Who Wrote the Gospels?
A Digest on Gospel Authorship
On my substack, one question comes up more than any other…
Who were the real authors of the Gospels?
Scholars generally think that the names traditionally attached to the gospels were not original to the gospels. But what does this mean for their authorship? Was the Church correct to associate them with the four figures we call Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Or is the identity of the gospel authors now impossible to recover?
The question is too large to tackle in a single post. But over the last few years, I have written a cluster of pieces which touch on the topic from different angles.
Below is a digest of seven of my posts on the gospels’ authorship.
Scholars often say that the gospels are anonymous. Their titles, ‘The Gospel according to X’, were added to the texts after their publication. Yet this claim may seem to rub against the fact that many of our earliest manuscripts do bear those titles. Why then are many scholars insistent that the gospels were anonymous, and what does this even mean? This piece explores the reasoning behind the majority scholarly view.
According to second-century tradition, the Gospel of Matthew was written by Jesus’ disciple. But mainstream scholars today reject this attribution. In this piece I outline why Matthew was probably not written by Matthew. I point to the late attribution of the Greek text to Matthew, its use of sources, its narration of Matthew’s call, among other pieces of evidence, to show that Matthew likely did not write the gospel.
The rare few who defend Matthean authorship often point to the way that money is used in the gospel. Money is referenced more frequently and in a greater variety of ways than the other gospels, which is sometimes taken as internal evidence that the tax collector, Matthew, wrote it. In this piece, I ask whether the argument cashes out.
One early tradition from Papias, the Bishop of Hierapolis, suggests that Mark was based on the preaching of Peter. But many scholars today are doubtful of this tradition. They note that Mark’s gospel does not have the flavour of eyewitness testimony, and its presentation of Peter is largely negative. In this piece, I consider whether these are strong objections to a Petrine connection to Mark.
If there is a single person who composed more of the New Testament than any other, it is probably the author of the third gospel and its sequel, Acts of the Apostles. Christian tradition identified this author as ‘Luke the beloved physician’, a Gentile travelling companion of Paul mentioned in the Pauline corpus. But many scholars today doubt this attribution. In this piece, I unpack the key arguments for and against thinking that Luke the beloved physician composed the Doppelwerk.
If Luke the travelling companion of Paul did not write Luke-Acts, who did? Many scholars assume that it was written by a man. But in this piece, I examine a proposal by Professor Joan Taylor that the writer we call ‘Luke’ was a woman. This takes us to another look at the “we” passages and the relationship between Paul and Thecla.
John’s gospel claims to have been written by a figure known as the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’. But who was this figure? Tradition identifies him as John the Son of Zebedee, yet mainstream scholarship is sceptical of this view. In this piece, I compile a guide to the scholarly debate, presenting seven candidates for the beloved disciple – from Zacchaeus and Jesus’ brother, to Mary Magdalene and a literary device.
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