5 ms·

None of the names associated with the gospels had anything to do with the writing of said gospels. All of them were composed after the deaths of these people.

hyfbjtdeh 2y ago
We know this. Because someone said it. And someone else wrote it down.
- tasty_freeze 2y ago
  There are writings from early Christianity which reference the Gospels. Bart Ehrman has said it isn't until circa AD 170 where the the gospels have an author's name attached to them.
  - zifpanachr23 2y ago
    Right, but due to pretty obvious references earlier than then we can assume they were written earlier. We don't really have great information on authorship or the exact forms the texts took...but it's largely agreed upon that there were books about Jesus floating around (we don't necessarily know the content) well before AD 170 (throw in some wiggle room years past Jesus death for stuff to settle down and spread, and subtract some years for the spread from the earliest references, and you wind up within the range most scholars would date the authorship). That may have been what you were trying to say and I just misunderstood. I think I may have just misunderstood what you meant by the 170 AD date.
    - tasty_freeze 2y ago
      For sure, they were written earlier. The point is two of the purported authors claim to be of the 12 disciples; the other two were scribes to two apostles. There is no evidence that this is true. It seems weird that the authorship was not reported for 140 years and then suddenly the authors were rediscovered. Why does it matter? It is the difference between eyewitness testimony and hearsay. Either type of testimony could be true or false, but generally speaking we put more weight on eyewitness testimony and far less on hearsay.
      - lambdaphagy 2y ago
        The claim that the authorship was not reported for ~90 years (not 140!) is an inference based on the surviving material from a literary culture very different from our own, separated from us by 2,000 years. Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy is highly recommended to those interested in the question of how different typographical print culture can be from manuscript culture, let alone from oral culture (of which the 1st century Mediterranean was a kind of intermediate form). The primary argument against the traditional assignation of authorship of the Gospels is that they're not referred to by name in the Church Fathers before Irenaus (~180 AD). But by the literary standards of the ancient world, that just doesn't seem that weird to me? The early Fathers were referring to works by authors in living memory, and the prevailing bibliographical standards were somewhat lax for even further removed sources. We wouldn't claim that anyone who referred to Aristotle as "the philosopher" or Isaiah as "the prophet", as often happened, didn't know their names. Moreover, Justin Martyr (~150 CE) is often cited as evidence against named Gospels, but in the same source he refers to the Gospels collectively as "the memoirs of the Apostles", which doesn't help the case for anonymous authorship. The biggest problem for the anonymous theory, however, is simply that there are no manuscript witnesses to support it: all the early manuscripts have titles. So the anonymous theory has to posit: - The last Gospel, John, was reduced to writing about ~95 AD. - The Gospels circulated throughout the Mediterranean in anonymous form. - At some point before 180 AD, the Church decided to get its story straight and assigned names to the Gospels. - At that point, everyone from France to India started referring to the Gospels with their present names, without any controversies or mixups. - All of the earlier anonymous manuscripts were lost to history. I'm not saying that definitely could not have happened, just that it doesn't seem especially more plausible than the traditional account. I've read a suspiciously large amount of historical criticism for someone who doesn't do this for a living, thinking I would finally get to the bottom of what the New Testament was "really" about. I came away with the impression that the optimal amount of attention to pay to NT hist crit is either a lot, or zero. Every generation of hist crit somehow comes away with the conclusion that the NT is really about the issues of concern to that generation. In fact this has been going on ever since the field was founded by 19th century German Romantics, who discovered that the NT was the product of national ur-spirits expressed through folklore [!] Our cultural familiarity with the NT sometimes keeps us from seeing how strange a collection of documents it really is. It is perhaps the best attested collection of sources in the ancient world, yet contains a mixture of Greco-Roman biography and history, supernatural events, and mystical theology. I am not trying to persuade you of any particular view about NT scholarship so much as challenge the idea that there's anything cut and dry about it.
Shawnj2 2y ago
Ehh for Mark and Matthew yes. I think that John and Luke are at least supposed to be from the perspective of John and Luke mainly because Luke uses first person language in Acts and the entire premise of John is that it’s from John’s perspective. It’s also possible that Eg they’re written down from an earlier oral tradition which originated with them

hyfbjtdeh 2y ago

We know this. Because someone said it. And someone else wrote it down.

tasty_freeze 2y ago
There are writings from early Christianity which reference the Gospels. Bart Ehrman has said it isn't until circa AD 170 where the the gospels have an author's name attached to them.
- zifpanachr23 2y ago
  Right, but due to pretty obvious references earlier than then we can assume they were written earlier. We don't really have great information on authorship or the exact forms the texts took...but it's largely agreed upon that there were books about Jesus floating around (we don't necessarily know the content) well before AD 170 (throw in some wiggle room years past Jesus death for stuff to settle down and spread, and subtract some years for the spread from the earliest references, and you wind up within the range most scholars would date the authorship). That may have been what you were trying to say and I just misunderstood. I think I may have just misunderstood what you meant by the 170 AD date.
  - tasty_freeze 2y ago
    For sure, they were written earlier. The point is two of the purported authors claim to be of the 12 disciples; the other two were scribes to two apostles. There is no evidence that this is true. It seems weird that the authorship was not reported for 140 years and then suddenly the authors were rediscovered. Why does it matter? It is the difference between eyewitness testimony and hearsay. Either type of testimony could be true or false, but generally speaking we put more weight on eyewitness testimony and far less on hearsay.
    - lambdaphagy 2y ago
      The claim that the authorship was not reported for ~90 years (not 140!) is an inference based on the surviving material from a literary culture very different from our own, separated from us by 2,000 years. Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy is highly recommended to those interested in the question of how different typographical print culture can be from manuscript culture, let alone from oral culture (of which the 1st century Mediterranean was a kind of intermediate form). The primary argument against the traditional assignation of authorship of the Gospels is that they're not referred to by name in the Church Fathers before Irenaus (~180 AD). But by the literary standards of the ancient world, that just doesn't seem that weird to me? The early Fathers were referring to works by authors in living memory, and the prevailing bibliographical standards were somewhat lax for even further removed sources. We wouldn't claim that anyone who referred to Aristotle as "the philosopher" or Isaiah as "the prophet", as often happened, didn't know their names. Moreover, Justin Martyr (~150 CE) is often cited as evidence against named Gospels, but in the same source he refers to the Gospels collectively as "the memoirs of the Apostles", which doesn't help the case for anonymous authorship. The biggest problem for the anonymous theory, however, is simply that there are no manuscript witnesses to support it: all the early manuscripts have titles. So the anonymous theory has to posit: - The last Gospel, John, was reduced to writing about ~95 AD. - The Gospels circulated throughout the Mediterranean in anonymous form. - At some point before 180 AD, the Church decided to get its story straight and assigned names to the Gospels. - At that point, everyone from France to India started referring to the Gospels with their present names, without any controversies or mixups. - All of the earlier anonymous manuscripts were lost to history. I'm not saying that definitely could not have happened, just that it doesn't seem especially more plausible than the traditional account. I've read a suspiciously large amount of historical criticism for someone who doesn't do this for a living, thinking I would finally get to the bottom of what the New Testament was "really" about. I came away with the impression that the optimal amount of attention to pay to NT hist crit is either a lot, or zero. Every generation of hist crit somehow comes away with the conclusion that the NT is really about the issues of concern to that generation. In fact this has been going on ever since the field was founded by 19th century German Romantics, who discovered that the NT was the product of national ur-spirits expressed through folklore [!] Our cultural familiarity with the NT sometimes keeps us from seeing how strange a collection of documents it really is. It is perhaps the best attested collection of sources in the ancient world, yet contains a mixture of Greco-Roman biography and history, supernatural events, and mystical theology. I am not trying to persuade you of any particular view about NT scholarship so much as challenge the idea that there's anything cut and dry about it.

Shawnj2 2y ago

Ehh for Mark and Matthew yes. I think that John and Luke are at least supposed to be from the perspective of John and Luke mainly because Luke uses first person language in Acts and the entire premise of John is that it’s from John’s perspective. It’s also possible that Eg they’re written down from an earlier oral tradition which originated with them