Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 7: My Explanation of the Problems with Church Tradition Concerning the Apostolic Authorship of the Gospels

(Book Review)

See Part 1 General Comments

Part 2: An Overview of Lee Strobel’s Argument that the Gospels are Based on Eyewitness Evidence

Part 3: Even if the Gospels Were Based on Eyewitnesses Evidence, That Would Not, Ipso Facto, Mean That They Were 100% Reliable

Part 4: Even if Lee Strobel Were Able to Prove that the Church Tradition about the Gospels Was Correct, Most of the Gospel Stories Still Would Not Be Based on Eyewitness Testimony

Part 5: My Explanation of Why the Church Tradition on the Apostolic Authorship of the Gospels is Incorrect

Part 6: The Gospels Do Not Contain Any Internal Evidence that they were Written by the Apostles.

            The tradition that the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John does not date back to the time of the apostles themselves.  We have nothing from within their lifetime that indicates they authored these Gospels

            Our earliest copies of the Gospels do not contain the titles of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.  (Granted, our earliest copies of the Gospels are just fragments, so it’s difficult to draw too much from this.)

            Also, the earliest quotations we have of the Gospels from the writings of the early Church fathers do not contain the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. 

            In ancient fragments, there’s substantial variation on how the titles are written, which indicates these were not part of the original text.  Furthermore, as Bart Ehrman points out, Matthew would never have titled his Gospel: “The Gospel According to Matthew”.  He would have just simply said “by Matthew” as the title line. [MORE ON THAT HERE]

            The names of the Gospels were not settled on until the mid second century.

            The earliest source we have on the authors of the Gospels is Papias, who wrote somewhere between 110 and 140 A.D., long after the apostles themselves would have been dead. 

            Papias only commented on the authorship of Matthew and Mark.  (He said nothing about the Gospels of Luke and John).

            As Bart Ehrman points out in Jesus, Interrupted, Papias is problematic to use as a source because he had a credibility problem.  The Church historian Eusebius (W) called Papias “a man of very small intelligence.”  Papias also seems to have believed in a lot of crazy stuff.  Papias believed that after Judas betrayed Jesus, Judas was cursed to bloat up, becoming so fat that eventually he couldn’t walk down the street because his head couldn’t fit between buildings, and eventually exploded and died. Ehrman cites other writings of Papias (surviving in Eusebius’s records) in which Papias quotes bizarre sayings of Jesus that no one today takes seriously at all.  Papias claimed that these sayings came from via the same church elders who vouched for Mark’s authorship. As Bart Ehrman notes, the only reason Christians ever bring up Papias is to establish the authorship of the Gospels.  Other than that, everything else he wrote is completely disregarded.  But, Erhman asks, if we can’t trust Papias on any of his other writings, why trust him about the authorship of the Gospels?

            Papias’s own writings do not survive (the other Church fathers apparently thought Papias’s writing were not worth saving), but some of his quotations survive in other writers. 

            Papias’s writings survive in the records of Eusebius.  Eusebius quotes Papias as saying that he personally talked to Christians who knew a bunch of people called the elders who vouched that Mark had written one of the Gospels.  (You can see already how this information is already 4th hand: theory of some anonymous elders, via anonymous groups of Christians, via Papais, as quoted in Eusebius).

            For Matthew, Papias doesn’t even say what his source is.

            Other than Papias, we don’t get any identification of the Gospels until Irenaeus in 180 A.D.  Here, for the first time, is someone now vouching for the authorship of Luke and John, after the apostles have all now been dead for quite some time.

            The time difference here is really quite incredible.  (As one blogger put it, this is like me now identifying the author of someone who wrote during the American Civil War.)

            Plus, there are any number of textual problems with the Church tradition inherited from Papias and Irenaeus.

            Ireneaus claims Matthew wrote his Gospel first (before Mark, Luke or John), and that it was originally written in Hebrew, and then only translated into Greek later.  (Papias also believes the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Hebrew.) 

            But all evidence points to Matthew being an originally Greek document.  No Hebrew copies of it have survived.  And as Robin Lane Fox points out, we know something about how the ancients translated documents, and we can generally tell if something was written originally in Greek, or if it was translated into Greek from another language.  There’s no textual evidence that Matthew was originally translated from Hebrew.  (And if Matthew had been originally written in Hebrew, then that would make the Synoptic problem that much more of an issue—but we’ll get to the Synoptic Problem in part 9).

            As Bart Ehrman points out, the probable reason that the Church tradition on the Apostolic authorship for the Gospels emerged in the late 2nd Century is that this was about the time that a lot of heretical Gospels started popping up that were forged under the names of the apostles (for example Peter, Thomas, Philip, et cetera).  Since the heretics were claiming that their Gospels were authored directly by the apostles, the Orthodox Church fathers needed to start coming up with traditions that linked their established Gospels back to the apostles.  The Orthodox Christians couldn’t be using Gospels with anonymous authors when the heretics claimed that their Gospels came directly from the apostles.

So Why Did the Church Fathers Then Settle on Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Instead of Attributing the Gospels to More Major Apostles like Peter, Paul, and James?

          There are a couple different theories for this:

            Bart Ehrman argues that it’s possible in the first and second centuries these names carried more weight in early Christian circles than they do today.  John-Mark, after all, was closely associated with both the missionary activities of both Peter and Paul.  Matthew and Luke may also have been bigger names back then than we realize.

(It’s notable that a lot of the heretic Gospels were attributed to apostles who are today considered minor—Thomas, Philip, Andrew, Mary Magdalene—but may have had more weight in some early Christian circles.)

            The big three names of the early apostles were Peter, James, John and Paul.  We already have the Gospel of John.  Luke was closely associated with Paul, and John-Mark was closely associated with Peter.  This was possibly a way of tying the Orthodox tradition directly to the big names of the Apostles, and yet at the same time not being too obvious about it.  (If they were too obvious about it, it might have invited the Gnostics and other unorthodox Christians to refute the authorship claims.)

           

            Robin Lane Fox, however, argues that it could be precisely because these figures were so minor that it was easy to attribute Gospels to them.  In the second century, Peter could have been too well known in Church circles to falsely attribute something to him—it might have been too well known by Peter’s associates that he never actually sat down and wrote a Gospel.  But minor figures like Matthew, John-Mark, and Luke would have been much more obscure, and harder to check up on if you claimed a Gospel was written by them.

            Also, it’s important to remember that the 4 Gospels were not originally forged under false names.  (Although other New Testament documents—Titus, 1&2 Timothy, 1&2 Peter—were forged, but that’s a separate topic.)  The Gospels were written anonymously, and only later did the Church try to assign names to them.  

            Robin Lane Fox suggests that the Church probably worked backwards from clues that they had in the Gospels.  For example Matthew is the only Gospel which defines the apostle Matthew by name (instead of “Levi” used in Mark), and the only Gospel that gives Matthew’s job as a tax collector.  Matthew’s Gospel also includes descriptions of sums of money in Jesus’s parables—the type of thing a tax payer would notice.  This kind of guess work might have caused the early church to attribute the Gospel to Matthew.  (Robin Lane Fox has similar theories for Mark and Luke.  I won’t list all the details here, but it’s the same kind of thing—they also involve working backwards from clues in the Bible.)

            The Gospel of Luke, because it’s preface makes clear the author was not an eyewitness, could never have been attributed to a major Apostle anyway, but it could easily be attributed to a companion of Paul.

Next: The Linguistic, Literacy, Cultural,and Geographic Problems Which Indicate the Gospels Were Not Written by the Apostles

Update:
One more little tidbit here.  As mentioned above, most of Papias's writings only survive via quotations in Eusebius.  And as for Eusebius, he was a die-hard Arian.

See here: