With all the challenges and obstacles, it’s fun being a historian of early Christianity. These are the topics people still find interesting. Although, I am often asked if being a historian of early Christianity means that I’m planning to be a priest. My father seems to think so! Anyways, one of the most shocking things (besides the fact that Jesus really did exist and that Dan Brown’s isn’t a good historian at all!) for those who come in contact with me and my work is the fact that we actually don’t know the names of people who wrote Gospels. How could that be? Don’t these books all have the authors’ names attached to them? If you pick up your Bible and open the New Testament, you will see the titles right there: Gospel of Matthew, Gospel of Mark, etc. Actually, things are much more complex than that! It’s a huge topic, so I’ll stick to Matthew’s gospel only!
There is a wide consensus among critical scholars that our gospels were written anonymously. It’s enough to look up any Introduction to the New Testament (link here, and here). It should be noted there are studies that try to refute this consensus (link here). Traditionally Gospels were thought to have been written by Matthew (a disciple who was a tax collector), John (the “Beloved Disciple mentioned in the Fourth Gospel), Mark (the secretary of the disciple Peter), and Luke (the traveling companion of Paul). On a surface level, one can see a problem in identifying these people as authors. For example, descriptions of Jesus in Matthew and John are different! They have different views of who Jesus was and what he talked about during his ministry. Just to note one difference: in Matthew, Jesus comes into being when he is conceived (virgin birth); in John, Jesus is the incarnate Word of God who was with God even before the creation of Earth! How is it possible that two people who followed Jesus for a year or two, listened to him every single day, have such a different view of who he was? But, there are other critical problems also!
None of the writers claims to be an eyewitness. We do have names on them, but they were attached later by editors and scribes to inform readers who they thought were the authorities behind the texts. That the titles are not original can be seen based on a simple reflection. Whoever wrote Matthew didn’t call it: “The Gospel according to Matthew” (Κατὰ Ματθαῖον Εὐαγγέλιον). Could you imagine a book with a title: Da Vinci Code according to Dan Brown? My upcoming article won’t be titled: “Charisma and Authority in the Early Church according to Marko Marina“. So, the title itself suggests it was something added later by a scribe or editor who gave us his opinion on the authorship of the Gospel. Not to mention the fact that the Gospel of Matthew was written completely in the third person. It’s always about what they (Jesus and the disciples) were doing. You can’t find a single reference in the first person. Even when an author mentions Matthew the tax collector, he doesn’t say: Jesus called me and I joined. Read it yourself: As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. ‘Follow me’, he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him (Mt 9,9). Does that sound as if Matthew is the author of that Gospel? Moreover, if disciple Matthew was really the voice behind the text, why would he copy a large part of the Gospel of Mark? There are verbatim agreements between those two, and scholars are certain that “Matthew” copied from “Mark”. Wouldn’t he just write his own Gospel based on his recollection of the time he spent with Jesus? Why copy from a guy who wasn’t even among the people who followed Jesus during his ministry? It really makes little sense. It should be added that one can’t be even certain that there really was a tax collector called Matthew who followed Jesus. I know that sounds weird, but there is a simple reason for that. The earliest written gospel (that of “Mark”) doesn’t mention Matthew but a guy named Levi, the son of Alphaeus as a tax collector and a disciple of Jesus. The author of the Gospel of Luke writing at approximately the same time as “Matthew” concurs! The problem is that Levi and Matthew are not similar names (it’s not like John and Joe). These are totally different names. Which Gospel is more reliable regarding this question? It’s hard to know. I think there really was a tax collector who followed Jesus, but it’s hard to know his real name or anything else about him (what was he like? Where did he come from? Etc.)
There are other hints that point in the same direction. For example, one can ask a basic question: What do we know about the followers of Jesus? If one reads New Testament accounts, it’s clear that Jesus’ disciples were all lower-class peasants from rural Galilee. True, Matthew is said to be a tax collector, but it is not clear how high up he was in the tax collecting organization: whether he was high up in the hierarchy or just a guy who is going from door to door to collect money. If the latter is the case, there is nothing to suggest that he would have required much of an education. Furthermore, in the ancient world, education was a privilege that only a few could afford. That is the reason why the majority of scholars are certain that the percentage of illiterate people was higher than 85%. One study suggests that the literacy level in Palestine during Jesus’ time was even lower than in the rest of the Roman Empire. Also, it was restricted to urban areas such as Jerusalem or Sepphoris (link here). It is no surprise then that the New Testament itself calls Peter and John “unlettered” (ἀγράμματος) (Acts 4,13). The main language in Palestine was Aramaic! On the other hand, Gospels were written in Greek, a language that suggests education and a high level of literacy. Is it possible that people like Matthew or John went through an education “system” after Jesus died? Well, anything is theoretically possible. But in this case, it’s highly unlikely. How many people from 1st century Palestine do we know of who could write in Greek? Only two, and they were upper-class aristocrats. One of them lived in Rome as a close friend of a Roman emperor! And even he states that he had problems in writing Greek.
External evidence of traditional authorship is extremely weak. The earliest source of any kind of tradition that links our Gospels to names such as Matthew or Mark comes from a church father named Papias who wrote a five-volume work called Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord. It is agreed upon that Papias wrote it somewhere between 110 and 140 CE, forty to seventy years after the first Gospel was written. Unfortunately, Papias’s work no longer survives. All we have come from quotations by later church fathers. It would be great if archaeologists would one day dig up a manuscript of this work in the desert of Egypt. But for now, we can only work with what we have. Nevertheless, he is an interesting source considering the fact that he states (in one of the quotations) that he personally talked with Christians who had known a group of people he calls “the elders”. These people knew some of Jesus’ disciples which would mean that we are dealing with third-or fourth-hand information. Two famous quotations from Papias are used in many articles and books: one related to Mark and the other related to Matthew. I’ll quote the latter one: “And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted them to the best of his ability”. Could that be evidence that Matthew really wrote Matthew? Well, there seem to be internal problems that can’t be ignored. For example, in stating this, Papias doesn’t say anything about his source of information. Is it third-hand? Fourth-hand? Who knows! If Papias was writing in 120, it was forty years after “our” Matthew was originally written. Likewise, two pieces of information that Papias gives us about Matthew are not true of “our” Matthew:
- Our Matthew is not just a collection of Jesus’ sayings – it’s a narrative of his life: words, deeds, conflicts, problems, arrest, execution, and resurrection!
- Our Matthew is written in Greek! There is not a shred of evidence that the Gospel of Matthew was a translation from a Hebrew original.
I should note that other quotations from Papias suggest he was inclined to all sorts of material that nobody today takes as a reliable account of what really happened. For example, Papias talks about the death of Judas: “Judas lived his career in this world as an enormous example of impiety. He was so swollen in the flesh that he could not pass where a wagon could easily pass. Having been crushed by a wagon, his entrails poured out”. He contradicts the account from Matthew who states that Judas died by hanging himself! There isn’t any serious scholar on this planet who thinks that Papias’s version of Judas’ death has anything to do with real history. Nevertheless, some scholars appeal to his witness in order to show that Matthew, the tax collector, really wrote the Gospel. It seems to me that they want to have support for their own points of view, and they’ll take any “evidence” they can get! But that’s not the way history works.
Our first secure external evidence on the authorship of the Gospel comes from Irenaeus, who wrote his masterpiece Against Heresies around 180 CE – approximately 100 years after the Gospels were originally written. By then, the Church had to deal with a lot of other gospels floating around. It was necessary to differentiate “right” from “wrong”, and “orthodoxy” from “heresy”. In that process, Church depicted the four most popular Gospels that were in accordance with the proclaimed faith and they were given names: the Gospel of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
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