In the previous post, I talked about the oral traditions passed on for decades before they were written down. Our first biography of Jesus was written c. 70 CE (Mark), our last c. 90-100 CE (John). Before that, people were telling stories about Jesus’ life all across the Roman Empire. These stories experienced change and interventions every time they were transmitted before they were finally written down. But passing stories for decades isn’t our only challenge in reconstructing the Historical Jesus. If it was the case that these stories were actually collected, revised, and written down by the apostles who witnessed Jesus’ life (Matthew, and John) or the companions of the apostles (Mark, and Luke), things would look, from a historical point of view, much better. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about the changes that happened during the transmission period. However, that isn’t the case. People just assume that the Gospels were written by these individuals because their names are at the beginning. If you open your Bible and go to the Gospels, you would see the titles “The Gospel According to Matthew”; “The Gospel According to Mark”, “The Gospel According to Luke”, and “The Gospel According to John”. Church tradition has held that the authors were two of Jesus’ disciples (Matthew, the tax collector, and John the son of Zebedee), and two companions of the apostles: Mark as a companion or interpreter of the apostle Peter, and Luke as a companion of the apostle Paul! However, most New Testament scholars doubt that. In fact, it appears that the New Testament Gospels were originally anonymous documents that circulated like that for several decades among the first Christian communities. How do we know that? In this and the next post, I’ll be digging deeper into the question of the Gospel’s authorship.

INTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR THE AUTHORSHIP: EXAMPLES OF TACITUS AND THE GOSPELS

How do historians establish the authorship of the ancient narrative documents? There are two important ways to do that. We look for the internal and external evidence that could point us toward the identity of the author. As far as internal evidence goes, the biblical Gospels are strictly speaking anonymous documents. Take for example the Gospel of Matthew. The author never identifies himself – anywhere in the narrative. It is a narrative written in the third person. Even in the chapter where Matthew (the tax collector, and Jesus’ disciple) is mentioned, it still is a third-person narrative. The author doesn’t say “And then Jesus called me”. In contrast, he continues to write about Matthew as if he is not talking about himself: “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). Nothing here suggests that the author is talking about himself. Quite the contrary! Why doesn’t the author seize the opportunity to say “Yeah, I’m that Matthew, I was following Jesus!” That would be a great way to increase the authority and credibility of his narrative. But he doesn’t do that! Why? Because, the author is someone else, not Matthew – the tax collector and one of the twelve apostles. Furthermore, biblical scholars have known for decades that the author of the Gospel of Matthew used large portions of the Gospel of Mark – we have verbatim quotations (word for word) where “Matthew” quotes from “Mark”. Why would a disciple of Jesus who followed him for months use the material from someone (Mark) who wasn’t the eyewitness of Jesus’ life? That makes no sense to me.

Other classical writings have authors identified themselves already at the beginning of the narrative. Take, for instance, Thucydides. In the prologue of his magnum opus, he states: “Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.” To be honest, not all Greco-Roman authors identified themselves in the text. The Roman author Tacitus wrote Histories and Annals. Nowhere in the text does he explicitly mentions his identity. Although, he does give some implicit information about himself. For example, Tacitus connects himself with the events he describes: In my own case I had no acquaintance with Galba, Otho, or Vitellius, through either kindness or injury at their hands. I cannot deny that my political career owed its beginning to Vespasian; that Titus advanced it; and that Domitian carried it further (Hist. 1.1.). In other words, Tacitus does position himself as a member of the Roman political life during the Flavian dynasty which is in accordance with the other biographical information we have on him based on other sources from that period (e.g. Pliny the Younger). We have nothing similar to that with the Biblical Gospels. Evangelists are always in a “third person” mode – as if they were not directly part of that story.

That brings us to the other part of the internal evidence: manuscript traditions. What about the titles in the manuscripts itself? The oldest manuscripts of the Gospels that contain titles are dated to the beginning of the 3rd century – 100 to 140 years after the Gospels were originally written. However, the structure of those titles suggest that they weren’t part of the original text. Take for instance “Papyrus 75” that contains parts of Luke’s and John’s Gospel with the titles included!

Since all of you, for sure, read Greek, you can spot the title ευαγ’γελιον κατα λουκαν and bellow that: ευαγ’γελιον κατα ιωαννην. This structure of the title (with a preposition κατα) is, at best, unusual. The structure itself suggests that this wasn’t the part of the original text. No author would title his work like that. Comparing it with the example of Tacitus – nowhere in the preserved manuscripts do you find such a formulation of the authorship and title of the work. In contrast, you have the name of the author in genetive possessive case (Corneli Tacitii) + the title of the work. Or in other cases in the manuscript tradition you have Cor. Taciti Libri – The books by Cornelius Tacitus. The preposition κατα indicates that the title was subsequently imputed by the third party in order to distinguish between various Gospels. Only in the 2nd century when other Gospels (e.g. The Gospel of Peter, The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Philip, etc.) emerged, the necessity of naming the hitherto anonymous gospels arose.

Another aspect of the internal evidence is the question of coherency between the text itself and the known facts about the alleged author. Based on the quality and nature of the writing, we can conclude that a certain level of education was needed for some text. It is not the same to write a short letter of only a few sentences and a complex theological or historical treatise. On the basis of everything we know about Tacitus from other sources (he was a Roman senator and a provincial governor), he would certainly have enough formal education to write complicated works such as the Histories or Annals. Unlike that, everything we know about the apostle John (for example) speak against him being the writer of the fourth Gospel. This Gospel was written in a highly stylized Greek with the indications that the author was a highly educated individual with an excellent background in philosophy and theology. Apostle John, as far as we know, was a lower class fisherman from rural area of Galilee. In fact, it is stated explicitly in the New Testament that this John was unlettered or ἀγράμματοί (Act 4:13). Simply put, he was illiterate. That goes along with everything we know about the formal education in the Graeco-Roman world – a phenomenon I wrote about in a scholarly article few years ago (see: here). I think that a similar case could be made for Matthew – despite the fact that he was a tax collector. I think that he wasn’t educated enough to write a complex narrative text such as the Gospel that is ascribed to him. But that would go beyond the scope of this short article.

So, these are the main internal reasons for thinking that the Biblical Gospels weren’t written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Of course that this presents a particular challenge to a historian who is trying to reconstruct the Historical Jesus. I would prefer that the Gospels were really written by those people. In that case, we would have either the first hand information from the apostles (Matthew and John) or the second hand information from those who personally knew the apostles (Mark and Luke). Unfourtunaty, we don’t have that. The Biblical Gospels were originally “anonymous” documents. This is even more visible when we look at the external evidence for the authorship – a topic I’ll be dealing with in the next post.