Who Wrote the Gospels?

Who wrote the Gospels?

Who is behind the four names that tradition has associated with these texts since the 2nd century?

Who are Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John?

Were the Gospels really written by them?

Over the last 100 years, many exegetes (*) have questioned this…

To be fair, many of the observations made by recent biblical scholarship (backed by archaeological and/or philological evidence) are interesting and worth a closer look…

Today I’d like to try to sort out a few questions that have been rattling around in my head:

• Who are the four Gospels attributed to?
• Who is behind the traditions preserved in them?
• Is the testimony they contain authentic?

1 • Who wrote the Gospel “According to Mark”?

This Gospel (the oldest of the four) has been linked to the name “Mark” since the 2nd century (a very common Roman name at the time).

Tradition identifies the author as the “John whose other name was Mark” mentioned several times in the Acts of the Apostles (cf. Acts 12:12, 12:25, 15:39) (*).

(*) (According to Acts, Mark was the son of a woman who opened her home to Christians for their meetings and prayers, cf. Acts 12:12. During Paul’s first journey, Mark apparently quit the trip early, cf. Acts 13:13… which left Paul pretty salty, cf. Acts 15:37-39. Mark also shows up in Paul’s letters to Philemon, cf. Philemon 24; to Timothy, cf. 2 Timothy 4:11; and to the Colossians, cf. Colossians 4:10; as well as in Peter’s first letter, cf. 1 Peter 5:13.)

According to Eusebius of Caesarea, Mark was the “interpreter of Peter” (*). In Eusebius’s account, Mark never knew Jesus personally but got his information from Peter.

(*) (EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA, Ecclesiastical History III.39.15. Eusebius’s source is Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia around AD 125, who in turn was reportedly passing on the testimony of a certain “John the Presbyter,” a first-generation Christian who had known the apostles.)

In short, hats off to Eusebius for trying to trace the chain of testimony from Papias of Hierapolis all the way back to Jesus…

That said, there are several reasons why it is unlikely that this Mark, the “interpreter of Peter”—that is, a Jew from Jerusalem—wrote one of the four Gospels:

2 • Who wrote the Gospel “According to Matthew”?

As with Mark, the association with “Matthew” goes back to the second half of the 2nd century.

Here too, Eusebius of Caesarea cites Papias as his source:

So what does Papias mean here?

• Is he referring to a Hebrew original that Matthew later translated into Greek? (Some scholars hold this view. Back in 2016 I mentioned Jean Carmignac, who, in his book The Birth of the Synoptics, did a monumental job of back-translating the Greek text to reconstruct the original Semitic text.)
• Or is he talking about the Gospel according to the Hebrews, cited by many Church Fathers between the 2nd and 5th centuries and used by Christians in Palestine and by Jewish Christians around Aleppo, in Syria?

Critics are divided on the question…

…what’s certain is that today no philologist attributes this Gospel to “Matthew the tax collector,” one of the Twelve (Mt 10:3; cf. also 9:9; Mk 3:18; Lk 6:15; Acts 1:13). Here’s why:

Not to mention that the Gospel refers more than once to persecution (especially in Mt 10:16-33).

The text was most likely composed in the 70s by a Christian of Jewish origin, in a community where the apostle Matthew may have played an important role.

3 • Who wrote the Gospel “According to Luke”?

Early Christian tradition recognizes “Luke” as the author of both this Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.

We already find this in Irenaeus of Lyons (130-202):

Similar testimony is found in the Muratorian Canon (an ancient list of New Testament books) and in Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Tertullian.

This Gospel and Acts have been attributed to Luke for two reasons:

• In his letters, Paul mentions Luke several times as his coworker/companion (cf. Philemon 24; Colossians 4:14; 2 Timothy 4:11);
• Several passages in Acts are narrated in the first-person plural, as if the evangelist had been present for those events (cf. Acts 16:10-17; 20:5-15; 21:1-18; 27:1–28:16).

Starting in the late 19th century, however, many critics began to doubt this testimony, both because the Greek name “Luke” (Loukás, Λουκάς) was quite common at the time, and because an author’s use of “we” was a common literary device in antiquity. Not to mention that in the Gospel’s prologue (cf. Lk 1:1-4), Luke places his own work at the end of a line of eyewitnesses and of the “many” who had already written accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection before him.

In short, here too exegetes have questioned whether “Luke the companion of Paul” is really the author of this Gospel:

On the other hand, nearly all critics agree that this Gospel and Acts were written by the same author (even though no manuscript has the two texts side by side), for linguistic, literary, and theological reasons.

4 • Who wrote the Gospel “According to John”?

The fourth Gospel repeatedly mentions a mysterious figure: “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (Jn 13:23-26; 19:26-27; 20:2-10; 21:7, 20-23).

Irenaeus of Lyons was the first to identify him with John, the son of Zebedee, and to name him as the author of the fourth Gospel (*):

(*) (Irenaeus’s source is his teacher Polycarp, who in turn was a disciple of the apostle John)

In his letter to Florinus (quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea), Irenaeus also shares some interesting details:

Many critics consider it unlikely that the author of this Gospel was an apostle, both because of its late date (as I mentioned before, the Gospel of John is thought to have been written between 90 and 100) and because “the disciple whom Jesus loved” portrayed here is very different from the John, son of Zebedee, of the Synoptic Gospels (cf., e.g., Lk 9:54-55; Mk 10:35-40):

What’s more, near the end of the Gospel we find this verse:

“We know“… “we” who? The speaker seems to be not so much the eyewitness himself as the members of the community in which the Gospel was written.

On the other hand, a close look at the text turns up some very interesting details:

Even granting that the fourth Gospel was not written by the apostle John, there’s no denying its very strong connection to one of the Twelve, through the role he played in the community where it was written:

Conclusion

So, bottom line: who wrote the Gospels?

Some critics (the majority) consider it unlikely that they were written by the evangelists whose names they bear.

Others (a minority) critique the critics.

The Church’s Magisterium hasn’t been too concerned with untangling this knot…

…but on one point it has been very clear: we know (no matter who actually wrote the last word) that all four canonical Gospels are of apostolic origin (cf. Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, no. 18).

What does “apostolic origin” mean?

It means that the Gospels originated within communities that gathered around the apostles (unlike the apocryphal gospels).

Communities that grew up around people who knew Him: people who lived with Him, walked with Him, ate with Him, listened to Him…

…people who “smelled like Jesus.”

salt

(Fall 2021)