For skeptics of the traditional authorship of the gospels, some questions:
- 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 to someone who had a somewhat dubious track record (like Mark who abandoned Paul on a missionary journey) unless it was true that Mark wrote it?
- 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?
