Evidence: The Gathering

[Randy Carson]

I'm sorry, I thought I was being clear. The information is the fact that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (and of course Acts, which dovetails with Luke and was most likely written by the same person) were not all written at once, by the disciples themselves, soon after the death of Jesus and then distributed among the faithful immediately after Jesus' death, as I had envisioned while a Christian; most Southern Baptists pretty much see the Canon as a single piece, essentially all handed down in a King James leather binding with all 66 books together, and don't consider the first- and second- century environment in which they were penned, both in historical terms and in terms of how people wrote back then as compared to how we write today.

I agree with you about the KJV, but I' a FORMER Protestant who's been Catholic for 35+ years.  

However, I'm not sure I understand what issues troubled you regarding the writing of the gospels.

Mark may have been written around AD 45; John around AD 95. Matthew, Luke and Acts were sprinkled in between. Why would it be a problem if there was spacing between them? Did learning this scandalize you?

And, yes, I think there is every reason to believe that the gospels were written by the traditional authors. I've made that argument before, so I'll hide it below...but one point before you click the button...does the gospel live and die on the basis of traditional authorship? I would argue that it does not. Consequently, while pointing to the authors as true eyewitnesses is a PLUS for the Christian case, it is not a required piece of evidence.

The upshot of all of this is that two things you cite above as contributing to your departure from the faith - date and authorship - should not have been and should not be a problem for you.

---

Who Wrote the Gospels?

While the historical reliability of the New Testament is not dependent upon knowing with certainty who the authors of the gospels were, it is indisputable that if the gospels can be shown to be written by eyewitnesses or by men who had access to eyewitnesses, the argument for the reliability of the New Testament as a whole is greatly advanced.

So, who wrote the gospels? Were they written by the men whose names we traditionally associate with these works within a lifetime of Jesus? Or were they written by “schools” which formed the gospels on the basis of their own traditions many decades later?

Evangelical author Dr. Craig Blomberg answers these questions in unambiguous terms:

“It’s important to acknowledge that strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous. But the uniform testimony of the early church was that Matthew, also known as Levi, the tax collector and one of the twelve disciples, was the author of the first gospel in the New Testament; that John Mark, a companion of Peter, was the author of the gospel we call Mark; and that Luke, known as Paul’s ‘beloved physician,’ wrote both the gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.”

Blomberg goes on to say: “There are no known competitors for these three gospels. Apparently, it was just not in dispute.”

Dr. Mary Healy, associate professor of Sacred Scripture at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, agrees.

“[Authorship of the gospels] is a very important question. It’s something that the Church has held consistently since the beginning is that the gospels are of apostolic origin which means that they were written either by apostles or by apostolic men – meaning men who were closely associated with them – and that’s the basis on which we have a firm confidence that the gospels really do reliably tell us who Jesus Christ was, and what he did and what he taught.”

Both Blomberg and Healy offer questions which must be answered by those who deny the traditional authorship of the gospels including:

• Why would copies of gospels circulate anonymously all over the Roman empire for decades and then suddenly be ascribed to the authors we know today unanimously without dispute in the second century?
  
• When the gospels were being read in the liturgy, how would they have been distinguished one from another if they did not have names such as “The Gospel of Mark” or “The Gospel According to Luke”?
  
• Why attribute a gospel written for a Jewish audience to Matthew, a man who would have been hated as a Roman collaborator by that audience, unless it was true that Matthew wrote it?
  

The latter question is particularly interesting today because of the popularity of “gospels” that were not included in the canon of inspired scripture. These fanciful accounts of Jesus, which were written centuries later, were commonly ascribed to more prominent members of the Early Church; thus, we have gospels according to Peter, James, Mary and Thomas among others.

Apart from these logical considerations, is there any evidence that the gospels were, in fact, written by their namesakes? The answer is yes, and here we turn to the historical writings of three ancient authors, Papias, Irenaeus and Origen.

Papias (d. ca. AD 100)

Little is known of the life of Papias. He may have been a hearer of the Apostle John and was a disciple of  Polycarp who was himself a disciple of John. Eusebius tells us that Papias was the Bishop of Hierapolis and a contemporary of Ignatius of Antioch. His writings are typically dated from about AD 95-125. In his preface, Papias states:

I shall not hesitate also to put into ordered form for you, along with the interpretations, everything I learned carefully in the past from the elders and noted down carefully, for the truth of which I vouch. For unlike most people I took no pleasure in those who told many different stories, but only in those who taught the truth. Nor did I take pleasure in those who reported their memory of someone else’s commandments, but only in those who reported their memory of the commandments given by the Lord to the faith and proceeding from the Truth itself. And if by chance anyone who had been in attendance on the elders arrived, I made enquiries about the words of the elders—what Andrew or Peter had said, or Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples, and whatever Aristion and John the Elder, the Lord’s disciples, were saying. For I did not think that information from the books would profit me as much as information from a living and surviving voice.

Having conducted his research, Papias writes the following concerning Mark:

And the presbyter said this. Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements.

Of Matthew, Papias writes:

Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.

Irenaeus (AD 130-200)

Irenaeus was Bishop of Lyons and a former disciple of Polycarp. In a brief passage, Irenaeus corroborates Papias concerning the authorship of Matthew:

"Matthew published his own Gospel among the Hebrews in their own tongue, when Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding the Church there. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, himself handed down to us in writing the substance of Peter’s preaching. Luke, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the Gospel preached by his teacher. Then John, the disciple of the Lord, who also leaned on his breast, himself produced his Gospel while he was living at Ephesus in Asia." (Adversus Haereses 3.3.4)

Origen (AD 185-254)

"Among the four Gospels, which are the only indisputable ones in the Church of God under heaven, I have learned by tradition that the first was written by Matthew, who was once a tax collector, but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, and it was prepared for the converts from Judaism, and published in the Hebrew [or Aramaic] language." (as quoted by Eusebius, H.E. 6. 25.3-4)

From the foregoing arguments and ancient testimonies, we can conclude that the synoptic gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and that these accounts were based on either direct or indirect eye-witness testimony.

---

Second Addendum: It occurs to me you may have been asking what exactly it was that convinced me that the Biblical stories were not an accurate or believable description of God's interaction with mankind. In that case, I'm referring to realizing that the human race is not 6000 years old and extant throughout the historical timeline, but are actually a blink in the history of the universe, and that it makes no sense for God to have waited to reveal Himself through the first >97% of the time Homo sapiens  have been around (that's using Francis Collins' 100,000 year number; I actually think it's closer to 200-250K), only to appear to one particular Bronze Age tribal sheepherder people, and just happening to share all their values, instead of appearing to the Chinese, the Kelts, the Malians, the Sumerians, the Dravidians, the Aryans, the Hyksos, the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Greeks, the Hittites, the Inca, or any of the major civilizations that have come before. Or to all of them, everywhere and often, so we wouldn't slaughter each other in the name of the "right" set of beliefs. The Judeo-Christian story just doesn't make sense to me on an evolutionary timeline, no matter how you dress it up.

This is a Protestant problem, Rocket...not a Catholic one. Yeah, Luther, Calvin and others wandered off the reservation 1,500 after Peter was named the first head of the Church, and the kinds of issues that you had problems with are the result of fundamentalist thinking that OUGHT to be rejected.

But that doesn't mean that ALL of Christianity is flawed. Only the heretical versions of it are.