So, I have started watching a series of sermons on the Gospel of Mark by Mike Winger and he talks about the question of who authored Mark.  This is some of what he has to say.  I’ve tidied it up a little bit.  

So what you’ll hear from everyone, it seems, nowadays, is that ‘all the Gospels are anonymous’.  Nobody knows who wrote them, and they were published anonymously, and the names that you see on your Gospels were added way later, so long after that nobody knew who wrote them.  I’ll quote Bart Ehrman here, Bart Ehrman says, “some books such as the Gospels had been written anonymously only later to be ascribed to certain authors who probably did not write them, apostles and friends of the apostles”.  He wrote that in his book Jesus interrupted , where he interrupts Jesus a lot.  

Richard Dawkins, who we know is a ‘great’ Bible scholar – no actually no he’s not – but Richard Dawkins says “nobody knows who the four evangelists were but they almost certainly never met Jesus personally”.  He wrote that in his book The God Delusion where he said a lot of other things that were, well, delusional (bit of a comedian this guy). 

I’ll move forward a little to his points on authorship.  

The chief argument here for saying Mark didn’t write Mark is that it was originally anonymous…what they won’t tell you, while you’re reading Mark…never does he say ‘and I, Mark, wrote this Gospel”.  It doesn’t say that, that’s true.  What they won’t tell you though, is that this was a standard way of writing a historical work at the time.  It was just normal, you don’t write your name in the middle of the text and say ‘I’m the guy writing this’.  

Let me give you some examples: Plutarch wrote fifty biographies but never mentioned his own name, in fifty biographies.  We don’t doubt that Plutarch wrote them, they wouldn’t challenge that because that’s not scripture and there’s sometimes a double standard when it comes to the Bible.  Plato’s writings, anonymous.  They’re anonymous, how do you know Plato wrote those?  Because of the historical attribution to Plato that’s always been attributed to Plato.  So we open it, and see Plato, pretty simple.  Plato, not playdough.  Porphyry also wrote anonymously, Clement of Rome wrote anonymously…it was standard to have works that were anonymous back then especially if they were historical in nature.  If you were trying to say I’m writing history you didn’t want to be putting yourself in the story, because it seemed too de-historicising, as if it were more of a story in history.

E.P. Sanders said, “the claim of an anonymous history was higher than that of a named work in the ancient world.  An anonymous book, rather like an encyclopaedia article today, implicitly claimed complete knowledge and reliability”.  Meaning it’s just fitting, you would expect to write his name into it like that.  It’s their way of standing back and saying, this is what really happened, it’s not just my opinion.  That’s the nature of this sort of anonymity in the text.