title is According to John (Kata Ioannen in Greek). And everyone we have record of who attests to this says that it was John. The same is true for Matthew, Mark, and Luke as well. Other than a very small fringe of whom we know next to nothing about (they only questioned John as far as we know), the first to question this was Faustus around 400 AD. That is a long time. And what did he say? The Gospels were written anonymously, and to that we shall now turn. I find this objection anachronistic because anyone who knows anything about ancient historical and biographical writing knows that the writers always wrote anonymously. Julius Caesar wrote about himself in the third person in his treatise, The Gallic Wars. He did it so well that someone later thought Suetonius wrote it. There are some exceptions, however, but they actually prove the rule of formal anonymity. One example would be the consul of Rome (almost equivalent to the US president in our day) named P Popilius Laenus when he wrote a milestone about himself. But generally speaking, it was considered arrogant to write about yourself in the first person. One other thing to think about: our four canonical Gospels were written with formal anonymity, and everyone seemed to recognize who wrote them. However, the extra-biblical gospels like Thomas, Peter, and Mary Magdalene were not written anonymously. And while John is the only big name apostle among our canonical four, we always see big names in these forgeries to boost their credibility. So it seems that the authors of the canonical Gospels didnt have to bend over backwards to prove who they were like the authors of the pseudopigraphal gospels did. I think that in general, you really dont need a lot of training in ancient history to see how the evidence reliably shows that the authors of our four Gospels probably were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And this is just an example of how biblical scholars often dont have the right training in history. They might have taken some undergrad courses, but that doesnt make you a scholar in that field.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 05:24:59 +0000
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