2 Part Post…

Timothy Paul Jones Mark, Luke, and John dictated the books that bear their names? According to skeptics, these four first-century personalities had little or nothing to do with the four New Testament Gospels. One scholar of the more skeptical sort has described the process in this way:

[The New Testament Gospels] were written thirty-five to sixty-five years after Jesus’ death, … not by people who were eyewitnesses, but by people living later. … Where did these people get their information from? … After the days of Jesus, people started telling stories about him in order to convert others to the faith.[i] … When … Christians recognized the need for apostolic authorities, they attributed these books to apostles (Matthew and John) and close companions of apostles (Mark, the secretary of Peter; and Luke the traveling companion of Paul).[ii]

In other words, Christians didn’t connect the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because these individuals actually wrote the Gospels. Early believers fabricated these connections to make the documents seem more authoritative.

Now, it is indeed quite likely that the earliest Gospel manuscripts didn’t include titles in the manuscripts themselves (though the possibility titles on tabs hanging from manuscripts or inscribed at the end of each book should not be ruled out). But there’s a serious problem with the skeptics’ reconstruction.[iii] By the late first and early second century, the Gospels had spread throughout the Roman Empire.[iv]

If second-century Christians had simply added names to each Gospel to make that Gospel seem authoritative, what would have happened? (Remember, there was no centrally-recognized authority to force congregations to connect a certain name to each Gospel—no executive director, no denominational board, no international convention of Christians.[v] And it wasn’t as if one pastor could stop by an office and email fellow-pastors about how to name a certain Gospel!)

Here’s what would likely have occurred: One church might have dubbed a Gospel with the name of Andrew, for example, while another congregation ascribed the same Gospel to Peter or Thaddeus or Bartholomew. As a result, each Gospel might have a half-dozen—or more!—different names, depending on where your ship happened to land.

But that’s not even close to what we find when we look at the ancient manuscripts.

Here’s what we do find: Once titles begin to appear in the manuscripts, every titled manuscript of the Gospel that we know as Matthew identifies Matthew as the source. And this happens not only with the Gospel According to Matthew but also with the other New Testament Gospels. Although the precise form and wording of the titles may vary, every titled manuscript of the Gospel According to Mark identifies Mark as the Gospel’s author—and the same pattern also marks manuscripts of the Gospels According to Matthew, Luke, and John. The literary form of the titles changes from one manuscript to another, but the ascribed author remains the same in every titled manuscript.

How did this happen?

Here’s the explanation that seems to make the most sense: When churches received each Gospel, they also received information about that Gospel’s origins, telling them whose eyewitness testimony this Gospel represented. Because they received clear oral traditions when they received each book, when Christians began adding titles to these manuscripts, every congregation connected each Gospel to the same author.
Why?

They already knew where each Gospel came from. Nothing less can explain the early consistency of the titles.

Who Really Wrote the Gospels?

So it seems that, from the time when the texts first began to circulate, the content of the New Testament Gospels was thought to have originated with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. If indeed Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were the sources of the books that bear their names, each New Testament Gospel derives from eyewitness testimony about Jesus.

What’s recorded in the Gospel According to Mark is the testimony of Simon Peter, recalled and preserved by John Mark. Luke’s Gospel integrates written and oral sources gathered by Paul’s personal physician. The materials that are unique to the Gospel According to Matthew came from Matthew, a tax collector who deserted his profession to follow Jesus. And the stories in the Gospel According to John? They originated in John Bar-Zebedee—one of Jesus’ first followers.

[i] B. Ehrman and W. Craig, “Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?: A Debate between William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman” (March 28, 2006): Retrieved August 1, 2006, from .

[ii] Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 235.

[iii] In the New Testament world, a theretofore-unknown idea had been emerging for some time—the requirement that a trustworthy work be reliably connected to a specific author. Otherwise, the work was subject to suspicion as a forgery. See D. Dungan, Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making of the New Testament (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2007) 34-35, 47.

[iv] By the early to mid-second century, the Gospels had probably reached most, if not all, primary population centers of the Roman Empire by this time.

[v] The Easter controversy makes it clear that no universally-recognized authority figure existed in the second century. Two bishops of Rome—Anicetus and Victor—tried at different times in the second century A.D. to standardize the date of Easter celebrations among Christians. Yet churches in the eastern half of the Roman Empire—primarily Asia Minor—persisted in celebrating Easter at a different time than the churches around Rome. The matter was still not settled in the fourth century A.D., as is clear from the proceedings of the Council of Nicea. For various accounts of this controversy, see Raniero Cantalamessa, et al., Easter in the Early Church: An Anthology of Jewish and Early Christian Texts (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993) 34-37; Eusebius, 5:23—28; Francis A. Sullivan, From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001) 140-153.

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In an earlier blog post, I explored the evidence that the four New Testament Gospels were linked with the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from the time they first began to circulate in the churches. In this post, I want to dig a bit deeper into specific first- and second-century testimonies about the authorship of the Gospels.

Papias of Hierapolis and the Authorship of the New Testament Gospels

The first testimony comes from Papias, a pastor in the southwestern portion of the area known today as Turkey. Papias was probably born in the middle of the first century, around the time of Paul’s second missionary journey. In the late first or early second century, Papias became the leading pastor of a church in the city of Hierapolis. Philip, a deacon from the Jerusalem church (Acts 6:5; 8:4-8), spent the last years of his life in Hierapolis. It was apparently from Philip’s daughters—the ones mentioned in Acts 21:8-9—and from associates of the apostolic eyewitnesses[i] that Papias received his information:[ii]
I won’t hesitate to arrange alongside my interpretations whatever things I learned and remembered well from the elders, confirming the truth on their behalf. … The elder said this: Mark, who became Peter’s interpreter, wrote accurately as much as he remembered—though not in ordered form—of the Lord’s sayings and doings. For [Mark] neither heard the Lord nor followed after him, but later (as I said) he followed after Peter, who was giving his teachings in short anecdotes and thus did not bring forth an ordered arrangement of the Lord’s sayings; so, Mark did not miss the point when he wrote in this way, as he remembered. For he had one purpose: To omit nothing of what he had heard and to present no false testimony in these matters. … And Matthew, in the Hebrew dialect, placed the sayings in orderly arrangement.[iii]

Although Papias recorded these traditions in the early second century,[iv] he received them well before the end of the first century.[v] If Papias of Hierapolis was familiar with Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels before the end of the first century, both Gospels must have been completed in the first century, while eyewitnesses of the events were still alive. It’s probable that Papias also recorded traditions about Luke’s and John’s Gospels, but—since the writings of Papias have survived only in fragmentary form—those testimonies have been lost.

Polycarp of Smyrna and the Authorship of the New Testament Gospels

If Papias alone had made these claims, perhaps we could pass over them as the product of one man’s imagination. But Papias doesn’t stand alone in this testimony. Another pastor—a man named Polycarp, born around the year 70—received the same information about the Gospels, separate from Papias.

As a young man, Polycarp was a student of John, the follower of Jesus. As an adult, Polycarp became pastor of a church in the village of Smyrna. Here’s what Polycarp learned from the eyewitnesses and passed on to one of his pupils:

Matthew composed his Gospel among the Hebrews in their language, while Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and building up the church there. After their deaths, Mark—Peter’s follower and interpreter—handed down to us Peter’s proclamation in written form. Luke, the companion of Paul, wrote in a book the Gospel proclaimed by Paul. Finally, John—the Lord’s own follower, the one who leaned against his very chest—composed the Gospel while living in Ephesus, in Asia.[vi]

So it wasn’t only Papias who knew the New Testament Gospels in the late first or early second century. Polycarp was familiar with them too—and not only Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels but also the Gospels According to Luke and John.
Taken together, the testimonies of Papias and Polycarp clearly suggest that—from the first century forward—Christians knew that the testimonies in the four Gospels could be traced to first-century apostolic eyewitnesses or close associates of the apostles.[vii]

The Muratorian Fragment and the Authorship of the New Testament Gospels

This testimony doesn’t even end with the words of Papias and Polycarp! A seventh-century copy of a second-century document survives that summarizes similar origins for the New Testament Gospels, apparently independent of Papias or Polycarp. The first few lines of the Muratorian Fragment are missing, but here’s what survives related to the Gospels:

…at which nevertheless he was present, and so he arranged them. The third book of the Gospel is the one according to Luke. Luke, the well-known physician—after the ascension of Christ, Paul took him as one zealous for the law—composed it in his own name, according to widespread knowledge. Yet he himself had not seen the Lord in the flesh; therefore, as he was able to ascertain events, so indeed he begins to tell the story from the birth of John. The fourth of the Gospels is that of John, one of the disciples.

What Does This Mean for You?

Many so-called “Gospels” claimed to come from apostles in later times—but only the four New Testament Gospels are traced to apostolic eyewitnesses and their close associates by multiple sources from the first and second centuries. The New Testament Gospels were not late-written legends; they were texts based on eyewitness testimonies, written while the eyewitnesses were still alive.

[i] Irenaeus seems to suggest that Papias knew the apostle John. See Irenaeus of Lyons, Sancti Irenæi espiscopi Lugdunensis et martyris Detectionis et eversionis falso cognominatæ agnitionis, seu, Contra hæreses libri quinque in Patrologiae cursus completes, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, France: Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857) 5:33:4.
[ii] For a thorough examination of the place of Papias and of the general authenticity of his claims, see R. Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006) 12-38, 202-239.
[iii] Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, Books I—V, ed. Kirsopp Lake, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926), 3:39.

[iv] Eusebius places Papias—with Clement of Rome—in Trajan’s reign, before the martyrdom of Ignatius in A.D. 107 (Eusebius, 3:36). See R. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Handbook for a Mixed Church Under Persecution (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1994) 610-611; R. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1993, 2000) 1027-1029.

[v] Bauckham, 17-18.

[vi]Irenaeus of Lyons, Contra Haereses, 3:1:1-2. Some have questioned the authenticity of Irenaeus’s recollections from his years with Polycarp. However, Irenaeus’s entire letter to Florinus—a friend who had joined a movement that denied the authentic humanity of Jesus Christ—testifies to his time with Polycarp: “O Florinus, … when I was a boy, I watched you in lower Asia with Polycarp, moving in splendor in the royal court, and trying to gain his approval. I remember the events of that time even more clearly than those of recent years. Whatever it is that boys learn, as they grow in their minds, merges permanently with their minds. That’s why I can still describe the very spot in which blessed Polycarp sat as he taught; I can still describe how he exited and entered, his habits of life, his expressions, his teachings among the people, and the accounts he gave of his interaction with John and with others who had seen the Lord. As he remembered their words—what he heard from them about the Lord and about his miracles and teachings, having received them from the eyewitnesses of the ‘Word of Life’—Polycarp related all of it in harmony with the Scriptures. … Continually, by God’s grace, I still recall them in faith. I testify before God that, if the blessed and apostolic elder heard any such thing [as the beliefs that Florinus had recently embraced], he would have cried out, placed his fingers in his ears—as was his habit—and exclaimed, ‘Good God! To what sort of time have you spared my life that should have to endure such things as this?’” (Eusebius, 5:20:4-8). The tone and content of this letter strongly corroborates Irenaeus’s connection to Polycarp. If Irenaeus was not in fact a disciple of Polycarp, such a letter as this one would have proved meaningless to Florinus and would have provided fodder for the arguments of Irenaeus’s opponents.

[vii] The influential work of J.D. Crossan merits special mention at this point. Crossan places the following idiosyncratic dates on the New Testament Gospels: Secret Gospel of Mark and Mark’s Gospel as it has survived to us, he places between A.D. 60 and 80, even though Secret Gospel of Mark is almost certainly a twentieth-century hoax. Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels are dated in the 90s, as well as a first edition of John’s Gospel. The surviving edition of John’s Gospel—according to Crossan—does not emerge until the early-to-mid-second century. Simultaneously, Crossan places the “lost Gospels” far earlier than most biblical scholars. See J.D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991) 427-434. Even such scholars as Bart Ehrman—far from an evangelical in his view of the Gospels—dates Mark’s Gospel in the 60s, Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels in the 70s or 80s if not earlier, and John’s Gospel no later than the 90s (B. Ehrman, Lost Christianities [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003] 19-20).