Here’s How We Know the Canonical Gospels Were Originally Anonymous

The four canonical gospels are traditionally attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew is said to have been a tax collector who became one of Jesus’s twelve apostles. Mark is a minor figure mentioned in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles who is said to have worked as a translator and secretary for the apostle Peter. Luke is said to have been a Greek physician who became a travelling companion of the apostle Paul. John is said to have been a fisherman who became one of Jesus’s twelve apostles along with his brother James.

Despite how well known these attributions are, however, New Testament scholars have realized for well over a hundred years now that the four canonical gospels were, in fact, originally anonymous works. They only became attributed to the authors to whom they are so widely attributed today in the second half of the second century CE, around a hundred years after the first of these gospels was originally written. In this article, I intend to explain the evidence for how scholars know this.

Dating the Gospel of Mark

Before we can talk about who wrote the canonical gospels, we first need to know when the canonical gospels were written. The Gospel of Mark (henceforth abbreviated as gMark) is almost certainly the earliest surviving gospel. Internal and external evidence strongly indicates that gMark was written sometime around the year 70 CE or thereabouts.

Possibly the strongest evidence that gMark was written sometime around this year is the way the gospel describes the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. gMark 13:1–2 states, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!’ Then Jesus asked him, ‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’”

In gMark 13:14, Jesus further warns, as translated in the NRSV:

“But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains.”

Later, gMark 15:29–30 emphasizes Jesus’s prediction of the destruction of the Temple again, claiming that people mocked Jesus while he was hanging on the cross, misinterpreting his prophecy to mean that he claimed he was going to destroy the Temple himself. The passage reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV:

“Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!’”

These passages almost unquestionably refer to how, in August 70 CE, the Roman legions under the command of the general Titus sacked and burned the city of Jerusalem. They utterly destroyed the Second Temple and all the buildings around it.

As the Temple and the buildings around it burned, the Roman legionaries erected their standards, bearing the images of the emperor and Roman deities, inside the court of the Temple itself, performed ritual sacrifices to them, and hailed Titus as emperor, amounting to the greatest sacrilege against the Jewish God and the Jewish religion. (This incident is recorded by the Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus in The Jewish War 6.316.)

Christian apologists regularly try to claim that Jesus could have genuinely predicted the destruction of the Second Temple forty years before it actually happened and that gMark therefore could have been written before the year 70 CE. Believe it or not, even though I am a skeptic through and through, I do think that the first part of this argument is actually plausible.

Although the predictions of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in gMark are accurate, they are also quite vague. As I myself have proven in the past, vague predictions about future doom and devastation are virtually always bound to come true eventually. gMark essentially portrays Jesus as predicting simply that the Temple will be destroyed at some point in the future, without any specific details about when or how this would happen. Jesus didn’t need to have the supernatural gift of prophecy to make this prediction, since, quite simply, this prediction was bound to come true eventually, since all buildings will ultimately be destroyed at some point.

This argument, however, has a major flaw that Christian apologists have, for the most part, ignored. The most significant part of the passages I have quoted above is not actually Jesus’s prediction itself, but rather the way gMark describes his prediction. You see, in gMark 13:14, the author inserts his own authorial comment to the reader: “ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω.” This means “Let the reader understand.” In making this comment, the author of gMark is clearly hinting to the reader in his own voice that the prophecy Jesus has just made had recently been fulfilled.

There is other evidence that gMark must have been written sometime around 70 CE or shortly thereafter, but the author’s comment hinting at the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem is probably the strongest individual piece of evidence.

ABOVE: The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem, painted in 1850 by the Scottish painter David Roberts

Dating the Gospels of Matthew and Luke

The Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke (henceforth abbreviated as gMatthew and gLuke respectively) must have both been written after gMark, because they both rely heavily on gMark as a source.

In fact, gMatthew and gLuke often directly copy long passages of text word-for-word from gMark with only minor alterations. Over half of the material in gMatthew and nearly half of the material in gLuke is copied from gMark. Because gMark, gMatthew, and gLuke are so similar for this and other reasons, they are known collectively as the “Synoptic Gospels.” (The word Synoptic comes from Greek and means “Seeing Together.”)

We know that gMark was written first and the authors of gMatthew and gLuke relied on it, rather than vice versa, for several reasons. These reasons have been covered in many places by many people. Indeed, only a week ago, Andrew Mark Henry, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt, posted a video on his YouTube channel Religion for Breakfast that covers some of the main reasons. I do recommend watching his video if you have time. He has an excellent channel with lots of extremely well researched educational content about different religions and their histories. Nonetheless, I will summarize some of the main reasons here myself.

One major reason why we know gMark came first is because gMark is written in extremely crude, simple Greek that is often very unidiomatic. gMatthew and gLuke often correct gMark’s language to make it more idiomatic and more pleasing to read. It makes sense why the authors of gMatthew and gLuke would correct gMark’s language in this way if we assume that gMark came first, but, if we assume gMatthew or gLuke came first and the author of gMark was relying on one of them, it would make no sense why the author of gMark would deliberately change gMatthew or gLuke’s grammar to make it less readable.

ABOVE: Diagram from Wikimedia Commons showing the Two-Source Hypothesis, the most widely accepted explanation of the relationship between the Synoptic Gospels among scholars, which holds that the authors of gMatthew and gLuke worked independently, but both relied on gMark and another common written source or body of sources known as “Q”

Another major reason why we can be reasonably sure that gMark came first is because gMatthew and gLuke include stories that are not included in gMark that it would make no sense for the author of gMark to leave out if he were relying on either of the other two Synoptic Gospels. The most striking case of this is gMark’s complete omission of any in-person appearance of the resurrected Jesus.

As I previously discussed in this article I wrote in February 2020 about textual criticism and the Bible, gMark originally ended abruptly with gMark 16:8. In the original ending of gMark, the women went to the tomb on the morning of the day after the Sabbath to discover that the tomb was empty. A young man in a white robe told them that Jesus had risen from the dead. Then women fled from the tomb and the author says that they told no one what they had seen, because they were afraid. Then the gospel just ends, without the resurrected Jesus ever making even a single appearance to anyone.

gMatthew and gLuke, on the other hand, include detailed descriptions of alleged post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. It is easy to see how the authors of gMatthew and gLuke might have been dissatisfied with the ending of gMark and therefore made sure to include detailed post-resurrection appearances in their own gospels.

By contrast, if the author of gMark were relying on gMatthew or gLuke, this would mean that, for some bizarre reason, he was reading a source that included multiple detailed descriptions of post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, but he decided not to include any of them in his own narrative and instead decided to end his gospel with the women fleeing from the empty tomb in fear.

ABOVE: Holy Women at Christ’s Tomb, painted in the 1590s by the Italian Baroque painter Annibale Carracci

A third major reason why we can be sure that the authors of gMatthew and gLuke relied on gMark and not vice versa is because, anytime all three Synoptic Gospels tell the same story, gMatthew and gLuke almost never agree with each other about what happened unless they also agree with gMark.

Sometimes gMark and gMatthew agree in contradiction with gLuke. Sometimes gMark and gLuke agree in contradiction with gMatthew. gMatthew and gLuke, however, never agree with each other in contradiction with gMark, except in a few very rare, unusual instances known as the “minor agreements.” In other words, gMark is always the “middle term” between gMatthew and gLuke.

Knowing that gMatthew and gLuke rely heavily on gMark provides essential information for establishing when the gospels were written and who wrote them. Because gMatthew and gLuke rely on gMark and we know that gMark was written sometime around 70 CE, we know that gMatthew and gLuke must have been written after this point. As I will discuss later in this article, however, external sources attest that both of these gospels were in widespread circulation by the early second century CE. They therefore both must have been written before around 100 CE.

Dating the Gospel of John

The Gospel of John (henceforth abbreviated as gJohn) is generally agreed to be the latest of the four canonical gospels. It is markedly different from the three Synoptic Gospels in terms of both its style and its content and it portrays Jesus in a radically different light. The author seems to demonstrate his awareness of the existence of earlier gospels in gJohn 20:30–31 and it is possible the author may have been aware of the earlier Synoptic Gospels. Nonetheless, gJohn is not obviously reliant on any of the other surviving gospels to a significant extent in the same way that gMatthew and gLuke are obviously reliant on gMark.

gJohn seems to much more overtly position Jesus in terms of Greek and Roman religions than the Synoptic Gospels. Notably, as I previously discussed in this article from December 2019 about the often-exaggerated similarities between Jesus and the Greek god Dionysos, gJohn makes much more extensive use of symbolism pertaining to wine and grapes than the Synoptic Gospels in a way that is reminiscent of Dionysos. (See, for instance, the miracle of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana in gJohn 2:1–11 and the Parable of the True Vine in gJohn 15:1–17.)

gJohn also contains much more blatant anti-Semitism than any of the Synoptic Gospels. (See, for instance, the confrontation between Jesus and “the Jews” in gJohn 8:21–59, in which Jesus calls his Jewish interlocutors children of Satan.) The increased use of imagery associated with Greek and Roman deities and increased anti-Semitism found in gJohn both seem to be reflective of the situation in the late first century CE and early second century CE, by which point Christianity was predominantly a Gentile religion and Christians were trying to distance themselves from Judaism to a greater extent than before.

The theology of gJohn also contains many elements in common with Christian Gnosticism, a movement which first began to emerge near the end of the first century CE. All of these factors, combined with other factors I haven’t mentioned, suggest that gJohn was written no earlier than the 90s CE.

Meanwhile, the earliest surviving fragment of a manuscript copy of any text that is now included in the New Testament is Rylands Library Papyrus P52, a tiny papyrus fragment bearing a portion of the eighteenth chapter of gJohn, which most likely dates to sometime roughly between c. 125 and c. 175 CE. gJohn was surely in circulation for several decades before the papyrus codex from which Papyrus 52 originates was copied. This means that gJohn cannot have been written any later than the middle of the first half of the second century CE.

Based on all this, the best estimate is that gJohn was most likely written sometime between c. 90 and c. 125 CE.

ABOVE: Photograph taken from Wikimedia Commons of the recto side of the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, the earliest surviving fragment of a New Testament text, which contains a portion of chapter eighteen of the Gospel of John and is dated to sometime roughly between c. 125 and c. 175 CE

The gospels’ internal anonymity

Now that we’ve established an outline of approximately when the four canonical gospels were written, we can talk about the evidence that indicates that they were originally anonymous. The first piece of evidence is the gospels’ own internal anonymity. As I have already mentioned and will explain in depth in a moment, the canonical gospels did not originally bear the titles by which they are commonly known today. These titles were most likely first attached to them in the second half of the second century CE.

Even most Christian apologists will concede that, if you ignore the titles, gMark, gMatthew, and gLuke say absolutely nothing about their authors’ identities. Nonetheless, many Christian apologists have tried to claim that the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, which was certainly written by the same person as gLuke, contains clues to gLuke’s author’s identity and that the gJohn tells us its author explicitly. I will examine both of these arguments in turn to show how they are incorrect.

The “we” passages in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles

Virtually all scholars agree that the Gospel of Luke was written by the same person as the Book of the Acts of the Apostles (henceforth abbreviated as Acts). A few pieces of evidence that gLuke and Acts were written by the same person include:

• Acts 1:1 explicitly references gLuke as the author’s “previous book.”

• gLuke and Acts are addressed to the same person (i.e., someone named “Theophilos”).

• Acts begins at exactly the point where gLuke ends as a direct continuation of the same narrative.

• gLuke and Acts use extremely similar language and express fundamentally the same theology, with a consistent emphasis on certain themes throughout both works.

• There are extensive cross-references between gLuke and Acts.

Unlike gLuke, Acts contains some passages that some readers have interpreted as providing information about the book’s author’s identity. Namely, in Acts 16:10-17, 20:5-16, 21:1-19, and 27:1-28:16, the author uses first-person plural verb forms—as well as the Greek first-person plural pronoun ἡμεῖς (hēmeîs), meaning “we”—to describe the travel group which included the apostle Paul. (Contrary to what some right-wing politicians have recently bizarrely suggested, the Bible does, in fact, contain pronouns.)

Readers since the late second century CE have interpreted these so-called “we passages” as evidence that the otherwise anonymous author of gLuke and Acts was a travelling companion of the apostle Paul. This interpretation, however, is probably not correct. For one thing, if the author of gLuke and Acts were really a travelling companion of the apostle Paul, we would expect him to explicitly identify himself as such to improve his credibility. Why would he cryptically hint about being a travelling companion of the apostle Paul by mysteriously using the first-person plural in a few instances, rather than simply state his identity outright?

There are several other possible interpretations of the “we passages” in Acts. One very popular interpretation holds that the author of gLuke and Acts may have been copying an earlier source that was actually written by a travelling companion of the apostle Paul nearly word-for-word and simply left the narrative in the first-person plural perspective without changing it.

The scholar Vernon Kay Robbins proposes a different interpretation in his paper “By Land and By Sea: The We-Passages and Ancient Sea Voyages,” originally published in pages 215-242 of the book Perspectives on Luke-Acts, edited by C. H. Talbert, published in 1978 by T&T Clark as volume five in the series Perspectives in Religious Studies, Special Studies Series. Robbins holds that the use of the first-person plural in the “we passages” may be a literary artifact derived from Greek and Roman accounts of sea voyages.

In any case, even if we assume that the author of gLuke and Acts really was a travelling companion of the apostle Paul, Paul had many travelling companions and we have no way of narrowing down which one wrote gLuke and Acts based on the works themselves, which are really all we have to go on.

ABOVE: Illustration of Luke the Evangelist writing his gospel from a French manuscript dated to c. 800 CE

The Gospel of John’s claim to have been written by the “beloved disciple”

The Gospel of John is the only canonical gospel that makes an explicit statement about its author’s identity. Nonetheless, gJohn still does not state its putative author’s name. Instead, gJohn 21:20–25 claims that the gospel was written by an unnamed disciple of Jesus. The author refers to this disciple throughout the text as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” The passage claiming that the “disciple whom Jesus loved” wrote the gospel reads as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus at the supper and had said, ‘Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?’ When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, ‘Lord, what about him?’ Jesus said to him, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!’ So the rumor spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?’”

“This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

gJohn never clarifies who the “beloved disciple” actually was and, as we shall see in a moment, the earliest external references to gJohn simply attribute the gospel to an “apostle,” without specifying who this “apostle” was.

Starting in the second half of the second century CE, however, some Christians began to assume that the gospel was written by John, the son of Zebedee, because he is the most prominent apostle mentioned in the Synoptic Gospels who is not mentioned by name in gJohn and Christians came to explain his apparent absence by identifying him as the “beloved disciple.” Alas, it is impossible for us to know whether the author of gJohn intended the “beloved disciple” to be John or one of the many other disciples who are not identified in the gospel by name.

There is also very good reason to believe that gJohn’s claim to have been written by the “beloved disciple” is, in fact, a lie—or, if you prefer to put it more nicely, a literary pretense. As I mentioned earlier, all of our evidence strongly indicates that gJohn was written at the very end of the first century CE or even in the early second century CE. By this time, all of the original followers of Jesus must have been dead or extremely elderly. Even if we assume that the “beloved disciple” was merely a boy in his late teenaged years when he was a follower of Jesus in around 30 CE, he must have been at least in his eighties or older by the time gJohn was written, if he was even still alive at all.

The claim that the “beloved disciple” wrote gJohn is also sharply at odds with the language and contents of the gospel itself. The “beloved disciple” is supposed to have been a lower-class, Aramaic-speaking Jewish man from rural Galilee. It is unlikely that he knew how to read and write and even less likely that he knew how to read and write in Greek. He almost certainly was not intimately familiar with Greek and Greco-Jewish philosophy.

gJohn, by contrast, is written in a refined, literary variety of Koine Greek. It uses sophisticated classical rhetorical techniques and it makes extensive references to concepts from Greek and Greco-Jewish philosophy, such as the idea of the λόγος (lógos), which, as I mentioned in this previous article I wrote about the relationship between “paganism” and Christianity, originates with the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Herakleitos of Ephesos (lived c. 535 – c. 475 BCE) and is central to the Gospel.

It is extraordinarily unlikely that a lower-class, Aramaic-speaking Jewish man from rural Galilee of any intellectual capacity could have learned to write Greek like this and could have become so versed in Greek and Greco-Jewish philosophy, simply because the opportunities for a man from such a lowly and foreign background to learn to write Greek and study Greek philosophy at this level were extremely rare.

The fact that gJohn is overtly anti-Semitic at times is further evidence that it was not written by the “beloved disciple.” Whoever the “beloved disciple” was, he was certainly Jewish and most likely saw Jesus as Jewish also. If he had written about Jesus’s conflicts with contemporary Jewish people, he would have most likely framed them as religious conflicts within Judaism.

gJohn, however, portrays Jesus as not merely disagreeing with other Jewish people’s interpretation of Judaism, but openly hostile towards Judaism itself. This is strongly indicative that the author of the gospel was a Gentile writing at a time when Christianity was starting to become distinct from Judaism.

ABOVE: John the Evangelist, painted in the 1620s by the Italian Baroque painter Domenico Zampieri

External evidence for the anonymity of the canonical gospels

Christian apologists often try to explain away the fact that the canonical gospels do not name their authors by pointing out that there are many other surviving ancient writings that do not explicitly name their authors in their body texts that have never been considered anonymous and that we know have always been attributed to those authors ever since they were first written.

As an example of this kind of argument, here is an excerpt from the article “Are the Gospels Anonymous?” written by the Christian apologist Michael Horner for the Christian apologetics website The Life:

“Technically, Ehrman is right — the four Gospels are “anonymous”, in that the author’s name is not explicitly listed in the text, but that does not mean that they were initially presented as texts without authors! It does not mean that we can’t be confident who wrote them.”

“In ancient times the omission of an author’s name in a text was not an unusual practice. We have literature written by Plato, Plutarch, Lucian, and Porphyry that do not contain their name in the text itself and are every bit as ‘anonymous’ as the Gospels, in that sense. But this by no means suggests that we have no idea who the authors were.”

Horner is correct that, just because a work does not explicitly name its author in its body text, this does not mean that the text was originally circulated anonymously. Many surviving works of ancient literature that do not mention their authors’ names in their body texts had authors’ names attached to them from the beginning.

Horner’s argument, however, completely ignores the second and arguably more important piece of evidence that supports the conclusion that the canonical gospels originally circulated for a long time without authors’ names attached to them. The fact that the texts of the gospels themselves do not state their authors’ names is important, but it is only the first half of the argument.

The second half of the argument is that every single Christian source written before the second half of the second century CE that references the gospels that are now considered canonical in any identifiable way refers to them without naming any authors, despite the fact that these same sources always name the author when they reference any other kind of work.

This, combined with the fact that the gospels themselves do not name their authors, strongly suggests that early Christians until the second half of the second century CE did not know who wrote the gospels because authors’ names had not yet become attached to them.

The Didache’s apparent references to gMatthew as anonymous

Possibly the earliest surviving work that references any of the canonical gospels is the Didache, a Jewish Christian church order that was most likely written either at the tail end of the late first century CE or in the early second century CE.

The Didache evidently relies on a written source, which it references directly at several points. This source is most likely the gospel that is known today as the “Gospel of Matthew.” Interestingly, however, the Didache never once refers to gMatthew by this title, nor does it ever attribute gMatthew to Matthew the apostle, the former tax collector. Instead, it consistently references its source text as simply “the gospel” without reference to an author. The Didache 8.2 declares:

“ἀλλ’ ὡς ἐκέλευσεν ὁ κύριος ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ αὐτοῦ, οὕτω προσεύχεσθε”

This means, in my own translation:

“But, as the Lord commanded in the gospel, thus you will pray:”

The Didache goes on to quote the Lord’s prayer using the exact same wording given in gMatthew 6:9–13.

Later, the Didache 11.3 seemingly references gMatthew using the expression “κατὰ τὰ δόγμα τοῦ εὐαγγελίου οὕτω ποιήσατε” (“you will do in this manner according to the decree of the gospel”). Later, the Didache 15.3 declares:

“Ἐλέγχετε δὲ ἀλλήλους μὴ ἐν ὀργῇ, ἀλλ’ ἐν εἰρήνῃ ὡς ἔχετε ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ·”

This means:

“And you will reprove each other not in anger, but rather in peace, as you have it in the gospel.”

The fact that the Didache seemingly references gMatthew, but does not reference any of the other gospels and simply refers to gMatthew as “the gospel,” without attributing it to Matthew the apostle, suggests that the Didache originates from an early Christian community that used gMatthew as its only or primary gospel and that gMatthew did not have an author’s name attached to it at the time the Didache was written.

ABOVE: Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles painted by the Constantinople Master in the early fourteenth century CE, now on display in the Pushkin Museum

Markion of Sinope’s attribution of a version of gLuke to Paul

Markion of Sinope (lived c. 85 – c. 160 CE) was an early Christian preacher and theologian who developed the earliest known attempt at a canon for the New Testament. Nothing Markion wrote has survived to the present day and we only know about him because later proto-orthodox Christian authors wrote works denouncing him as a heretic.

Markion is a fascinating figure, but his canon and his theology are not really important for the purposes of this article. If you want to learn more about him, I previously discussed him in this article I wrote back in August 2019 about the development of the New Testament canon.

All that is really important for the purpose of this article is the fact that the proto-orthodox writers who wrote works condemning Markion record that his canon included a shorter version of the gospel that is known today as the “Gospel of Luke.” Markion, however, did not call his gospel “the Gospel of Luke”; instead, he called it the “Gospel of the Lord” and claimed that it had been written by none other than the apostle Paul.

Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora’s identification of the author gJohn as simply an “apostle”

There was an early Christian Gnostic teacher named Ptolemy who lived in the second century CE who may have died sometime after the year 180 CE. Possibly the earliest surviving direct external reference to gJohn occurs in a letter that this Ptolemy wrote to a wealthy Roman woman named Flora, known as the Epistle to Flora.

Ptolemy’s Epistle to Flora has only survived to the present day because the proto-orthodox Christian apologist and heresy-hunter Epiphanios of Salamis (lived c. 310 – c. 403 CE) quotes the letter in its entirety in his book Against Heresies 33.3.1 – 33.7.10 in order to denounce it as heretical filth—thereby inadvertently preserving it for all posterity.

Early Christian apologists are, of course, notorious for accidentally preserving all kinds of sources and information about things that they regarded as depraved or heretical. As I discuss in this article I wrote in August 2021, some of the absolute filthiest stories about the ancient Greek deities in all of ancient literature have survived solely because the early Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE) retells them in his apologetic treatise Exhortation to the Hellenes in order to prove how depraved and decadent Greek religions supposedly were.

In any case, in the letter, Ptolemy quotes gJohn 1:3, attributing the gospel to an unnamed “apostle” without ever using the name John. This suggests that, at the time Ptolemy was writing, Gnostic Christians were not yet identifying the “beloved disciple” as John.

ABOVE: Fresco at the Gracanica monastery, near Lipljan, Kosovo, depicting how the artist imagined the early Christian heresy-hunter Epiphanios of Salamis might have looked (No one knows what he really looked like.)

Ioustinos Martys and the “memoirs of the apostles”

Ioustinos Martys (lived c. 100 – c. 165 CE) was a very early Christian apologist who is known for three works he wrote in the Greek language that have survived to the present day: The First Apologia, The Second Apologia, and the Dialogue with Tryphon.

In his writings, Ioustinos Martys certainly references the gospels that are now attributed to Mark, Matthew, and Luke. He may also reference the gospel that is now attributed to John. Ioustinos Martys wrote his First Apologia sometime between the year 155 and the year 157 CE. In chapter 67, he describes how Christians would read from the writings of the Jewish prophets and/or from the “memoirs of the apostles” during every Sunday worship service. This indicates that, by the middle of the second century CE, multiple gospels had already acquired important liturgical significance within Christian communities.

Nonetheless, at the time when he was writing, the gospels were apparently still anonymous. Ioustinos Martys never at any point references any of the gospels by the titles by which they are known today, nor does he ever attribute any of them to the authors to whom they are now attributed. Instead, anytime he wants to reference a gospel, he references all the gospels collectively, calling them “the memoirs of the apostles.”

It is worth noting that the gospels are the only texts that Ioustinos Martys references in this manner; anytime he wants to reference a text that is not a gospel, he cites the author of the work by name. The fact that he only ever references the gospels collectively as “memoirs of the apostles” suggests that he was relying on a collection or a compendium of multiple gospels, all of which were still anonymous, but which were believed to have been written by apostles.

ABOVE: Engraving by the French engraver André Thevet, originally published in 1575 in the book Illvstree de diverses figvres des choses plvs remarqvables veves par l’auteur, & incogneues de noz anciens & modernes, depicting what the artist imagined Ioustinos Martys might have looked like. No one knows what he really looked like.

The fragments from Papias quoted by Eusebios in his Ecclesiastical History

Some of the more educated Christian apologists do, of course, have what they think is a thorough rebuttal to the argument that the gospels are always referred to as anonymous in Christian texts from before the second half of the second century CE. This rebuttal relies on some evidence that apologists interpret to mean that gMark and gMatthew were already attributed to Mark the secretary of Peter and Matthew the apostle by the late first century CE. I intend to show why this is not the case.

As I have already mentioned, gMark and gMatthew say absolutely nothing whatsoever about their respective authors’ identities. In the late first century CE, however, there was a prominent Christian known as John the Presbyter, who is most likely the author of the First, Second, and Third Epistles of John that are now included in the New Testament. Christians have traditionally identified John the Presbyter as John the Apostle, but, in reality, they were most likely two different men who simply both happened to have the name John, which was an extremely common name among Jewish men in the first century CE.

Papias of Hierapolis (lived c. 60 – c. 130 CE) was a younger contemporary of John the Presbyter. Papias became a Christian bishop and wrote a work in the Greek language titled Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord, in which he claimed to rely on information that he had derived from John the Presbyter in some manner. (It is unclear whether he is supposed to have gotten this information from reading a work John the Presbyter wrote, from talking to John the Presbyter himself, or from talking to people who had talked to John the Presbyter.)

Unfortunately, Papias’s Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord has not survived to the present day. Nonetheless, the much later Christian historian Eusebios of Kaisareia (lived c. 263 – c. 339 CE), whose writings have survived to the present day, had access to a copy of the work. Eusebios comments on Papias in his Ecclesiastical History 3.39.14-17. He tells us with brutal honesty that he thinks that Papias’s writings demonstrate that he was a gullible idiot.

ABOVE: Seventeenth-century illustration depicting what the artist imagined Eusebios of Kaisareia might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)

Despite his obvious disdain for Papias, Eusebios quotes a couple of important passages that Papias wrote in his Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord, supposedly relying on information derived in some manner from John the Presbyter. In the first of the passages that Eusebios quotes, Papias claims that Mark worked for Peter as an interpreter and he wrote an account of everything he could remember hearing about Jesus from Peter. Here is what Papias says in the first passage quoted in Eusebios’s Ecclesiastic History 3.29.15 in the original Greek:

“καὶ τοῦθ᾿ ὁ πρεσβύτερος ἔλεγεν· Μάρκος μὲν ἑρμηνευτὴς Πέτρου γενόμενος, ὅσα ἐμνημόνευσεν, ἀκριβῶς ἔγραψεν, οὐ μέντοι τάξει, τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ κυρίου ἢ λεχθέντα ἢ πραχθέντα· οὔτε γὰρ ἤκουσεν τοῦ κυρίου οὔτε παρηκολούθησεν αὐτῷ, ὕστερον δέ, ὡς ἔφην, Πέτρῳ, ὃς πρὸς τὰς χρείας ἐποιεῖτο τὰς διδασκαλίας, ἀλλ᾿ οὐχ ὥσπερ σύνταξιν τῶν κυριακῶν ποιούμενος λογίων, ὥστε οὐδὲν ἥμαρτεν Μάρκος, οὕτως ἔνια γράψας ὡς ἀπεμνημόνευσεν· ἑνὸς γὰρ ἐποιήσατο πρόνοιαν, τοῦ μηδὲν ὧν ἤκουσεν παραλιπεῖν ἢ ψεύσασθαί τι ἐν αὐτοῖς.”

This means, in my own translation:

“And these are the things the elder [i.e., John the Presbyter] said: ‘Mark being the interpreter of Peter, he wrote down as many things as he could remember that had been said or done by the Lord with exact details, albeit not in order. For he did not hear from the Lord, nor did he accompany him, but later, as I said, accompanied Peter, who was in the habit of making his teachings for his needs, but not as though he was making the sayings of the Lord in order, so that Mark did not err by thus writing some things as he remembered them. For he made only one purpose: not to leave any of the things which he had heard out, nor include any falsehood among them.’”

Eusebios then goes on to quote another passage, in which Papias claims that the apostle Matthew wrote a collection of the sayings of Jesus. He writes in his Ecclesiastic History 3.29.16 in Greek:

“ταῦτα μὲν οὖν ἱστόρηται τῷ Παπίᾳ περὶ τοῦ Μάρκου· περὶ δὲ τοῦ Ματθαῖου ταῦτ’ εἴρηται· Ματθαῖος μὲν οὖν Ἑβραΐδι διαλέκτῳ τὰ λόγια συνετάξατο, ἡρμήνευσεν δ’ αὐτὰ ὡς ἧν δυνατὸς ἕκαστος.”

This means, in my own translation:

“These, then, are the things that are recorded by Papias concerning Mark; and, concerning Matthew, he says these things: ‘Matthew therefore collected the sayings [i.e., τὰ λόγια] in the Hebrew dialect [i.e., Ἑβραΐδι διαλέκτῳ], and each interpreted them as best as he was able.’”

If you tell a conservative Christian apologist who knows something about early Christian history that the gospels were originally anonymous, they will most likely try to claim that these fragments quoted by Eusebios are proof that Papias attributed the gospels we know today as the “Gospel of Mark” and the “Gospel of Matthew” to Mark the secretary of Peter and to Matthew the apostle respectively. Since Papias was most likely writing in the early second century CE, and was supposedly relying on John the Presbyter who lived in the late first century CE, conservative apologists will insist that this disproves the claim that the gospels were originally anonymous.

This argument, however, has a massive flaw. Papias does indeed claim that Mark wrote a gospel and that Matthew wrote a gospel, but, in the passages quoted by Eusebios, he does not describe the contents of these gospels in detail, nor does he quote them in any way that would suggest that he is talking about the same gospels that are known today as the “Gospel of Mark” and the “Gospel of Matthew.” In fact, what Papias does tell us about the gospels that Mark and Matthew supposedly wrote is markedly different from what we know about the gospels that are attributed to those men today.

Papias and the supposed gospel written by Mark

Papias says that Mark wrote down everything he remembered hearing about Jesus from Peter, but he did not write these things in chronological order. Modern scholars disagree whether the gospel that is known today as the “Gospel of Mark” is supposed to be written entirely in the chronological order of events, but there is no question that the major events that make up the skeleton of the gospel’s narrative are clearly in chronological order.

gMark as we know it begins with Jesus’s baptism, his temptation in the desert, the beginning of his ministry in Galilee, and his calling of the first disciples in chapter one. The gospel then describes Jesus’s ministry in chapters two through ten; his final trip to Jerusalem in chapters eleven through thirteen; the Last Supper, his betrayal by Judas Iscariot, his arrest by the Romans, and his trial before the Sanhedrin in chapter fourteen; his trial before Pilate, his crucifixion, and his death in chapter fifteen; and the discovery of the empty tomb in chapter sixteen.

These basic narrative elements are clearly in chronological order because they would not make any sense otherwise. For this reason, it would very strange for someone to say that gMark as a whole is not written in chronological order. It would be even stranger to imply, as Papias seemingly does of the gospel supposedly written by Mark of which he speaks, that the author simply wrote stories down as he happened to remember them.

We can’t definitively say that Papias cannot possibly have been talking about the gospel we know today as the “Gospel of Mark,” but the discrepancy between Papias’s description and the gospel we know today suggests that Papias was probably talking about a different gospel that has since been lost.

ABOVE: Illustration of Mark the Evangelist writing his gospel from a manuscript dating to c. 823 CE

Papias and the supposed gospel written by the apostle Matthew

Although Papias’s description of the gospel that was supposedly written by the apostle Matthew is admittedly not especially detailed, it still differs drastically from the gospel that is known today as the “Gospel of Matthew”—to such an extent that it would take some outlandish contortions of the evidence to argue that Papias was talking about the work known today as the “Gospel of Matthew” at all.

Papias says that the apostle Matthew wrote a collection of “the sayings” (“τὰ λόγια”) of Jesus. Papias says nothing about this collection of sayings including any narrative about the life and ministry of Jesus whatsoever. The problem is that gMatthew as we know it today is quite manifestly not a collection of sayings; in fact, it consists primarily of narrative and all the sayings it does contain are embedded within this narrative. Thus, the form of the gospel described by Papias does not at all match gMatthew as we know it.

Papias also says that Matthew wrote his collection of the sayings of Jesus “in the Hebrew dialect,” by which he means either Hebrew or Aramaic. gMatthew, however, was almost certainly originally written in Greek. We can be reasonably sure of this for several reasons. One of these reasons is that, aside from this fragment of Papias, there is no evidence to suggest that a Hebrew or Aramaic version of gMatthew ever existed.

A second reason is because, when a text is a translation of a text that was originally written in another language, it usually bears certain features that give it away as a translation, such as idioms and linguistic elements that are distinctive of one language that don’t translate well into the other language. These features are, at the very least, not overtly apparent in gMatthew as we know it.

The third—and probably most compelling—piece of evidence, however, is that large portions of gMatthew as we know it are taken directly, word-for-word from the Greek text of gMark and, as I have already mentioned, there is compelling evidence that the author of gMatthew was relying on gMark, rather than vice versa.

If gMatthew had originally been written in Hebrew or Aramaic and only later translated into Greek, we would expect it to have markedly different wording from gMark, since the derivative parts of the gospel would be filtered through two translations, first from Greek into Hebrew or Aramaic and then back from Hebrew or Aramaic into Greek. Instead, we find that the wording matches almost exactly the vast majority of the time.

In short, Papias is almost certainly not talking about the gospel that is known today as the “Gospel of Matthew,” but rather about a different work—a sayings gospel originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic that has since been lost. Nothing Papias says in the fragments quoted by Eusebios demonstrates that any of the canonical gospels were attributed to the people to whom they are now attributed before the second half of the second century CE.

ABOVE: Saint Matthew and the Angel, painted in 1661 by Rembrandt

There is another reason, however, why we can be reasonably certain that the apostle Matthew did not write the gospel that is known today as the “Gospel of Matthew.” As I have already mentioned, over half the material in gMatthew is copied directly from gMark, often word-for-word without significant alteration. The apostle Matthew, however, is supposed to have been an eyewitness to Jesus’s ministry. Why on earth would an eyewitness who knew Jesus while he was alive copy the majority of his account of the life and ministry of Jesus from an account written by someone else who was not an eyewitness?

The case against Matthean authorship of gMatthew gets even stronger when we consider that the material gMatthew copies from gMark even includes the story of how Jesus called Matthew to become a disciple. This story is told in gMark 2:13–17 and gMatthew 9:9–13 with almost identical wording. If Matthew the apostle really wrote gMatthew, then why on earth did he copy his own biography nearly word-for-word from a source written by someone else without even adding any significant details or insights?

The notion that Matthew the apostle wrote the gospel that is now attributed to him is simply implausible in light of the evidence in the gospel itself.

ABOVE: The Calling of Matthew, painted in 1502 by the Italian painter Vittore Carpaccio

Eirenaios of Lugdunum and the earliest known attribution of the four gospels to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John

The earliest author who is known to have applied the names Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John to authors of the four canonical gospels is Eirenaios (lived c. 130 – c. 202 CE), who was the bishop of the city of Lugdunum in southern Gaul. In around 180 CE or thereabouts, Eirenaios wrote a work titled Against Heresies.

Eirenaios was evidently aware of the stories Papias had earlier recorded about Mark and Matthew having written gospels and he is the first person known to have identified the gospels allegedly written by Mark and Matthew with gMark and gMatthew respectively. He is also the first person who is known to have ever mentioned Luke as having written a gospel. (Remember that Markion had earlier attributed a version of gLuke to Paul.) Finally, Eirenaios is the first person who is known to have identified the “beloved disciple” who supposedly wrote gJohn with the apostle John. He writes in Against Heresies 3.1, as translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut:

“For, after our Lord rose from the dead, [the apostles] were invested with power from on high when the Holy Spirit came down [upon them], were filled from all [His gifts], and had perfect knowledge: they departed to the ends of the earth, preaching the glad tidings of the good things [sent] from God to us, and proclaiming the peace of heaven to men, who indeed do all equally and individually possess the Gospel of God.”

“Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesos in Asia.”

Eirenaios’s Against Heresies became widely read among Christians throughout the Roman Empire. After he attributed gMark, gMatthew, gLuke, and gJohn to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John respectively, these attributions quickly became enshrined in church tradition.

Eirenaios probably did not invent the attributions of the gospels to their now-traditional authors himself; it is likely that some other Christians were starting to attribute the gospels to these authors in the decades leading up the time when Eirenaios was writing (i.e., in the 150s, 160s, and 170s CE). Nonetheless, Eirenaios certainly seems to have played a role in popularizing and standardizing these attributions.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a stained glass window created in the year 1901 by the artist Lucien Bégule for the Church of St Eirenaios, in Lyon, France, depicting how the artist imagined Eirenaios of Lugdunum might have looked

Other objections refuted

Michael Horner’s article “Are the Gospels Anonymous?” that I referenced earlier contains several more arguments that attempt to prove that the gospels were attributed to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John from the very beginning. All of these arguments, however, fall flat on their faces. For instance, here is the first argument:

“Ancient Near Eastern people, especially Christians, distrusted anonymous and pseudonymous writings, but did not distrust the gospels. Therefore, they must have known who the authors were.”

This argument is circular and demonstrably false. Early Christians only seem to have been distrustful of anonymous writings if you explain away the dozens of anonymous gospels, epistles, apocalypses, and so forth that early Christians trusted by asserting that these works of Christian literature must not have been anonymous for early Christians. The gospels are far from the only anonymous works that circulated with authority among early Christians. For instance, the Didache, which I have referenced in this article, is definitely anonymous, but yet early Christians definitely used it.

The Epistle to the Hebrews is even more striking proof of the trust that early Christians were willing to invest in sources that even they acknowledged were completely anonymous. Early Christians widely disagreed about who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews and some even held that it was impossible for anyone to know who wrote it. Eusebios of Kaisareia in his Ecclesiastical History 6.25.14 quotes the early Christian theologian and scholar Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 CE) as having written that “God only knows” who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews. Nonetheless, early Christians apparently trusted the Epistle to the Hebrews enough to include it in the New Testament canon, despite its well-known anonymity.

Additionally, just because Christians before the second half of the second century CE didn’t have names that they could give to the people who wrote the canonical gospels doesn’t mean that they didn’t believe that the gospels were written by people with serious credibility. Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora attributes gJohn to an “apostle” and Ioustinos Martys attributes the gospels to unnamed “apostles” as well. Early Christians clearly believed that the gospels were written by important and trustworthy people; they just don’t seem to have agreed on exactly who those people were.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Papyrus 114, dating to the middle or end of the third century CE, bearing the text of the Epistle to the Hebrews 1:7–12

Here is another argument that Horner makes in his article:

“All the earliest gospel manuscripts (that contain the beginning) contain the titles in the form ‘The Gospel According to …’ — where the author’s name fills in the blank.”

This argument is easily dismissed by the fact that there are absolutely no surviving gospel manuscripts that contain the beginning of the gospel that date from the first or second centuries CE. By the time of the earliest surviving gospel manuscripts that contain the beginning of any of the gospels, the gospels were already attributed to the authors who are now considered traditional.

Saying that the gospels were attributed to the traditional authors by the time of the earliest manuscripts that contain the beginning of any of the gospels therefore is not really helpful, since the traditional attributions are attested in Eirenaios’s Against Heresies long before they are attested in any gospel manuscripts.

Horner’s article also claims:

“If there were no authors’ names placed on the outside extremely early, how did the title format achieve such uniformity in its unusual design and across such distances? If the gospels had circulated for more than 100 years, then we would expect them to have a variety of different title forms and authors.”

This is simply an argument from sheer ignorance. We know for a historical fact that various titles and authors were assigned to the gospels that are now accepted as canonical in the first and second centuries CE. We also know that different groups of Christians used sometimes significantly different versions of these gospels during this early period of Christian history.

As I mentioned earlier, the Didache simply refers to a work that is most likely gMatthew as “the gospel.” Around forty years or so before Eirenaios wrote his Against Heresies, Markion of Sinope applied the title “the Gospel of the Lord” to a version of gLuke, which he claimed had been written by the apostle Paul. Ioustinos Martys references all the gospels as “memoirs of the apostles.” Even in the late second century CE, after Eirenaios, a group of Christians in Asia Minor whom proto-orthodox writers call the “Alogians” claimed that gJohn was actually written by the Gnostic teacher Kerinthos.

The question of how the gospels came to receive uniform titles and how they came to be unanimously attributed to certain authors is a good one, but the fact of the matter is that we know that early Christians referenced them by different names and attributed them to different authors, so the answer cannot be that they were attributed to these authors with the titles we know today from the very beginning.