Why doesn't Justin Martyr name the gospel authors?

Critics of the traditional gospel authorship attributions make much of the fact that Justin doesn't name the authors of the gospels. And he fails to name the authors even though he cites the documents so often (or similar documents, depending on your view of what he was citing).

One problem with that appeal to Justin's silence is that we have so much evidence for interest in gospel authorship and the naming of the authors both before the time when Justin wrote and shortly afterward. Those sources are widespread geographically, theologically, in terms of their personalities, etc. See my last post about the pre-Justin sources, for example. So, it seems that Justin's practice is more the exception than the rule, and we should treat it accordingly.

Before I get to why Justin didn't name the gospel authors, I want to address another factor that should be taken into account. Justin does offer partial corroboration of the traditional authorship attributions, as discussed here. His reference to "apostles and those who followed them" (Dialogue With Trypho, 103) lines up well with the traditional attributions to two apostles (Matthew and John) and two associates of the apostles (Mark and Luke). And, as my post just linked discussed, Justin seems to know that the gospel of Mark is associated with Peter, which partially corroborates Markan authorship, given that the Mark under consideration is typically thought to have been a disciple of Peter. Comments like these from Justin provide evidence that he had a substantial amount of knowledge about the origins of the gospels. He explicitly names John as the source behind Revelation:

"And further, there was a certain man with us, whose name was John, one of the apostles of Christ, who prophesied, by a revelation that was made to him, that those who believed in our Christ would dwell a thousand years in Jerusalem; and that thereafter the general, and, in short, the eternal resurrection and judgment of all men would likewise take place." (Dialogue With Trypho, 81)

If Justin is attributing the book of Revelation to John, as is likely, then Justin is offering corroboration that John had interest in and the ability to produce documents, contrary to modern skeptical objections based on John's alleged illiteracy, lack of education, etc. Again, though Justin doesn't name the gospel authors for us, he does give us a substantial amount of partial corroboration of the traditional authorship attributions.

I think the best explanation for why he doesn't name the gospel authors is that he wanted to emphasize their collective testimony, the cumulative weight of what they wrote. Another way of putting it is that he wanted to highlight the fact that he was appealing to the life of Jesus as the gospels present it as a whole, not just in part. I'll discuss a few indicators I've noticed that seem to point in that direction.

The genre of Justin's extant writings offers some support for the view I'm advocating. He was writing as an apologist in contexts that emphasized Jesus' life as a whole. He was responding to Judaism (Dialogue With Trypho) and paganism (First Apology, Second Apology), not just doing something like responding to a heretical group that only disagreed with orthodoxy about some smaller portion of Jesus' life or a particular doctrine or group of doctrines. That sort of apologetic context is one in which appealing to the cumulative weight of the gospels would have some merit. I'm not saying that anybody writing in such a context would have to avoid naming the gospel authors. But there is some merit to emphasizing the combined testimony of the authors in such a context, and avoiding singling them out by name would be one way of doing that.

Furthermore, there are a lot of collective comments about the gospels in Justin's writings. He cites a comment Trypho, his Jewish opponent, made that seems to refer to the gospels collectively as "the gospel": "I am aware that your precepts in the so-called Gospel are so wonderful and so great, that I suspect no one can keep them; for I have carefully read them" (Dialogue With Trypho, 10). Elsewhere in the document, Justin himself repeatedly refers to the gospels collectively as "the memoirs of the apostles" or some equivalent (100-107). In another document, he refers to them together as both "memoirs" and "gospels" (First Apology, 66-67). The large majority of the time, he uses the plural "apostles" or "those who followed them [the apostles]" to describe the authors. He does that even when he's citing material found in only one gospel. For example, he discusses the star of Bethlehem and the magi and refers to how the account comes from "the memoirs of His apostles" (Dialogue With Trypho, 106). So, it isn't just his not naming the authors that needs to be explained. It's also his use of the plural the large majority of the time, even though he could have singled out a document like the gospel of Matthew by saying "an apostle", "one of the apostles", or something else along those lines. The explanation I'm offering here addresses both Justin's not naming the authors and his tendency to refer to them in the plural.

Another line of evidence to take into account is what we see in one of his disciples. Tatian wrote the Diatessaron, the earliest extant harmony of the gospels. It's probably not just a coincidence that the indicators of interest in the collective testimony of the gospels that we see in Justin are illustrated so explicitly in his disciple.

Did Justin have our gospels (not just similar documents) and assign the traditional authorship attributions to them? Almost certainly. But he had reason, and reason that has some merit, to avoid naming the authors as a means of emphasizing their collective testimony. Regardless of whether I'm right about that, Justin's partial corroboration of the traditional gospel authorship attributions, the pre-Justin sources, and the ones who wrote shortly after he did make it highly unlikely that the anonymous gospels hypothesis is the best explanation of what happened.