“Strictly Speaking, the Gospels are Anonymous” (w/ YouTube)

As Anonymous as Genesis

“…strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous”

~ Craig Blomberg, The Case for Christ

This little boulder of information is so frequently passed over. Evangelicals stamp feet and insist that the gospels are eyewitness records. But these are curious eyewitness records indeed, though a person is unlikely to come away from The Case for Christ understanding the following:

• The gospels never claim to be eyewitness records.
• They never narrate in the first person.
• They were written in the wrong language for Galilean disciples.
• They recount a great deal that the disciples could not have witnessed.
• But perhaps most disturbing – and perhaps the first flag we should have noticed – is that they are entirely anonymous.

And that makes the first four books of the New Testament a whole lot like the first five books of the Old Testament: they all have unfounded traditions about who wrote them; they were all written in the wrong language; they were all written in the wrong voice; and they all include information that doesn’t make sense for eyewitnesses. Yet we like to say that they are eyewitness records – because, hey, that sounds reliable.

~

A few more quotes to flesh out this interesting issue of anonymity:

“…what about the gospels, which, technically speaking, are formally anonymous?”

~ Michael Kruger

“…all the Gospels were written anonymously, and none of the writers claims to be an eyewitness. Names are attached to the titles of the Gospels (“the Gospel according to Matthew”), but these titles are later additions to the Gospels, provided by editors and scribes to inform readers who the editors thought were the authorities behind the different versions.”

~ Ehrman, Bart D. (2009-02-20). Jesus, Interrupted

 “The gospels (and Acts) are anonymous, in that none of them name an author.”

~Wikipedia, sourced from Stephen Harris

These quotations cover conservatives, liberals, everyone. If you consult any serious scholar – Christian or non-Christian: the gospels were written as “formally anonymous” documents. The titles simply were not affixed by the authors. The name traditions were attached later. The only real argument on the table is, how much later, and how accurately?

But surely these traditions were correct. Surely Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote our gospels. Right?

The Ascriptions are Wrong

Wishful thinking remains available for those who would embrace it. The Case for Christ offers the company line for those who require propping up, providing the “facts” according to an exclusively fundamentalist segment of scholars while posturing as some kind of objective investigation. The Ehrman Project provides quick answers to hush the disquiet of troubling thoughts. But for those who would dig, more complete and less rosy answers await.

On the evidence, there are a number of good reasons to conclude that the traditional ascriptions were incorrect and that, whoever wrote the gospels, they did not have firsthand knowledge of Jesus themselves.

Here is a brief 8 1/2 minute lecture excerpt from Bart Ehrman that gives the high points:

   ~

(NOTE: video is set to play from 48:30 to 57:06. Timings sometimes do not work correctly in IE. Recommend using Firefox)

Tradition!

The main takeaway from all of this is that the Bible itself does not tell us who wrote the gospels. For that, we need the parallel church traditions about these texts. As discussed on the Timeline of NT Books infographic, Irenaeus gives us our first record of who wrote the gospels, late in the second century (180 AD). That’s about 100 years after the gospels were written, or more. Nevertheless, it is disquieting for evangelicals to realize that eyewitness claims of authorship are actually non-Biblical.

The supporting rationale circles the same drain as other holy texts: we know the texts are reliable because they are eyewitness accounts. But we do not know that these texts are eyewitness records because they themselves say so, nor because they appear to be so. We only think this because a later religious tradition tried to make the texts sound as authentic as possible. Thus, tradition claims authorship, and authorship validates content, yet the content was the basis for the tradition in the first place. Mmm-hmm.

Meanwhile, the gospels themselves shrug at our rightly suspicious glances, looking back with a plaintive expression of dumb innocence: “Don’t look at me – I never claimed to be written by anybody special.”

But seeing the role of tradition in all of this, one has to cover the ears against the rising Catholic outcry: “we told you so.” The stories about Jesus represent later-written traditions as told by different communities of believers. Further, it is only on church traditions that we have any assertions about who wrote them (and they turn out to be highly suspect). Still more, it was the church fathers who decided what texts were authentic and which ones got into the Bible. And they did so based on which texts had more compelling traditions of authenticity. So yes. Religious traditions came first, and the Bible came later, at all points.

God’s Word

This dilapidated state of affairs is the expected outcome, since God’s texts have ever arrived by a circuitous route of dubious intermediaries. Here we owe ourselves and others a sanity check. On the Christian proposition, God himself had been here on earth for a good three decades. Yet he left us not a single written word. How likely is that? He could have written the gospel by his own hand. Or a few letters. Something. Anything. He was supposed to have been The Word. He very likely had a literacy that exceeded his immediate disciples. It seems like communication of the written sort would have been something he could probably have managed. Given that Christianity was destined to be a religion grounded in religious texts, it sure would seem to clinch the deal if God himself wrote a few lines here and there.

We do not have “God’s Word” in the gospels. If Jesus had actually written something by his own hand, and if he had been who the Gospel of John claimed, then we would perhaps have a case for such a claim. But no. We have gospels – stories about Jesus. These are stories about what Jesus said – not Jesus’ words. They are stories about what Jesus did – not objective histories about the life and times of the Nazarene. And they are told as hero tales, as recounted by… whoever the authors actually were.