What Needs To Be Addressed In Gospel Authorship Disputes

Discussions will often focus inordinately on one Christian, like Papias or Irenaeus, or a small group of Christian sources. Some of the evidence that most needs to be addressed won't even come up. For example, what about the practical issue of how the gospels and similar documents were distinguished from one another in contexts like their use in church services, their being stored in libraries, and in the process of looking up information in them? In modern contexts, we use means such as titles on the covers of books and titles on book spines to distinguish one book from another. How were distinctions made during the earliest years when the gospels circulated (not just the second century and later)? We know that distinguishing among the relevant documents by means of author names was widely practiced from the second century onward, and continuity makes more sense than discontinuity. Since those who think the documents were distinguished differently in the first century or who want us to be agnostic on the subject bear the burden of proof (given the discontinuity they're giving credence to), what proof do they have to offer? Another significant issue that often gets neglected is what non-Christians (heretics, Jews, and pagans) said about authorship issues, not just Christian sources. People often suggest that somebody like Papias or Irenaeus had a Christian bias that makes him unreliable. How, then, do they explain the gospel authorship attributions of non-Christians? There's also the fact that people so often underestimate the Christian sources, such as their earliness, number, variety, and credibility. Both Christian and non-Christian sources frequently questioned traditional authorship attributions (e.g., Christian doubts about Revelation, non-Christian doubts about Daniel) and left documents anonymous or attributed to a group rather than an individual (e.g., The Martyrdom Of Polycarp). They were capable of doing the same for the gospels if the evidence warranted it. For a collection of resources on issues like these, see here. And here's one about Matthew in particular.

Since Papias comes up so often in these discussions (but see the posts just linked for examples of sources other than Papias before the time of Irenaeus), do a Ctrl F search for "Papias" here for responses to common objections related to him. I wrote a review at Amazon of a book about Papias, a review you can read here, and it addresses some relevant issues as well. Keep in mind that even if Papias' comments that are typically cited about the writings of Mark and Matthew are about documents other than our canonical gospels (an unlikely scenario), his comments would still provide evidence for the traditional gospel authorship attributions. It would be a lesser and more indirect form of evidence, but, on balance, it would still be evidence for the traditional attributions. His comments would still provide evidence that Mark and Matthew were literate, that they had interest in writing about gospel-related issues in particular, etc. If Papias was referring to something Matthew wrote that was roughly analogous to the hypothetical Q document, for example, instead of our canonical Matthew, that would still increase the plausibility of Matthew's having written the canonical gospel attributed to him. It's not as though ancient authors were only capable of writing one document. Since so many of Eusebius' citations of Papias are about lesser-known traditions he commented on (about Judas' death, about premillennialism, etc.), it would be plausible that Eusebius also cited some of Papias' comments of that nature related to Mark and Matthew. Or the Mark comments are about our canonical Mark, whereas the Matthew comments are about a previous writing of Matthew that Papias discussed in the process of addressing the canonical gospel attributed to him. Whatever the scenario, none of the typical skeptical objections to Papias' comments amount to much with regard to Papias, and they're even less significant with regard to the evidence for the gospels' authorship more broadly.