The Many Reasons For Naming The Gospel Authors

I've mentioned that the early Christians had a need to distinguish among the gospels and similar documents and that the names of the documents' authors are the most likely means by which they made those distinctions. I want to expand upon an aspect of that situation.

It's important to recognize the number and variety of circumstances in which distinguishing among the documents would have been relevant. I often mention the use of the documents in church services and the storing of them in libraries as examples. But the need to distinguish among the writings in question would have been present in other contexts as well.

For example, anybody studying the gospels - reading them, looking up passages in them, comparing one gospel to another, or whatever else - would have need to distinguish among the documents. They would need to be distinguished in conversations, oral or written, as well. I've discussed the early Christian practice of distributing copies of the gospels, presumably often involving more than one gospel. They would need to be distinguishable in that context also. So, the need for distinguishing among the gospels and the opportunities for and appeal of placing titles on them, attaching identifying tags to them, and so forth would have existed early and in a large number and variety of contexts.

We should consider the early gospel authorship attributions in light of that background. Not only does that background tend to be overlooked or underestimated, but so do many of the earliest authorship attributions. The combined effect is that people tend to think the evidence for the attributions is much weaker than it actually is. Here are some comments I posted at another blog several years ago about some of the early attributions that are often neglected. Familiarize yourself with that evidence (and there's more like it, which I've discussed elsewhere) and the surrounding context I addressed above.