Sunday, August 28, 2022

The Best And Earliest Evidence For Gospel Authorship

I can't be exhaustive here. These are just some examples, and more can be found in our archives. (See my collection of links to posts on Matthew's authorship here, for instance.) But I want to gather a lot of this information into one post that addresses all of the gospels. Some of the posts I'll be linking below discuss multiple topics, so you may have to search for the relevant material within the post that's linked.

- Once two or more gospels or other relevant documents were being used in church services, libraries, or other contexts, there would have been a need to distinguish among the documents. Luke 1:1-3 suggests that there was such a need as early as the middle of the first century. Even liberal scholarship acknowledges that there were multiple gospels being used together that needed to be distinguished from one another well before the end of the first century (e.g., Luke's use of the gospel of Mark). The practice from the second century onward of distinguishing among the gospels by means of author names makes that means of distinguishing among them the most likely one to have existed in the first century. So, there probably were author names attached to the gospels well before the end of the first century.

- The "we" passages in Acts identify the author of Luke and Acts to some extent, though without naming him.

- John 19:35 and 21:24 identify the author of the fourth gospel. See here for more about the relevant internal and external evidence, especially the evidence pertaining to whether the document was written by John the son of Zebedee or some other John.

- If 1 John was written by the same person who wrote the fourth gospel, as the internal and external evidence suggest, then 1 John 1:1-3 provides further evidence that the author of the fourth gospel claimed to be an eyewitness of Jesus.

- A church leader Papias refers to as "the elder", probably the apostle John, was discussing gospel authorship in the first century (in Eusebius, Church History, 3:39:15).

- Papias lists some of the disciples of Jesus, and the list ends with John and Matthew. The best explanation for why the list ends that way is that John and Matthew had gospels attributed to them in Papias' day. (For an expansion of the argument I summarized in the Amazon review just linked, see my interaction with some objections here.)

- Eusebius refers to how Clement of Alexandria derived the traditional gospel authorship attributions from some early elders (Church History, 6:14:5-7). Since Clement was born in the middle of the second century, the elders in question probably lived at least that early and easily could have been alive in the early second century or before then. For a discussion of the passage and its significance, see here.

- The testimony of the Apocryphon Of James.

- The testimony of the Epistle Of The Apostles.

- The testimony of Ptolemy.

- The testimony of Marcion and his earliest followers.

- The testimony of the Gospel Of Thomas.

- The testimony of the Ebionites.

- The testimony of Justin Martyr.

- The testimony of Heracleon.

- The testimony of Celsus and his Jewish source(s).

- The testimony of Theodotus.

- The testimony of a Roman source used by Irenaeus.

- What Tertullian wrote about the copies of the gospels in his day probably represents a widespread situation, which is reflected in the ancient gospel manuscripts we have today: "here I might now make a stand, and contend that a work ought not to be recognised, which holds not its head erect, which exhibits no consistency, which gives no promise of credibility from the fulness of its title and the just profession of its author" (Against Marcion, 4:2).

- And the gospel copies seen by Tertullian and others in his day and earlier would have included some older manuscripts. That conclusion isn't just likely in the abstract, but also is implied by some comments we have from ancient sources who mentioned the age of some of the texts they had. While discussing a textual controversy involving the book of Revelation, Irenaeus referred to the reading found in "ancient" copies (Against Heresies, 5:30:1). Bruce Metzger noted that some patristic sources refer to the preservation of some of the original copies of the New Testament documents (The Canon Of The New Testament [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], n. 4 on 4-5). He cited the examples of Tertullian's claim that the church of Thessalonica still possessed the original copies of the letters Paul sent them and the claim of Petrus I Alexandrinus that the church of Ephesus still had the original gospel of John. You don't have to believe such claims in order to recognize that the claims probably wouldn't have been made if such documents were never preserved for a long period of time. Given these claims by multiple ancient sources and the time, expense, and other factors involved in producing copies of documents in the ancient world, it's likely that some copies of the gospels would have been preserved for a long time. Christians' (and others') views of gospel authorship would have been shaped in part by gospel manuscripts that dated decades earlier, perhaps sometimes a century or more.

- I've cited some examples of early Jewish, pagan, and heretical sources corroborating the traditional gospel authorship attributions. For more examples, see here. If the gospels initially circulated anonymously, were originally attributed to people other than the traditional authors, or had significant problems associated with their traditional attributions, we'd expect these early non-Christian sources to recognize that fact and make an issue of it. Instead, they corroborate the traditional authorship claims.

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