Early Interest In Mark's Authorship

When critics of the traditional gospel authorship attributions discuss the subject, they sometimes distinguish between the two earlier gospels, which they consider to be Mark and Matthew, and what they take to be the latter two, Luke and John. They'll concede that there are significant internal indications of authorship in the latter two sources, such as the "we" passages in Acts and the reference to the author of the fourth gospel in John 21:24. But it's suggested that we don't have anything like that for the other two gospels.

First, we should note that the critics' view of Christianity often depends on a highly negative view of all four gospels, not just two of them. Their concessions about Luke and John are important, then.

Secondly, the order of the gospels doesn't matter much in a context like this one. We're talking about a timeframe of a few decades most likely, with some of the same people still alive when the last gospel was published, social factors remaining largely the same, and so on. Furthermore, there isn't much to go by in judging whether Matthew was written before Luke or Luke was written before Matthew. I've argued elsewhere, like here, that Luke probably was written no later than the mid 60s. If critics want to place Matthew earlier than that, then the earliness of the document will be problematic for them.

Third, features like the "we" passages in Acts and the comments made in John 21:24 are just a couple of lines of evidence among many others for the authorship of the third and fourth gospels. Some of the other types of evidence we have for the authorship of those gospels also exist for Mark and Matthew. All four of the gospels, not just the latter two, likely were distinguished from one another by means of author names, and the authors of all four, not just the latter two, could be identified by means of oral reports, titles, tags, the writing on the cover or spine of a codex, etc. Objecting that Mark and Matthew don't also have something like the "we" passages or an equivalent of John 21:24 doesn't change the fact that they do have multiple other lines of evidence for their authorship. See here regarding gospel authorship in general, here and here on Mark in particular, and here on Matthew in particular, among many other relevant posts in our archives.

Fourth, though Luke and John have advantages over Mark in the contexts critics are highlighting, there's another context in which Mark has an advantage over those other gospels. If Mark was the first gospel, as critics typically maintain, then its being the first would draw people's attention and interest accordingly. That would be true not only because of Mark's significant role as the first of the gospels, but also because of its role as a source for the later gospels. And Mark would have had the longest amount of time among the gospels for people to look into its background, ask questions about it, and so forth. It wouldn't make sense for critics to assign so much significance to Mark as having had that sort of primacy among the gospels, but then turn around and suggest that people wouldn't have had much or any interest in its authorship.

Fifth, though I've just given a plausible reason for there to have been significant early interest in the authorship of the gospel of Mark, and I think it's likely there was such interest, we don't have to know why there was early interest in order to know that there was. Papias cites a first-century church leader, referred to as "the elder" (probably John the son of Zebedee), showing interest in Mark's authorship and disseminating details about it to other people. And, of course, Papias' recording of that information reflects his interest in the topic and his expectation that his audience would be interested in it. The elder he cites was a first-century source, Papias lived part of his life in the first century, and at least some members of his initial audience surely lived part of their lives in the first century. So, we have multiple lines of evidence for interest in Mark's authorship among first-century sources. And the modern argument that Papias was referring to some other document affiliated with Mark, not our gospel of Mark, is dubious, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere. The early interest in Mark's authorship isn't the same as something like the "we" passages in Acts or John 21:24, but it is evidence that the authorship of Mark's gospel was of interest and being looked into early on, not just later, which has some evidential value when judging the authorship of the document.