Why be good?

[Randy Carson]

It is not just that the gospel authors did not see these events first hand, it is also the ridiculous, mythic, bronze age stories they contain within that makes them unreliable as a historic document.

My time is limited today, but I did want to add something for you to consider regarding the authorship of the gospels.

Imagine that the gospels were written and distributed to all the churches with no names attached to them. The names of the authors were quickly forgotten because no one cared about that. The idea of apostolic authority meant nothing to the early church. When someone got up to read from a gospel, no one in the congregation really knew which gospel he was reading from because they had no names to distinguish them.

But more importantly, fifty years goes by...one hundred years goes by...two hundred years. And then an amazing thing happens: we find that the churches which are scattered all over the Roman empire and the Mediterranean DO have names for the gospels - AND THE NAMES ARE THE SAME WHEREVER YOU GO. 

It's not as if the Church in Thessalonica called the first gospel, the "Gospel According to Matthew" while a Church in Alexandria referred to it as the "Gospel of Andrew". The Church in Rome did not refer to the last gospel as the "Gospel of Phillip" while that same book was known as the "Beloved Disciple's Gospel" in Antioch.

This was before the Internet, before telephones, before electricity. How did the Churches decide - loooooooong after the fact - what the names of each of the Gospels was going to be? And how did they communicate that information to hundreds, maybe thousands of local churches, in order to get them all to agree to the new names?

And since the Early Church Fathers were also writing during all those years, why is it that we don't have any record of them calling a single gospel by any name other than the traditional name by which it is known today?

Who organized all this coordination so many years after the fact? And how on earth did they manage to pull of such a logistical feat?

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The plain answer is that when the Gospels were written, they were distributed from Church to Church, and the recipients would have wanted to know all the details of where the Gospel had come from, who was the authority behind it, etc.

The Church - all of the individual congregations included - has ALWAYS known who the authors of the gospels were: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.