Why Scholars Doubt the Traditional Authors of the Gospels

The traditional authors of the canonical Gospels – Matthew the tax collector, Mark the attendant of Peter, Luke the attendant of Paul, and John the son of Zebedee – are doubted among the large majority of mainstream New Testament scholars. However, the public is often not familiar with the complex reasons and methodology that scholars use to reach definitive and well-supported consensuses about critical issues, such as assessing the authorial traditions for ancient texts. To provide a good overview of the majority opinion about the Gospels, the Oxford Annotated Bible (a compilation of multiple scholars summarizing dominant scholarly trends for the last 150 years) states (pg. 1744):

“Neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith (Lk 1.4; Jn 20.31). Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.”

Unfortunately, however, much of the general public is not familiar with scholarly resources like the one quoted above; instead, Christian apologists often put out a lot of material, such as The Case For Christ, targeted towards lay audiences, who are not familiar with scholarly methods, in order to argue that the Gospels are the eyewitness testimonies of either Jesus’ disciples or their attendants. The mainstream scholarly view is that the Gospels are anonymous works, written in a different language than that of Jesus, in distant lands, after a substantial gap of time, by unknown persons, compiling, redacting, and inventing various traditions in order to provide a narrative of Christianity’s central figure, Jesus Christ, to confirm the faith of their communities.

As scholarly sources like the Oxford Annotated Bible note, the Gospels are not historical works (even if they contain some historical kernels). 

Coming from my academic background in Classics, I have the advantage of critically studying not only the Gospels of the New Testament, but also other Greek and Latin works from the same period. In assessing the supposed evidence for the Gospels versus other ancient texts, it is very clear to me that the majority opinion in the scholarly community is correct in its assessment that the traditional authorial attributions are spurious. To illustrate this, I will compare the evidence for the Gospels’ authors with that of a secular work, namely Tacitus’ Histories. Through looking at some of the same criteria that we can use to evaluate the authorial attributions for an ancient text, I will show why scholars have many good reasons to doubt the authors of the Gospels while being confident in the authorship of a more solid tradition, such as what we have for a historical author like Tacitus.

How do we determine the authors of ancient texts? There is no single one-size-fits-all methodology that can be used for every single ancient text. We literally have thousands of different texts that have come down to us from antiquity, and each has its own textual situation. However, there are some general guidelines that can be applied broadly across all traditions, from which more specific guidelines can further be derived when assessing a particular tradition.

Scholars generally look for both internal and external evidence when determining the author of an ancient text. The internal evidence consists of whatever evidence we havewithin a given text. This can include the author identifying himself, or mentioning persons and events that he witnessed, or using a particular writing style that we know to be used by a specific person, etc. The external evidence consists of whatever evidence we haveoutside a given text. This can include another author quoting the work, a later critic proposing a possible authorial attribution, what we know about the biography of the person to whom the work is attributed, etc.

For the canonical Gospels there are both many internal and external reasons why scholars doubt the traditional authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I shall begin by summarizing the problems with the internal evidence:

To begin with, the Gospels are all anonymous and none of their authors names himself within the the text. This is even acknowledged by many apologists, such as Craig Blomberg (whom I will be using here as an apologetic foil arguing in favor of the traditional authors), who states in The Case for Christ (pg. 22): “It’s important to acknowledge that strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous.” So, immediately one type of evidence that we lack for the Gospels is their authors identifying themselves in the texts. This, however, need not be an immediate death blow, since authors do not always name themselves in their texts. I have specifically chosen to compare the Gospels’ traditions with that of Tacitus’Histories, since Tacitus likewise does not name himself in his historical works. If the author does not name himself, there are other types of evidence that can be looked at.

First, even if the body of a text does not name its author, there is often still a name and title affixed to a text in our surviving manuscript traditions. These titles normally identify the traditional author. The standard naming convention for ancient works was to place the author’s name in the genitive case (indicating personal possession), followed by the title of the work. Mendell in Tacitus: The Man And His Work notes (pg. 345) that, while not all of our surviving manuscripts are complete with titles, the titles that we do have on some of the best manuscripts have Cor. Taciti Libri (“The Books of Cornelius Tacitus”). This naming convention is important, since it specifically identifies Tacitus as the author of the work. An attribution may still be doubted for any number of reasons, but it is important that there at least be a clear attribution.

Here we already have a problem with the authors of the Gospels. The titles that come down in our manuscript traditions for the Gospels do not even explicitly claim Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John as their authors. Instead, the Gospels have an abnormal title convention, where they instead use the Greek preposition κατά, meaning “according to” or “handed down from,” followed by the traditional names. For example, the Gospel of Matthew is titled εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Μαθθαίον (“The Gospel according to Matthew”). This is problematic, from the beginning, in that the earliest title traditions already use a grammatical construction to distance themselves from an explicit claim to authorship. Instead, the titles operate more as traditions, where the Gospels have been “handed down” by church traditions affixed to names of figures in the early church, rather than the author being clearly identified [1]. In the case of Tacitus, none of our surviving titles says that theHistories or Annals were written “according to Tacitus” or “handed down from Tacitus.” Instead, we have clear attribution to Tacitus in one case, while only vague and ambivalent attributions in the titles of the Gospels.

Furthermore, it is not even clear that the Gospels’ abnormal titles were originally placed in the earliest manuscript copies. We do not have the autograph original text for any work from antiquity, but for the Gospels, many of the earliest manuscripts that we possess have grammatical variations in their title conventions. This divergence in form among the earliest manuscripts suggests that their was no original manuscript or title upon which the later titles were based. As textual criticism expert Bart Ehrman points out in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (pgs. 249-250):

“Because our surviving Greek manuscripts provide such a wide variety of (different) titles for the Gospels, textual scholars have long realized that their familiar names do no go back to a single ‘original’ title, but were added by later scribes.”

So, in addition to the problem that the Gospels’ titles do not even explicitly claim authors, we likewise have strong reason to suspect that these traditional titles were not even affixed to an original manuscript [2].

To be fair, no early manuscript copies of Tacitus’ Histories survived the Christian Middle Ages for us to see if the same problem would be true in the earliest manuscripts traditions for Tacitus. Likewise, for our later medieval copies of Tacitus, Mendell (pg. 345) notes that “the manuscript tradition of the Major Works is not consistent in the matter of title.” However, since these are far later copies, the title variations may have crept in later in the tradition.

Nevertheless, Mendell (pg. 345) notes that we have strong contemporary evidence to suggest that the title “Historiae” was affixed to Tacitus’ original Histories:

“Pliny clearly referred to the work in which Tacitus was engaged asHistoriae: Auguror nec me fallit augurium Historias tuas immortales futuras (Ep. 7.33.1). It is not clear whether the term was a specific one or simply referred to the general category of historical writing. The material to which Pliny refers, the eruption of Vesuvius, would have been in theHistories. Tertullian (Adv. gentes 16, and Ad nationes 1.11) cites theHistories, using the term as a title: in quinta Historiarum. It should be noted that this reference is to the “seperate” tradition, not to the thirty-book tradition, so that Historiae are the Histories as we name them now.”

The evidence for Tacitus’ original title is not fully conclusive, but what is noteworthy is that Pliny the Younger (a contemporary) writes directly to Tacitus and says that he is writing aHistoriae, and the later author Tertullian quotes the work by that title.

For the purposes of authorship, however, the exact wording of the title need not fully concern us. The evidence is certain in the case of Tacitus that Pliny (our earliest source for Tacitus’ work) clearly states that Tacitus himself is writing a Historiae. In the case of the Gospels, textual experts like Bart Ehrman doubt that their were any original named titles affixed to the texts, and even the earliest titles merely state that it was “according to” the names affixed to the text. In the former case we have a clear claim to authorship, whereas in the latter we have generalized traditions that were probably added later.

Beyond the titles, we can look within the body of a text to see if the author himself reveals any clues either directly or indirectly about his identity. For Tacitus, while the author does not explicitly name himself, he does discuss his relation to the events he is describing in theHistories (1:1):

“I myself knew nothing of Galba, of Otho, or of Vitellius, either from benefits or from injuries. I would not deny that my elevation was begun by Vespasian, augmented by Titus, and still further advanced by Domitian; but those who profess inviolable truthfulness must speak of all without partiality and without hatred.”

Here, while he does not name himself, the authors of the Histories reveals himself to be a Roman politician during the Flavian Dynasty, which he specifies to be the period that he will write about. This matches the biographical information that we have of Tacitus outside of the Histories. For example, we know outside the text that Tacitus was writing a historical work about the Flavian period, since we have letters from Pliny the Younger (6.16; 6.20) written to Tacitus, where he responds to Tacitus’ request for information about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pliny’s letters also refer to Tacitus’ career as a statesman, such as when he gave the funeral oration for the Roman general Verginius Rufus (2.1). So we know from outside the Histories that Tacitus was a Roman politician writing a history about the Flavian era. This outside information is corroborated exactly by the evidence within the text. Thus, we have every good reason to suspect that the author of the Histories is Tacitus, as the internal evidence strongly coincides with this tradition.

A further note is that, as an educated Roman politician, we have every reason to suspect that Tacitus had the literary, rhetorical, and compositional training needed to author a complex work of prose, such as his Histories. That is to say, from what we know of the author’s background, he belonged to the demographic of people whom we would expect to write complex Latin histories. As we will see for the Gospels’ authors, we have little reason to suspect, at least in the case of Matthew and John, that their traditional authors would have even been able to write a complex narrative in Greek prose.

According the estimates of William Harris in his classic study Ancient Literacy (pg. 22), “The likely overall illiteracy of the Roman Empire under the principate is almost certain to have been above 90%.” Of the remaining tenth, only a few could read and write well, and even a smaller fraction could author complex prose works like the Gospels [3].

Immediately, the internal information that we have in the Gospel of John contradicts the traditional attribution of the gospel to John the son of Zebedee. We know from internal evidence, based on its complex Greek composition, that the author of the gospel was highly literate and trained in Greek. Yet, from what we know of the biography of John the son of Zebedee, it would make little to no sense if he was the author. John was a poor rural peasant from Galilee, who spoke Aramaic. In an ancient world where literary training was largely restricted to a small fraction of rich, educated elite, we have little reason to suspect that a Aramaic-speaking Galilean peasant could author a complex Greek gospel. Furthermore, in Acts 4:13, John is even explicitly identified as being ἀγράμματος (“illiterate”), which shows that even evidence within the New Testament itself would not identify such a figure as an author [4]. Likewise, the internal evidence of the Gospel of Matthew contradicts the traditional attribution to Matthew (or Levi) the tax collector. While tax collectors had basic accounting training, the Gospel of Matthew is written in a complex narrative of Greek prose that shows extensive familiarity with Jewish scripture and teachings. However, tax collectors were regarded by educated Jews as a lower, “unclean” class, who were ostracized from their community. As scholar Barbara Reid (The Gospel According to Matthew, pgs. 5-6) explains, “The author had extensive knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures and a keen concern for Jewish observance and the role of the Law … It is doubtful that a tax collector would have the kind of religious and literary education needed to produce this Gospel.” However, we have no such problem in the case of Tacitus. As an educated Roman senator, who belonged to a social class of people known to author Latin histories, we would exactly expect Tacitus to author a work like theHistories, while we would have no strong reason to believe that an illiterate peasant, like John, or a mere tax collector, like Matthew, would be able to author the Greek gospels that we have.

Furthermore, the sources of the work itself can often betray clues about its author. In the case of the Gospels, we know that they are all interdependent upon each other for their information. Matthew borrows from as much as 80% of the verses in the Gospel of Mark, and Luke borrows from 65%. While John does not follow the ipsissima verba of the earlier gospels, its author was almost certainly aware of the earlier narratives (as shown by scholar Louis Ruprecht in This Tragic Gospel).

Once more, for the Gospel of Matthew, the internal evidence contradicts the authorial attribution. The disciple Matthew was allegedly an eyewitness of Jesus. Mark, on the other hand, who is the alleged author of the Gospel of Mark, from which the author of Matthewcopied 80% of the verses, was not an eyewitness of Jesus nor a disciple, but was merely an attendant of Peter. Why would Matthew, an alleged eyewitness, need to borrow from as much as 80% of the material of Mark, a non-eyewitness?

Apologists have come up with fantastical ad hoc assumptions to explain this problem with Matthew, an alleged eyewitness, borrowing the bulk of his text from a non-eyewitness. For example, Blomberg in The Case for Christ (pg. 28) speculates:

“It only makes sense if Mark was indeed basing his account on the recollections of the eyewitness Peter … it would make sense for Matthew, even though he was an eyewitness, to rely on Peter’s version of events as transmitted through Mark.”

To begin with, nowhere in the Gospel of Mark does the author ever claim that he is reporting the recollections of Peter (Blomberg is splicing this detail with a later dubious claim by the church father Papias, to be discussed below). The author of Mark never names any eyewitness from whom he gathered information.

But what is further problematic for Blomberg’s assumption is that his description of how the author of Matthew used Mark is way off. The author of Matthew does not “rely” onMark rather than redact Mark to change many of its traditions and versions of events. As scholar J.C. Fenton (The Gospel of St. Matthew, pg. 12) explains, “the changes which he makes in Mark’s way of telling the story are not those corrections which an eyewitness might make in the account of one who was not an eyewitness.” Here is a valuable article by Steven Carr that discusses some of the ways in which the author of Matthew actually usedMark. One thing that Carr discusses is how the author of Matthew “adds Jewish elements which ‘Mark’ overlooked.” To list a couple of of Carr’s examples:

• Mark 9:4 names Elijah before Moses. Naturally, Matthew 17:3 puts Moses before Elijah, as Moses is far more important to Jews than Elijah.
• Mark 11:10 refers to the kingdom of our “father” David. No Jew would have referred to “our father” David. The father of the nation was Abraham, or possibly Jacob, who was renamed Israel. Not all Jews were sons of David. Naturally, Matthew 21:9 does not refer to our father David.

These are subtle differences, but what they demonstrate is that the author of Matthewwas not “relying” on Peter via Mark, but was redacting the earlier work to make it more consistent with Jewish teachings! This makes no sense at all for Blomberg’s hypothesis. Matthew was described as a tax collector (a profession that made one a social outcast from the Jewish community). Peter, in contrast, was described as a Galilean Jew privy to Jesus’ inner circle. Why would Matthew redact the recollections of Peter via the writings of his attendant in order to make them more consistent with Jewish teachings?

Instead, scholars have long recognized that the anonymous author of Mark was most likely an unknown Gentile living in the Jewish Diaspora outside of Palestine. This is strengthened by the fact that Mark uses the Greek Septuagint to quote translations from the Old Testament. Likewise, the author is unaware of many features of Palestinian geography. Just for one brief example: in Mk 7:31 Jesus is described to have traveled out of Tyre through Sidon (North of Tyre) to the Sea of Galilee (South of Tyre). In the words of scholar Hugh Anderson in The Gospel of Mark (pg. 192), this would be like “travelling from Cornwall to London by way of Manchester.” These discrepancies make little sense if the author of Mark was a traveling attendant with Peter, an Aramaic-speaking native of Galilee [5].

Instead, scholars recognize that the author ofMatthew was actually a native Jew. As someone more familiar with Jewish teachings, he redacted Mark to correct many of the non-Jewish elements in the earlier gospel. This again makes little sense if the author ofMatthew were actually Matthew the tax collector, whose profession would have ostracized him from the Jewish community. Instead, scholars recognize that the later authorial attributions of both of these works are almost certainly wrong.

In fact, even conservative scholars like Bruce Metzger (The New Testament, pgs. 97-98) have agreed, “the apostle Matthew can scarcely be the final author” and “no simple solution to the problem of authorship is possible.” And Christian scholar Raymond Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament, pgs. 159-60) acknowledges, “That the author of the Greek Gospel was John Mark, a (presumably Aramaic-speaking) Jew of Jerusalem who had early become a Christian, is hard to reconcile with the impression that it does not seem to be a translation from Aramaic, that it seems to depend on oral traditions (and perhaps already shaped sources) received in Greek, and that it seems confused about Palestinian geography.”

The way that the Gospel of Luke uses Mark as a source likewise casts doubt on Mark being the original author. As discussed above, the author of Luke borrowed from as much as 65% of the material in Mark. This is all very interesting, since the author of Luke is likewise the author of Acts, and Mark, the attendant of Peter, has an appearance in Acts(12:25). That means that the author of Luke includes in his later narrative the supposed author from whose gospel he borrowed 65% of the material. Yet, never once does the author of Luke identify this man as one of his major sources!

As Randel Helms points out in Who Wrote the Gospels? (pg. 2):

“So the author of Luke-Acts not only knew about a John Mark of Jerusalem, the personal associate of Peter and Paul, but also possessed a copy of what we call the Gospel of Mark, copying some three hundred of its verses into the Gospel of Luke, and never once thought to link the two – John Mark and the Gospel of Mark – together! The reason is simple: the connecting of the anonymous Gospel of Mark with John Mark of Jerusalem is a second-century guess, on that had not been made in Luke’s time.”

Apologists here will try to dismiss this point as merely being an argument from silence. But again, as in the case of Matthew, the way that the author of Luke uses Mark strongly suggests that he was not “relying” on the recollections of Peter via his attendant, but wasredacting an earlier anonymous narrative. For example, Bart Ehrman in Jesus Interrupted (pgs. 78-84) discusses how the author of Luke changed many details of the passion scene in Mark, where Jesus is depicted in despair and agony, in order to portray Jesus instead as calm and tranquil in his own narrative (e.g. Jesus’ last words are altered from a despairing statement in Mk 15:33-37 to a more tranquil one in Lk 23:44-46). Why would Luke, the Gentile attendant of Paul, redact and change the recollections of Peter – the chief disciple of Jesus – about the passion, crucifixion, and death of Jesus? The reason why is that the author of Luke almost certainly did not believe that Mark was written by an attendant of Peter. Instead, the anonymous author of Luke redacted and changedMark, another anonymous author, to suite his own theological and narrative purposes [6].

A final note about the Gospels borrowing material from each other is that such works, which are not original works but are largely redactions of earlier traditions, generally lack authorial personality. They are not written to tell the recollections of any one person, let alone an eyewitness [7]. Instead, the Gospels are highly anonymous, not only in not naming their authors, but in writing in a collective, revisionist manner. New Testament expert Bart Ehrman (Forged, pg. 224) explains that the general anonymity of the Gospels in part owes itself to influences from the Old Testament:

“In all four Gospels, the story of Jesus is presented as a continuation of the history of the people of God as narrated in the Jewish Bible … All of these books are written anonymously … the message of the Gospels … is portrayed in these books as continuous with the anonymously written history of Israel as laid out in the Old Testament Scriptures.”

Their authors were more concerned about gathering a collection of their communities’ teachings and organizing it into a cohesive narrative. This is not at all the case for Tacitus. We might be suspicious of the authorship, if Tacitus had merely copied from 80% of the material of an earlier author (as the Gospel of Matthew did) in order to write a highly anonymous narrative. Instead, Tacitus wrote in a highly unique Latin style that distinguished him as an individual, personal author.

We have seen above that the internal evidence does not support Matthew, Mark, or John as the authors of the gospels attributed to them. What about Luke? The Gospel of Lukeand Acts are attributed to Luke, the traveling attendant of Paul. This is all very interesting, since we possess 7 non-forged epistles of the apostle Paul. If Luke was Paul’s attendant, then corroborating details between Acts and the Paul’s epistles may support the claim that Luke authored Acts. However, scholars often find the opposite to be the case. To name a few discrepancies:

• In Acts 9:26-28, Paul travels to Jerusalem after his conversion, where Barnabas introduces him to the other apostles. However, in Paul’s own writings (Gal. 1:16-19), Paul states that he “did not consult any human being” after his conversion and did not travel to Jerusalem until three years after the event, where he only met Peter and James [8].
• In Acts 16:1-3, Paul has a disciple named Timothy, who was born from a Greek father, be circumcised “because of the Jews who lived in that area.” However, this goes against Paul’s own deceleration (Gal. 2:7) “of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised.” Likewise, in Gal. 2:1-3, Paul brings another Gentile disciple, Titus, to the Jewish community in Jerusalem, but particularly insists that Titus not be circumcised [9]. Likewise, in 1 Cor. 7:20, Paul states regarding circumcision, “Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them.”
• In Gal. 2:6, Paul makes it clear that his authority is equal to the original apostles, stating, “whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—they added nothing to my message.” However, in Acts 13:31 Paul grants higher authority to those who originally “witnessed” Jesus. Likewise, Acts 1:21 restricts the status of “apostle” to those who had originally been with Jesus during his ministry, despite Paul’s repeated insistence that he was an apostle in his letters (1 Cor. 9:1-2).

In light of these and other discrepancies between Paul’s own recollections and how he is depicted in Acts, many scholars agree that the author of Luke and Acts was probably not an attendant of Paul (the speculation that he was is based largely on the ambiguous use of the first person plural in a few sections of Acts, to be addressed below). Nevertheless, the author of Luke and Acts clearly had a strong interest in Paul. However, the Oxford Annotated Bible (pg. 1919) points out the author “was probably someone from the Pauline mission area who, a generation or so after Paul.” Hence, we once more have an anonymous author who was distanced from the various traditions and stories that he compiled later as a non-eyewitness.

The same problem of discrepancies between a text with outside epistolary evidence does not exist in the case of Tacitus. For example, we have Pliny’s letters (6.16; 6.20) written to Tacitus about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Campania. This outside evidence is corroborated within the text, when Tacitus mentions the burial of cities in Campania in the praefactio of his Histories (1.2). That Tacitus mentions the eruption in the introduction to his history shows that he used Pliny’s account when fully describing the disaster later in his narrative (although these later books did not survive the bottleneck of texts lost during the Christian Middle Ages). Thus, in the case of Tacitus, we have harmony between outside epistolary evidence and the internal evidence of the text, whereas in the case of the Gospel of Luke, we have discrepancies between Paul’s letters, showing that the author was probably not a companion of Paul.

So far I have addressed the internal evidence for the authorship of Tacitus’ Histories and the Gospels. As has been shown, Tacitus has passed the criteria with flying colors, while all of the Gospels have multiple internal problems. These internal problems are probably already sufficient to dismiss the traditional authors on their own. However, there are likewise external reasons to doubt the traditional authors.

In terms of external evidence for the authorship of Tacitus’ Histories, we have Pliny the Younger (a contemporary) writing directly to Tacitus while he was authoring a Historiae. Thus, from the beginning, Tacitus was identified as the author of a history, and this history was identified as the Histories we have today by all subsequent authors who cite relevant passages. As Mendell (pg. 225) explains, “Tacitus is mentioned or quoted in each century down to and including the sixth.” Thus, Tacitus was identified as the author from thebeginning of the tradition, rather than merely being speculated to be the author later in the tradition. This is very strong external evidence.

We have precisely the opposite in the case of the Gospels. As New Testament expert Bart Ehrman (Forged, pg. 225) explains:

“The anonymity of the Gospel writers was respected for decades. When the Gospels of the New Testament are alluded to and quoted by authors of the early second century, they are never entitled, never named. Even Justin Martyr, writing around 150-60 CE, quotes verses from the Gospels, but does not indicate what the Gospels were named. For Justin, these books are simply known, collectively, as the “Memoirs of the Apostles.” It was about a century after the Gospels had been originally put in circulation that they were definitively named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This comes, for the first time, in the writings of the church father and heresiologist Irenaeus [Against Heresies 3.1.1], around 180-85 CE.”

Incidentally, Irenaeus wanted there to be specifically four gospels because there are “four pillars” of the Earth (Against Heresies 3.11.8). This was the kind of logic by which the Gospels were later attributed…

Ehrman (Forged, pg.226) goes on to explain:

“Why were these names chosen by the end of the second century? For some decades there had been rumors floating around that two important figures of the early church had written accounts of Jesus’ teachings and activities. We find these rumors already in the writings of the church father Papias [preserved in Eusebius Hist. eccl. 3.39.14-17], around 120-30 CE, nearly half a century before Irenaeus. Papias claimed, on the basis of good authority, that the disciple Matthew had written down the saying of Jesus in the Hebrew language and the others had provided translations of them, presumably into Greek. He also said that Peter’s companion Mark had rearranged the preaching of Peter about Jesus into a sensible order and created a book out of it.”

Incidentally, the church father Eusebius (Hist eccl. 3.39.13) elsewhere describes Papias as a man who “seems to have been a man of very small intelligence, to judge from his books.” Likewise, another fragment of Papias tells a story about how Judas, after betraying Jesus, became wider than a chariot and so fat that he exploded.

Irenaeus derived the authorship for Matthew and Mark from Papias. However, Ehrman (Forged, pgs. 226-227) goes on to explain:

“There is nothing to indicate that when Papias is referring to Matthew and Mark, he is referring to the Gospels that were later called Matthew and Mark. In fact, everything he says about these two books contradicts what we know about (our) Matthew and Mark: Matthew is not a collection of Jesus’ sayings, but of his deeds and experiences as well; it was not written in Hebrew, but in Greek; and it was not written – as Papias supposes – independently of Mark, but was based on our Gospel of Mark. As for Mark, there is nothing about our Mark that would make you think it was Peter’s vision of the story, any more than it is the version of any other character in the account.”

Irenaeus’ notion that the author of Luke and Acts was an attendant of Paul comes from speculation over a few passages in Acts where the author ambiguously uses the first person plural (16:10-17; 20:5-15; 21:1-18; 27:1-28:16). However, as scholars such as William Campbell have pointed out in The “We” Passages in the Acts of the Apostles (pg. 13):

“Questions of whether the events describes in the “we” sections of Acts are historical and whether Luke or his source/s witnessed them are unanswerable on the basis of the evidence currently available, as even the staunchest defenders of historicity and eyewitnessing acknowledge. More important, the fact that Acts provides no information and, indeed, by writing anonymously and constructing an anonymous observer, actually withholds information about a putative historical eyewitness, suggests that the first person plural in Acts has to do with narrative, not historical, eyewitnessing.”

Thus, the attribution to Luke the attendant of Paul is likewise unsound, being based on misinterpretations of vague narrative constructions in the text. Likewise, Ehrman (Forged, pg. 227) explains how Irenaeus spuriously speculated John the son of Zebee to be the author of the fourth gospel:

“The Fourth Gospel was thought to belong to a mysterious figure referred to in the book as “the Beloved Disciple” (see, e.g., John 20:20-24), who would have been one of Jesus’ closest followers. The three closest to Jesus, in our early traditions, were Peter, James, and John. Peter was already explicitly named in the Fourth Gospel, so he could not be the Beloved Disciple; James was known to have been martyred early in the history of the church and so would not have been the author. That left John, the son of Zebedee. So he [Irenaeus] assigned the authorship to the Fourth Gospel.”

As can be seen, Irenaeus’ attribution comes from little more than speculation over an anonymous character in the text (as we will be shown below, the actual internal evidence within John suggests that the anonymous “disciple whom Jesus loved” was probably a fictional invention of its anonymous author).

Thus, we have a clear trail of how all of the Gospels’ authors were derived from spurious 2nd century guesses: Matthew and Mark are based on Irenaeus misinterpreting passages in Papias that actually referred to other works, Luke was speculated to be an author based on little more than vague narrative constructions using the first person plural in the text, and John was based on speculation over an unknown “disciple whom Jesus loved.” Thus, not only is the external evidence weak, but all of it can be completely explained as later, spurious mis-attributions.

That the attributions were mere speculations is even reflected in the later titles. As I discussed above, the use of the construction κατά (“according to” or “handed down from”) in the titles already signifies that the attributions were speculative and merely traditional. As Ehrman (Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, pg. 42) points out, “Suppose a disciple named Matthew actually did write a book about Jesus’ words and deeds. Would he have called it ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’? Of course not… if someone calls it the Gospel according to Matthew, then it’s obviously someone else try to explain, at the outset, whose version of the story this is.” Thus, the traditional attributions from the beginning started with later authors merely speculating over the different versions of the Gospels to assign traditions.

Apologists like Blomberg, however, will still attempt another escape hatch. In The Case for Christ (pg. 27) he argues:

“These are unlikely characters … Mark and Luke weren’t even among the twelve disciples. Matthew was, but as a former hated tax collector, he would have been the most infamous character next to Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus! … So to answer your question, there would not have been any reason to attribute authorship to these three less respected people if it weren’t true.”

It is not clear to me why Matthew, as a reformed tax collector, would be hated next only to Judas, the man who betrayed Jesus. But this claim about these being “unlikely” attributions is already refuted above, where a clear trail is demonstrated for how the traditional authors were speculated. Furthermore, Ehrman (Forged, pgs. 227-228) points out:

“Some scholars have argued that it would not make sense to assign the Second and Third Gospels to Mark and Luke unless the books were actually written by people named Mark and Luke, since they were not earthly disciples of Jesus and were rather obscure figures in the early church. I’ve never found these arguments very persuasive. For one thing, just because figures may seem relatively obscure to us today doesn’t mean that they were obscure in Christian circles in the early centuries. Moreover, it should never be forgotten that there are lots and lots of books assigned to people about whom we know very little, to Phillip, for example, Thomas, and Nicodemus” [10].

Ehrman’s last point about other mis-attributions is likewise noteworthy. One thing that cannot be forgotten is that, in the context surrounding the Gospels, there were tons of mis-attributions and forgeries circulating in the early church. As Ehrman (Forged, pg. 19) explains, “At present we know of over a hundred writings from the first four centuries that were claimed by one Christian author or another to have been forged be fellow Christians.” In such a context, there were canonical disputes over which texts were authoritative, which led later authors, like Irenaeus in works like Against Heresies, to speculate and spuriously attribute texts to early figures in the church. As Ehrman (Forged, pgs. 220-221) summarizes:

“When church fathers were deciding which books to include in Scripture … it was necessary to ‘know’ who wrote these books, since only writings with clear apostolic connections could be considered authoritative Scripture. So, for example, the early Gospels that were all anonymous began to be circulated under the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John about a century after they were written … None of these books claims to be the written by the author to whom they are assigned … They are simply false attributions” [11].

Such is the case for why scholars doubt the traditional attributions of the Gospels. To return to Tacitus, however, there was no prevailing context of doctrinal and canonical disputes that would have encouraged a later author to assign the Histories to the Roman senator. Furthermore, while forgery and mis-atribution could happen with secular texts, scholars have found no evidence of any in the case of Tacitus (here is an article explaining why). The later authors who mention the work simply quote Tacitus as the known author, while the Gospels are a clear case of later speculations and mis-attribution.

Why do apologists attempt to go against the majority scholarly consensus to defend the traditional authors, anyways? The fact is that scholars over the last 150 years have recognized, after thorough study of the New Testament, that we do not have the writings of a single eyewitness of Jesus (the closest we come are in the 7 non-forged letters of Paul, who was not an eyewitness, was writing decades later, and provides very few biographical details about Jesus). Because of this, our knowledge of Jesus comes from little more than garbled oral traditions, legendary development, and finally, after half a century, anonymous hagiographies, like the Gospels, that are not even written in the same language that Jesus spoke. Our sources for Jesus are thus very poor and unreliable. None of this entails that Jesus did not exist, but we can scarcely reconstruct a general biography of his life, let alone prove any of his miracles.

An apologist may still argue that, even if the Gospels’ attributions are wrong, their authors may have still had access to an eyewitness original source. However, scholars likewise find this to be very unlikely. For Mark, the earliest Gospel, Ehrman (Forged, pg. 227) explains:

“There is nothing to suggest that Mark was based on the teachings of any one person at all, let alone Peter. Instead, it derives from the oral traditions about Jesus that ‘Mark’ had heard after they had been in circulation for some decades.”

The situation only gets worse from there, as the anonymous author of Matthew then borrows as much as 80% of the material of this earlier anonymous source, which itself was based on oral traditions. Likewise, the anonymous author of Luke copies from 65% of the material of the anonymous author of Mark. Furthermore, the author of Luke even makes clear that he did not have access to eyewitnesses, as he specifies in the in introduction of his gospel (1:1-2) that he was making use of written accounts (he identifies none of these authors, but we can tell that he copied Mark) that were based on mere traditions that were “handed down” over a span of time (allegedly from distant, original eyewitnesses, although the author of Luke names none).

John is the only gospel to claim an eyewitness source, and yet the author does not even name this mysterious figure, but simply refers to him as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” This is hardly eyewitness testimony, and internal evidence suggests that the author ofJohn merely invented this figure. Verbal parallels strongly suggest that the anonymous disciple is Lazarus from John 11 (verses 1; 3; 5; 11; 36), whom Jesus raises from the dead in the passage. This Lazarus is very likely based on the retelling of a story about an allegorical Lazarus in Luke 16:20-31. In the parable, Lazarus is a beggar who was fed by a wealthy man who dies and goes to Heaven, but the rich man dies and goes to Hell. The rich man begs Abraham in Heaven to send Lazarus to warn his family, since, if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent. In Luke, Abraham refuses to send Lazarus from the dead, arguing that people should study the Torah and the Prophets to believe and will not be convinced even if someone from the dead visits them. In the Gospel of John, however, in which Jesus is more prone to demonstrate his powers through signs and miracles, rather than by appeals to OT verses like in the Synoptic Gospels, the author instead has Jesus raise Lazarus, so that people may believe in him. The author of Johnthus very likely is redacting a previous story based on an allegorical character. Regardless, even if the anonymous beloved disciple is not based on this probable redaction, the Gospel of John is extremely ambiguous about this character’s identity, even refusing to name him at key moments, such as the discovery of the empty tomb (20:1-9), where other characters, such as Mary Magdalene and Peter are named, and yet this character is kept deliberately anonymous. The traditional identification of the disciple as John the son of Zebedee, among many other reasons, is undermined by the internal evidence of this beloved disciple’s connection with the high priestly families of Jerusalem (18:15-16), which hardly could be expected of the illiterate fisherman from backwater Galilee. The Gospel of John likewise shows signs of originally ending at John 20:30-31, and chapter 21, which claims the anonymous disciple as a witness, is very likely an addition from a later author. The chapter (21:24) distinguishes between the one who is testifying and the authors (plural) who know that it is true [12]. Furthermore, the final composition of John is dated to approximately 90 CE, which is largely beyond the lifetimes of any adult eyewitnesses of Jesus [13]. To compensate for this problematic chronology, the author even has to invent the detail that this supposed eyewitness would live an abnormally long life (21:23) to account for the time gap. This detail is further explained if the anonymous disciple is based on Lazarus, who was already raised from the dead and has conquered death. Ultimately, all of these details suggest that the unidentified “source” is almost certainly an authorial invention (probably of a second author) used to gain proximal credibility for the otherwise latest of the four canonical Gospels.

Conclusion:

To repeat the majority scholarly opinion that I discussed at the beginning from the Oxford Annotated Bible (pg. 1744):

“Neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith (Lk 1.4; Jn 20.31). Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.”

I have worked in this rather lengthy article to explain why many scholars agree this is the case. Furthermore, I have shown how the same scholarly methods for determining authorship can be used to doubt the Gospels, while confirming authors for whom we have more reliable traditions, such as Tacitus.

To summarize some of the same questions that we could ask about Tacitus’ authorship versus the Gospels, here are a few:

Does the attribution clearly identify the author, rather than use a grammatical construction to merely report a tradition?

Tacitus	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
Yes	No	No	No	No

Did the attributed author have sufficient literary training to author the work in question?

Tacitus	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
Yes	No	Plausible	Plausible	No

Does what we know of the author’s biography align with the internal evidence within the text?

Tacitus	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
Yes	No	No	No	No

Do authors who attribute the work outside of the text show signs of speculating over the author?

Tacitus	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Was there a prevailing context of mis-attribution, forgery, and canonical disputes surrounding the text that would increase the likelihood of its mis-attribution?

Tacitus	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

As has been shown, the same criteria for determining authorship can be applied for the Gospels as for any secular work, like Tacitus’ Histories. When scholars apply these criteria they find the authorial tradition of Tacitus to be reliable and the authorial traditions of the Gospels to be highly unreliable. I have provided just one example here in the case of Tacitus, but textual experts likewise have undergone rigorous analysis of other ancient authors, such as Livy, Plutarch, etc., and found the evidence to confirm their authorship. My main advice for determining any author for an ancient work is to first look at what previous scholars have found. You will find that mainstream scholarship for the last 150 years has found authorial traditions for authors like Tacitus or Plutarch to be reliable, whereas the vast majority of mainstream scholars doubt the authors of the Gospels.

A final note is that the criteria that I have used above provide qualitative, rather than justquantitative, reasons for doubting the Gospels’ authors. That is, the criteria that I employ are independent of each other (e.g. internal vs. external evidence). This means that the many reasons we have to doubt the authors are not just based on degree, but also vary bycategory. Sometimes apologists will make quantitative distinctions to argue for the reliability of the NT, such as claiming that a century is only a small span of time between the writing of a work and its attribution (e.g. apologists often claim that the 2nd century attributions are not really that far from the original compositions of the Gospels). However, such arguments are one-dimensional and superficial, since the amount of time elapsed is only an argument by degree. However, I have shown that categorically there are many sound reasons to doubt the Gospels, so that the mere degree of any one criterion is insignificant, when multiple other criteria go against the traditional authors. Likewise, it is noteworthy that Tacitus passed multiple independent criteria for identifying the author. The best explanation for how Tacitus could satisfy multiple categories of inquiry is because he is genuinely the author of the text. In contrast, the best explanation for why the Gospels’ traditional authors fail multiple categories of evaluation is that the later attributions genuinely do not fit the data.

-Matthew Ferguson

[1] Further noteworthy is that the κατά (“according to”) preposition does not even have to refer to named individuals. For example, the Gospel of the Hebrews is titled τὸ καθ’ Ἑβραίους εὐαγγέλιον (“the Gospel according to the Hebrews”). This construction hardly entails that the Hebrews themselves are the authors of the work, rather than the title referring to a tradition or group that the gospel was associated with. Thus, the κατά is hardly acting here as a claim to authorship. Another objection that apologists will make is that the titles had to use an unusual construction, because the title τὸ εὐαγγέλιον (τοῦ) Ιησού Χριστού (“The Gospel of Jesus Christ”) already had to use the objective genitive to indicate the subject of the life, and thus could not use a subjective genitive to indicate the author. However, there are Greek constructions that can avoid this problem and still have the author’s name in the genitive. For example, τὸ εὐαγγέλιον (τοῦ) Ιησού τοῦ Χριστοὺ τὸ (τοῦ) Μάρκου (“The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the one of Mark”). Nevertheless, the ancient scribes who added the titles made use of no such construction that would have more clearly identified an author.

[2] As Christian scholar Raymond Brown notes (An Introduction to the New Testament, pgs. 158; 208; 267), the titles were not added until the latter half of the 2nd century, during canonical disputes in which connecting particular scriptures with figures in the early church was used as a means of gaining authority and canonical status for a text. A minority of scholars have speculated that they were added earlier, such as Hengel in The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ. However, even Christian apologists find this view difficult to defend. Christian apologist Craig Blomberg (Making Sense of the New Testament, pg. 151), for example, while describing Hengel’s thesis as “suggestive and worth serious consideration,” concludes that this view is “ultimately speculative and not provable.”

[3] Furthermore, particular regions of the Roman Empire had lower levels of literacy, such as rural regions like Galilee, and likewise Greek literacy was even further limited if these areas were fluent in another language, such as Aramaic. In the case of rural Galilee, scholar Mark Chancey in The Myth of a Gentile Galilee and Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus finds that literacy was largely restricted to two major urban centers, Sepphoris and Tiberias, and that the rural Jews of the region had little interaction with the Greek language or Gentiles. These circumstances would certainly limit figures like Peter and John, both rural peasants from Galilee, from being able to author complex Greek prose, such as in the New Testament works attributed to them. This is, of course, in addition to the fact that such poor persons would not have had the sufficient literary training even in their own language to author complex prose scripture. Another apologetic response to the problem of literacy is that illiterate persons could have allegedly used a scribe to whom they would dictate the work. However, this assumption misunderstands both the nature of literacy and how scribes were used in antiquity. It is true that literate persons, such as Paul, would dictate (in Greek) to scribes who would write down his words, as evidenced in Rom. 16:22 and Gal. 6:11. However, that does not entail that an illiterate person could dictate prose in a foreign language. One could, of course, further speculate that an illiterate person told a scribe the gist of a story, which the scribe then interpreted, organized, and wrote in a different language. However, in such a case the scribe would be the actual author of the work. Furthermore, Ehrman (Forged, pg. 77) raises another problem for this speculation: “Where in the ancient world do we have anything at all analogous to this hypothetical situation of someone writing a letter-essay for someone else and putting the other person’s name on it – the name of the person who did not write it – rather than his own name? So far as a I know, there is not a single instance of any such procedure attested from antiquity or any discussion, in any ancient source, of this being a legitimate practice. Or even an illegitimate one. Such a thing is never discussed.”

[4] The typical apologetic response to this passage is to claim that ἀγράμματος (“illiterate”) only means “uneducated” or “lacking formal rabbinic training.” However, it was typically educated Jews with rabbinic training who belonged to the small portion of the Jewish population who could author complex prose. Furthermore, while it is possible that the passage is merely referring to rabbinic training, it is far more probable, given the historical context, that the passage also indicates illiteracy. Catherine Hezser in Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine finds that only about 3% of the population could read and most of these would have lived in cities or large towns (not typical of where the disciples of rural Galilee were from). Furthermore, as Ehrman (Forged, pg. 73) explains, “Most people outside of the urban areas would scarcely ever even see a written text. Some smaller towns and villages may have had a literacy level around 1 percent. Moreover, these literate people were almost always the elite of the upper class. Those who learned to read learned how to read Hebrew (not Greek).” Likewise, we have archeological evidence that suggests that Peter, who is described alongside John as ἀγράμματος (“illiterate”) in Acts 4:13, was in fact illiterate based on excavations of his hometown in Capernaum. As Ehrman explains (Forged, pg. 74-75), “In order to evaluate Peter’s linguistic abilities, the place to begin, then, is with Capernaum … The archeological digs have revealed … there are no inscriptions of any kind on any of the buildings … Reed [Archeology and the Galilean Jesus, pgs. 140-169] concludes that the inhabitants were almost certainly ‘predominantly illiterate’ [even in Aramaic] … In short, Peter’s town was a backwoods Jewish village made up of hand-to-mouth laborers who did not have an education. Everyone spoke Aramaic. Nothing suggests that anyone could speak Greek. Nothing suggests that anyone in the town could write. As a lower-class fisherman, Peter would have started work as a young boy and never attended school. There was, in fact, probably no school there.” Bear in mind that John is described as ἀγράμματος (“illiterate”) alongside Peter in the passage, for whom we have very strong archeological evidence that he was probably illiterate. Thus, the best interpretation of the passage is that Acts 4:13 is describing Peter and John as bothlacking Rabbinic training and being illiterate.

[5] Apologists, of course, have come up with a number of attempts to rationalize this problem in geography. However, as scholar C.S. Mann (Mark, pg. 322) explains, “While the text is clear enough at this point, the geography is impossible to reconstruct … The attempts of various commentators past and present to make sense of this awkward journey are often more inglorious than enlightening.” Mann further notes that the author of Matthew, who was probably more familiar with the region, in fact changes the itinerary to resolve the geographical problems. As Mann (pg. 322) explains, “Matthew has no reference to Tyre and Sidon, nor yet of the Ten Towns, contenting himself merely with the statement that Jesus ‘departed from there and came by the Sea of Galilee’ (15:29).” Likewise, this particular problem is hardly the only problem with Palestinian geography inMark. Another problematic route is in Mk 11:1, which has Jesus and the disciples, in approaching Jerusalem from Jericho, come first to Bethphage and then to Bethany. As Helms (Who Wrote the Gospels?, pg. 6) explains, “Anyone approaching Jerusalem from Jericho would come first to Bethany and then Bethphage, not the reverse. This is one of the several passages showing that Mark knew little about Palestine.” Nineham (The Gospel of St. Mark, pgs. 294-295) agrees, “Mark did not know the relative positions of these two villages on the Jericho road.” Another problem concerns the location of Geresa (modern Jerash). As Theissen (The Gospels in Context, pg. 242) explains, “According to 5:1ff, the town of Gerasa and its surrounding lands lie near the Lake of Galilee, although in reality Gerasa is about 65 kilometers southeast of the lake.” Likewise, Raymond Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament, pg. 160) notes, “No one has been able to locate the Dalmanutha of 8:10, and it may be a corruption of Magdala.”

[6] Of course, the common apologetic retort to redactions of this kind normally goes something along the lines of “different emotions can exist in the same man,” when Jesus is depicted in one gospel in a different manner than another. But such rationalizations greatly oversimplify the problem and miss the importance of the Synoptic Gospels’ interdependence in their source material. The author of Luke had a copy of Mark in front of him when he wrote about the passion and crucifixion of Jesus. Yet, at key moments, he made significant alterations in the previous narrative. In the Lukan narrative (23:27), a great number of people follow Jesus during his crucifixion, including a number of women, who are instead stated to have remained at a far in the Markan narrative (15:40). In the Lukan narrative (23:42-43), Jesus is crucified between two criminals, one of whom repents and to whom Jesus replies, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” However, in the Markan narrative (15:32), both of the criminals crucified next to Jesus mock him. In the Markan narrative (15:34-37), Jesus’ last words convey despair: “Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ (which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’).” However, in the Lukan narrative (23:46), Jesus’ last words convey resolve and tranquility: “Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he breathed his last.” We can try to brush off these differences by rationalizing that each author merely “told one half of the story,” but we know that the author of Luke had access to Mark. The far more natural explanation for the changes is that the author of Luke simply had a different opinion and wished to depict Jesus’ crucifixion in a different way. As I explain in my article about Bible contradictions, this is the type of conclusion that we would reach for any secular text. However, apologists who have presuppositions of inerrancy often twist themselves in logical pretzels to avoid obvious contradictions and redactions between the Gospels. For secular interpreters, however, I think the discrepancies and changes between the different authors are quite clear. Since the author of Luke changed the narrative in Mark to suite a different theological agenda, I think it is quite unlikely that this author thought that the account in Mark was based off the teachings of Peter.

[7] Apologists, of course, have attempted to extract authorial personality from selective readings based on a few tenuous passages and uses of vocabulary. For example, apologists have claimed that the author of Luke-Acts uses vocabulary specialized to physicians (the occupation that Luke, the attendant of Paul, was said to have) and takes extra notice of sick people. However, scholar Henry Cadbury in The Style and Literary Method of Luke has deflated much of these claims by a closer reading of the relevant passages. Cadbury undertook this research when completing his doctorate, and the joke went round in scholarly circles that Cadbury earned his doctorate by denying Luke of his.

[8] Fitzmyer (Acts of the Apostles, pgs. 438-439) elaborates further about this passage, “Luke reports the first visit of Saul to Jerusalem after his flight from Damascus (9:26-29; cf. 22:17; 26:20). It is the first of five, or possible six, postconversion visits to Jerusalem that will be enumerated (the counting depends on a problematic variant reading). Whether they are all individually historical is problematic. It may be that Luke, dependent on different sources, has historicized and individualized some of the visits, when he should rather have realized that he had inherited more than one record of the same visit … In any case, the first postconversion visit of Saul to Jerusalem in Acts is to be taken as that reported in Gal 1:18: ‘Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to consult Cephas, and I stayed with him for fifteen days.’ That means ‘three years’ after his experience on the road to Damascus.” As scholar Christopher Matthews (Oxford Annotated Bible, pg. 1937) concludes, “In Gal. 1:18 Paul states that his first visit to Jerusalem was three years after his conversion. Luke associates Paul with Jerusalem from the beginning.”

[9] A common apologetic rationalization for this contradiction is to claim that, because Timothy was born from a Jewish mother, he was racially considered a Jewish Christian, whereas Titus, who was born of both a Greek father and mother, was regarded as a Gentile. However, this interpretation is anachronistic and, as Fitzmyer (Acts of the Apostles, pg. 575) notes, belongs “to a later Mishnaic tradition (m. Kidd. 3:12: ‘the offspring is of her own standing’; cf. Str-B, 2.741).” However, as Cohen (“Was Timothy Jewish?,” pg. 268) explains, the “vast majority of ancient and medieval exegetes did not think” that Timothy was Jewish. “There is no evidence that Paul or the Jews of Asia Minor thought so. Ambrosiaster and his medieval followers did think so, but in all likelihood this interpretation is wrong because there is no evidence that any Jew in premishnaic times thought that the child of an intermarriage followed the status of the mother.”

[10] There are also many other later Christian texts that were attributed to obscure figures, despite Blomberg’s assertion that unlikely candidates would not be chosen if an attribution was invented. As Robert Price (The Case Against The Case For Christ, pg. 19) elaborates, “In fact apocryphal (which only means ‘not on the official list’ for whatever reason) gospels are attributed to such luminaries as Bartholomew, Judas Iscariot, the prostitute Mary Magdalene, doubting Thomas, the heretical Basilides, the even more heretical Valentinus, Nicodemus, and the replacement Matthias. They didn’t always go for the star names.”

[11] A common apologetic slogan about the church fathers’ attributions is that they allegedly “universally agreed” upon Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and thus were not speculating about the authors. However, this is only true of the later church fathers from the latter half of the 2nd century onward, whereas the earliest references to the texts treat them anonymously. Ignatius (c. 105-115 CE) and Polycarp (c. 110-140 CE), for example, quote the Gospels anonymously. Later, Justin Martyr (c. 150-160 CE) refers to the Gospels collectively as the “Memoirs of the Apostles.” Later still, Irenaeus (c. 175-185 CE) finally attributed the works to their traditional authors. This trail reflects a process in which the Gospels were gradually associated with the apostles, until eventually being attributed to specific names, when there were canonical disputes in the latter half of the 2nd century. Sometimes apologists will further claim that, if the attributions were invented, we would expect to see multiple names proposed for the Gospels. However, there is little reason to expect this. If there was only one canonizing movement, then there would only be one set of names attributed to the anonymous works, whereas multiple attributions would only be expected if there were separate, conflicting canonizing movements. Furthermore, as Robert Price (The Case Against The Case For Christ, pg. 18) points out, “We don’t have everyone’s opinions. We are lucky to have what fragments we do that survived the efforts of Orthodox censors and heresiologists to stamp out all ‘heretical’ opinions. However, we do know of a few differing opinions because Tertullian, Justin Martyr, and others had to take the trouble to (try to) refute them. Marcion knew our Gospel of Luke in a shorter form, which he considered to be the original, and he did not identify it as the work of Luke. He may have imagined that Paul write that version. Also … Papias sought to account for the apparent Marcionite elements in the Gospel of John by suggesting Marcion had worked as John’s secretary and scribe and added his own ideas to the text, which it was somehow too late for John to root out. Similarly, some understood the gospel to be Gnostic (rightly, I think) and credited it to Cerinthus.”

[12] It is not clear that the “beloved disciple” described at the end of John is even intended to be understood as the author of the work. As scholar Robert Kysar (The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 3, pgs. 919-920) explains, “The supposition that the author was one and the same with the beloved disciple is often advanced as a means of insuring that the evangelist did witness Jesus’ ministry. Two other passages are advanced as evidence of the same –19:35 and 21:24. But both falter under close scrutiny. 19:35 does not claim that the author was the one who witnessed the scene but only that the scene is related on the sound basis of eyewitness. 21:24 is part of the appendix of the gospel and should not be assumed to have come from the same hand as that responsible for the body of the gospel. Neither of these passages, therefore, persuades many Johannine scholars that the author claims eyewitness status.”

[13] Likewise, while church tradition maintains that John the son of Zebedee lived to a very old age, there is also a large body of ancient evidence indicating that he died much earlier, being executed alongside his brother James, whose martyrdom is described in Acts12:2. This body of evidence indicating that John did not live to old age is laid out by scholar F.P. Badham in “The Martyrdom of John the Apostle.” While it is historically uncertain whether John died alongside James, this body of evidence casts doubt on the tradition that John lived to an old age and thus raises further problems for the notion that John authored the fourth and latest gospel. As I explain in my article about the martyrdom of the disciples, our evidence for any of these church figures is very, very limited. In light of such poor evidence, in addition to contradictions among our sources, it is not tenable that John the son of Zebedee ever lived to an old enough age to author the gospel later attributed to him. This is just another problem for the authorial tradition of the fourth gospel, in addition to the numerous other ones listed above.