TomboyMom

Hi, long time no visit this forum. I received my entire education re: Biblical scholarship here and will always be grateful. In another forum, I have asserted per your excellent guidance that mainstream biblical scholarship agrees that no gospel was authored by an eyewitness. I have been challenged to say who these scholars are. Could you help summarize:
Why we know the gospels were not written by any apostle.
When they were written.
What the consensus of modern scholarship says about this.
Who are these leading, recognized modern scholars?

Thanks again, proving as always that no good deed goes unpunished.

Hmmm, apparently you can edit a post but not a thread title? Can a mod help, it's embarrasing. WTF is a "godpel?"

jgibson000

I suggest you pick up a copy of Raymond Brown's Introduction to the New Testament (or via: amazon.co.uk). He covers all the issues you want covered.

An older study by Grant is to be found here.

You should also familiarize yourself with the data available both at Mark Goodacre's NTGateway and with the material on the Gospels that Felix Just has online.

JG

Diogenes the Cynic

Be careful about about letting this issue be defined in terms of scholarly authority. For one thing, the burden to prove eyewitness authorship to any of the Gospels rests with the person making that assertion, not with anyone else to disprove it. The authors are unknown. They do not identify themselves in the text of the Gospels and none of them claim to be eyewitnesses. Therefore, any attempt to claim that any author can be positively identified at all (much less as an eyewitness) is only a hypothesis, and as such, requires evidence, (hopefully including scholarly support).

While the per se statement that scholarly consenus does not generally accept the authorship traditions as authentic is true, as stated it's really only an appeal to authority and should be augmented with the reasons why those traditions are rejected. It's always better to be a little bit familiar with the data itself than just the end product of scholarly consenus.

Don't let anyone back you into the corner of having to disprove their hypothesis. There is no reason to concede any default assumption of eyewitness authorship to the Gospels. The better course to go is to ask them why any such thing should be concluded. What is their evidence, argument and scholarly support? They are the ones making the assertion. They have the burden of proof (you can start by asking them to produce five peer-reviewed scholars who DO support traditional authorship).

Ben C Smith

The fourth canonical gospel claims to be based on the writings of an eyewitness.

Ben.

Diogenes the Cynic

It doesn't say which one, though, does it? And that appended claim does not represent a claim by the author(s) himself.

Roger Pearse

Moving the 'burden of proof' around is not worth anyone's time, surely? We need to find out what the data says, and then we all know what is, and is not, evidenced. Likewise appealing on political and religious issues to the 'authority of scholars' is a waste of time; curiously they nearly always reflect the establishment view of their day, especially the 'rebels'.

Now I read your comment, and I admit that I have seen these claims and I was wondering on what such claims were based. Is this it? Is this the evidence offered for this claim of anonymity?

It sounds fairly strange to me. The authors of the gospels are not unknown, unless the authors of most texts are unknown: the manuscripts identify them (our first port of call for authorship of any text), the fathers identify them (other ancient writers being our next stop), and there is no trace in antiquity of the sort of uncertainty over authorship we have for texts where the authorship is really lost such as Hebrews (another cross-check). We have no other works by these authors, so stylistic checks against other works given authorship on the same grounds are impossible. We have one or two derisory attempts by heretics to ignore one or another for their own ends, and even these, in their feebleness, rather testify to the universal acceptance of the authorship rather than to any alternative information. So what positive evidence is there to the contrary, I wonder?

Wouldn't a demand that a text must contain a statement of authorship be failed by nearly every modern book, never mind ancient ones? Hey, wouldn't it be failed by many posts in this forum?

The demand that the authors must include a statement explicitly asserting eye-witness status is strange -- why 'must' they do this? How does our need to obtain this information project on people dead 2,000 years an obligation to include it? Don't we instead seek out the testimony in the historical record? What does it say? Does it say that "we don't know"? It does not. Limited as the survivals today of 2nd century literature are, it clearly states that they were apostles or apostolic men.

In short all the data that exists tells us a different story, which then leads us to ask just why anyone would assert different, and we can then find polemical reasons easily enough.

Indeed it's all a bit remniscent of the old story about the schoolboy who wrote "Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of the same name."

But if someone has some solid evidence to the contrary, I'm certainly willing to listen. I look at the 31 works of Tertullian -- an author whose works are written in a very characteristic style -- and most of them would fail the above demands.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

hatsoff

Mark and Luke are not even traditionally supposed to have been written by eyewitnesses. Matthew copies directly from Mark, which means he almost certainly was not an eyewitness, either. John is a later work, with more developed theology and a gnostic edge, no qualities of which are indicative of eyewitness testimony. Moreover, its conclusion implies that it is at least once removed from its eyewitness source. One tradition even attributes it to the second-century gnostic Cerinthus.

Also, the Gospels come from a period where forgery was rampant. It is therefore natural to view them with a marked degree of skepticism.

Diogenes the Cynic

That doesn't stop apologists from trying to do it.
I'm not sure how a view can simultaneously represent the view of the 'establishment" and the "rebels," but I agree that an appeal to scholarly consensus is, in itself, rather hollow.
I said the authors were UNKNOWN, not anonymous (not quite the same thing), but the fact that we don't know who the authors were makes them unknown, yes.
The manuscripts do not identify them, unless you're trying to count the titles, in which case you know your claim is specious. Those titles were not written by the authors.
Another specious claim, and kind of circular since the Patristic traditions of authorship are kind of what's in question. You're appealing to tradition to support tradition. Completely circular.
Universal acceptance when? In the 4th century? We don't really know much about how these texts were received in their first century or two of existence, so this is just another tautological appeal to tradition.Having said that, are you really so positive there was no dispute over authorship? This is from Peter Kirby's page on GJohn at ECW:
The evidence AGAINST eyewitness authorship is quite extensive. Hatsoff gives a good start at it above. Matthew is dependant on Mark and Q. It does not match the description of a logia attributed to Papias by Eusebius. The author makes no claim anywhere in the text to be a witness. The narrative material which the author did not get from Mark is some of the most fantastic, demonstrably ahistorical and patently fictional material of the entire NT.

John is written too late, is written in layers, shows a late development of theology, contains long speeches by Jesus which could not have been preserved by oral tradition (and are remembered by no one but John). The book anachronistically retrojects the the claim that the followers of Jesus are already aposunagogos, expelled from the synagogues, during the life of Jesus. That's not a mistake a witness would make. It shows a fluency of Greek and a familiarity with Alexandrian (specifically Philonic) theological ideas which stretch credulity for an illiterate Galilean fisherman.
No.
I haven't said that they "must." I've only pointed out that they don't. Wouldn't you expect an eyewitness account to contain some instance of the first-person in its narrative? If a text contains not a single first-person claim, then why should it be assumed, absent any other internal evidence, that the author is describing an eyewitness account?

And why would an alleged eyewitness such as Matthew rely on the accounts of non-witnesses to to describe events he saw himself?
And those 2nd century claims are speculative at best. Not only that, they're not supportable by internal evidence from the texts.
The data includes much internal evidence within the texts to indicate that they are not primary accounts.

pob14

Luke 1:1-2:
So Luke makes the positive claim that it is NOT written by an eyewitness.

All of the gospels narrate incidents for which no one was present but Jesus (Gesthemene, the temptation in the desert, etc.), so there were no eyewitnesses.

John 21:24 is a weak claim of authority:
If "this" ("this is the disciple") means the author, who is the "we" that know his testimony is true? It seems at best to be a claim that GJohn as we know it is based on some writing of some disciple. Also, that is in the same chapter as the "tarry till I come" discussion, which sure seems to be an apologetic written after John's death.

Roger Pearse

Yes, I meant the titles given in the manuscripts. These may or may not be authorial. I am well aware of and interested in titres et articulations, as a recent colloquium at Chantilly called them, and the interesting problems associated. But to dismiss the attributions in the manuscripts is to dismiss the only source for a very large number of texts. They may be unreliable -- indeed the vast number of texts labelled only De fide in medieval catalogues is evidence of this; they may or may not be authorial, since we don't know much about whether author's gave texts titles -- but they are there.

The point is to drive this from data, you see, not to find reasons to ignore it.

If we have already decided, a priori, that the testimony of those who knew the apostles and their successors is to be disregarded, of course we know nothing about the early church. But you can't really mean that.

No, we know of two disputes that I can think of; Marcion's attempt to disregard and edit the gospels (whether one would normally count that, I'm not sure); and the curious question of the Alogoi who Epiphanius suggests attributed John to Cerinthus which we all discussed a while back, and (IIRC) came to the conclusion that the story when assembled relied rather more on the 13th century Syriac writer Dionysius bar Salibi than was quite comfortable.

But of course some heretic was bound to assert these things, since the gospels were an obstacle to their purposes. The point that I was suggesting was that the fewness and feebleness of these is itself testimony to the thesis that it wasn't a game worth playing, so well-accepted were they.

Thank you for these, which I read with much interest.

To my amateur eye, tho, that none of this seems to be evidence. Some of these statements are true and are data -- e.g. the Greek text cannot be the 'Hebrew' of Papias, self-evidently, although there must be some relationship --, but they are not evidence for the proposition offered; rather we are merely invited to infer that they are, based on various unstated assumptions and presumptions, and that they are incompatible with authorship. (I hate it when inference is treated as being on the same level as a piece of data explicitly stating something; most serious mistakes seem to come from making this mistake.) But that would involve what seem to me to be endless assumptions about the process of composition, and I don't know that these assumptions are sound since we have no evidence for them and they are commonly not even stated.

Personally I am averse to this entire class of argument. It seems entirely subjective to me, relying on what people we don't know 'must not' have done. It's not to be opposed to positive plain statements in the historical record, in my humble opinion. If we have nothing in that record, then we may tentatively form conclusions along these lines, but more data is very likely to blow them to pieces.

IMHO, of course.

All the best,

Roger Pearse