godspell said 

I’ll concede that last point.  It could be more explicit, but given that he was probably writing this for the same audience he wrote the gospel for, it didn’t need to be.  

As to titles, I put my trust in Bart here–I don’t think any of the four gospels were originally written in the names of Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John.      

This is certainly Bart’s opinion.  But it’s an opinion constructed chiefly from the absence of evidence; there is no positive evidence to support this.  We simply have never found any complete manuscript (nor one with a the beginning of the gospel) that lacked a title.

From a broader perspective …. the only positive evidence we have that the gospels were originally circulated without titles is that the internal text of each does not identify the author.  But this is similarly true of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Cicero, Tacitus, Varro and many other major works of antiquity.

But let’s say Bart is correct in general on this.  Let’s say some of these works circulated without titles and were effectively anonymous …. Of all the canonical gospels, the one least likely to have circulated without a title is Luke, and not only for the reason I previously gave about Luke’s relative obscurity.

In his bible, Marcion famously included only one gospel in his biblical canon, published circa 135 CE: an anonymous work appearing to be an abridged version of Luke.  Depending on when you date the Gospel of Luke, this is quite possibly within the living memory of first publication.  If we take a conventional date like 85 CE, then Marcion’s gospel is being published at the same time interval that we currently have with Neal Armstrong walking on the moon and with Woodstock.  In other words, there would have been plenty of living people alive not only during the publication of Luke, but also for the publication of Marcion’s gospel.  

Note: interestingly, the later one places the publication of Luke, the stronger the point this makes.

When Tertullian pens his polemic Against Marcion in 208 CE, one of his arguments is that, unlike the four canonical gospel, Marcion’s bible used a work by an “anonymous” author, which he contrasted (negatively) with the four known Gospel writers:

Marcion, on the other hand, you must know, ascribes no author to his Gospel, as if it could not be allowed him to affix a title to that from which it was no crime (in his eyes) to subvert the very body.  And here I might now make a stand, and contend that a work ought not to be recognized, which holds not its head erect, which exhibits no consistency, which gives no promise of credibility from the fullness of its title and the just profession of its author.  

Against Marcion (4.2).

The same authority of the apostolic churches [Corinth, Rome, Ephesus, Antioch, etc.] will afford evidence to the other Gospels also, which we possess equally through their means, and according to their usage — I mean the Gospels of John and Matthew — while that which Mark published may be affirmed to be Peter’s whose interpreter Mark was.  For even Luke’s form of the Gospel men usually ascribe to Paul.  And it may well seem that the works which disciples publish belong to their masters.  Well, then, Marcion ought to be called to a strict account concerning these (other Gospels) also, for having omitted them, and insisted in preference on Luke; as if they, too, had not had free course in the churches, as well as Luke’s Gospel, from the beginning.  Nay, it is even more credible that they existed from the very beginning; for, being the work of apostles, they were prior, and coeval in origin with the churches themselves.

Against Marcion (4.5).

In other words, Tertullian is rejecting this abridged gospel as anonymous, while arguing in favor of the four canonical Gospels as having, in effect, a chain of custody handed down from the apostolic churches.

Buttressing Tertullian, we have the Muratorian fragment, dating to 170 CE, which expressly names Luke’s Gospel and Acts as part of the canon.  While this fragment, on its own, is probably not within a reasonable living memory of the original publication of Luke, it is only one generation removed.

Note: the inclusion of John’s gospel in the Muratorian fragment, coupled with the discovery of P52, and the internal identification of testimony from “the beloved disciple” makes a strong case that John was never anonymous either.

This bring us to the Irenaeus work Against Heresies (circa 182 CE), which not only names the author of Luke, but identifies him as a companion of Paul (3.1.1).  This is all within the first century of the conventional publication date.

What’s more: P75, which is probably the oldest fragment of Luke we have, dates back to 175-225 CE.  Thus, P75 comes from a period where the association of Luke’s Gospel with Luke was already established.  We have no copies of Luke from a period when the authorship of that Gospel was even possibly an issue. 

In sum … this is all a basic problem of time.  Is there enough time from its original publication for Luke to be both anonymous and then clearly identified with a Lukan authorship?  Ironically, those wishing to push Luke’s works earlier likewise weaken the argument against anonymity.

godspell said
I’m looking for patterns here, and the patterns I see argue for anonymous authors, whose identities were known to a relatively small circle.  I’d need a great deal more than this to change my mind about that.  But as I’ve said, scholarly consensus is a moving target–that keeps moving.  

It would be easier, to be sure, if Christianity wasn’t a living religion, many of whose adherents want to bolster its claims, while others strive to undermine them.  Neither goal, of course, should be the goal of the historian.  The historian only wants to know what happened, and why.  In practice, though, everybody has an axe to grind.  

My axe is that I believe Jesus was an exceptionally good and insightful man, with a strong knowledge of scripture and remarkable courage, charisma, and compassion.  Which makes me skeptical of claims that people who told stories about him that give him godlike abilities (as opposed to abilities that might be ascribed to any Jewish holy man) knew him personally.  His humanity is my focus, not his alleged divinity, which was alleged only after his death.  

What’s yours?  🙂  

My axe is that I sometimes find critical scholars engaging in the same type of logical fallacies and double-standards that apologists use.  I’m an attorney by trade.  And over the years it’s caused me to be increasingly skeptical about claims to expertise.

There are a handful of arguments Bart makes — sometimes even stating his opinion as fact (like the anonymity of the gospels, for instance) — that would not hold up to the same type of critical scrutiny he applies to ancient Christian works.  Examples of this include his rejection of the post-crucifixion burial and his contention that the reference by Papias to gospels he identified to be authored by “Matthew” and “Mark” were not versions the Gospels According to Matthew and to Mark.

Bart might be right about these things.  But the support he cites for his arguments is extraordinarily weak.

There are many areas of disagreement where the factual record is sufficient that we don’t need so-called expert opinion on the issue.  Arguments about anonymity of the gospels fall into this category.  Once you read up on both sides of the argument, you have just as much relevant knowledge as scholars do.  So, you don’t really need “scholarly opinion” to work out a best explanation.

Obviously, if we are talking about translating obscure Greek terms or dating ancient, that is a different story.

But Bart has the same factual background on certain issues that we do.  And sometimes, on those issues, he reaches conclusions I find unpersuasive.  Anonymity of authorship is an example.  And other critical scholars have joined Bart’s opinion on this.

But, if you read scholarship about Plato’s Republic or Cicero’s De Re Publica, those works are virtually never referred to by scholars as “anonymous.”

godspell said
vergari, I enjoy talking to you, but I loathe this type of response.  It’s time-consuming and irritating.

And no, I don’t think Luke and Acts have different authors, and am truly baffled how you got that out of what I typed.

Please respond in a single block of text.  It’s not that hard.  I know, they did this in ancient times as well, which is how some lost books have come down to us, through polemics aimed at them, but I don’t particularly want anything I write to survive that way, or perhaps at all.  🙂 
  

Fair enough.  And I appreciate the dialogue.  I fear I was bit overly antagonistic yesterday.  I had misconstrued what you had written.  From now on, I won’t break up my responses.  And you don’t need to respond to this part.  No more breaking up blocks after this.

godspell said

Epistles are interesting, in that obviously they do begin with someone identifying himself to the recipients (no return address stickers in ancient times), and are therefore ripe for forgery, since of course few people would know the true epistle writer’s handwriting, due to the letters being reproduced in many hands.

How could there possibly be forgeries in ancient times if the books being forged (Galen’s, for example) had no identification of the author?  Explain that to me.  Plato was a prominent thinker as well, and self-evidently he did identify himself as the author of his dialogues–and if others wanted to write in his name, they had to do the same.  The false Pauline epistles are forgeries because they identify themselves as Paul’s work.  The gospels are not forgeries, regardless of who wrote them, because they do not identify their authors, correctly or otherwise.

We do not have an original copy of any famous book or letter from ancient times (probably no obscure ones either, since they just disappeared).  We don’t have a copy of Augustus’ memoirs, which we know existed, but we can be damn sure they had his name on them when they did exist.  It was not normal for authors in ancient times to conceal their identities, but there were good reasons for Christian authors to do so, and they did.  Making it difficult at a later time for later generations to be sure who had written them.  But authorship would be ascribed to someone prominent, someone who had been remembered, as Moses was remembered (whoever he was in reality) as the author of the Pentateuch.

Also, on the question of ‘positive evidence’–ancient history is shockingly deficient in this regard.   Our positive evidence for Socrates is basically written in the form of fiction–dialogues that certainly didn’t take place as written (if at all), and a funny play by Aristophanes where Socrates is talking to clouds, conning rich people out of their money, and generally making an ass of himself.  (Some scholars think this play helped build support for Socrates’ trial and execution, but there is no record of that event other than more fictionalized dialogues from two of his pupils, neither of whom were present for the festivities, because they knew better). 

The gospels, as written, don’t seem to be out to convince anyone that their authors were eyewitnesses to the events in question and in fact important people in Jesus ministry.  Quite the contrary.  I think that is a later tradition, created precisely to give them greater authority, but also to conceal the fact that the identity of their authors had been lost to time.  And that has happened more times than can possibly be counted in the distant past.  It’s happened in modern history as well. 

On the epistles:  I would assume, perhaps incorrectly, that the autographs would have included the author’s seal.  Of course, we have no way of knowing. 

On forgeries:  Interesting question.  (And your point is well made with reference to, for example, the Gospel of Peter, which expressly includes an ending identifying the author as Peter; similarly, the Gospel of Thomas opens with “Didymos Judas Thomas” having recorded the sayings of Jesus.)  I suppose it depends on the meaning of the term “forgery,” which I think tends to be overused.  Bart has strenuously argued that the “we” passages in Acts are forgeries.  Of course, as you point out, this is an odd conclusion if Acts really was published anonymously.

On Christian authors disguising their identity:  Do we have positive evidence of this?  That is to say, do we have any examples of someone writing during the early centuries of the Church that any of these works (gospels or otherwise) were published anonymously in order to protect the identity of the author?

Positive evidence:  I think you may be overstating my point on positive evidence.  My point is not that “positive evidence” is “dispositive” or fully resolving the issue.  My point is that positive evidence can give us a good starting point in our historical investigation.  There is quite a bit of positive evidence all over the ancient world on any number of things.  BUT …. that doesn’t mean the positive evidence is dispositive or ultimately correct.

Again, I am not arguing that circumstantial evidence is not persuasive.  Indeed, sometimes circumstantial evidence is by the best evidence on an issue.  But, when attempting to put together an argument for an event from the distant past based on circumstantial evidence alone, the nature of the circumstantial evidence needs to be tightly scrutinized in order to make sure, among other things, that the best interpretations of that evidence are being drawn and the circumstantial evidence is not being used in a circular manner.

What I have noticed in the case of the anonymity of the Gospels is based in part on a circumstantial evidence which applies to many, many more works which are not considered anonymous (lack of identification within the text itself), coupled with certain assumptions that appear to based on circular reasoning, to wit: that early Christian writers hid their identities due to fear of persecution. 

On the former point, I am not in principle opposed to arguments from silence.  The axiom that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as demonstrated by Arthur Conan Doyle’s example of “the dog that didn’t bark.”  As we have now well-plowed this ground, the argument seems to be that the Gospels never internally identify the author and early writers quoting those works don’t identify the authors either; thus, the works originally lacked identifying authors.  The problem, as I’ve pointed out, is that this same type of evidence applies broadly and to works we don’t consider anonymous: in the case of the missing internal identification of the writer: this was the norm, not the exception, in antiquity; and, in the case of early Christian writer quoting scripture without attribution: they did this equally to works that we know were not published anonymously, such as the epistles of Paul, Peter and James.  Thus, the problem with using this type of evidence from silence is that we have too many of examples of it not being applicable to the conclusion you’d like to draw.

On this latter point, what reason do we have to think that early Christian writers hid their identities due to fear of persecution?  Because the Gospels were originally anonymous.  On this point, the conclusion (the Gospels were anonymous) is supported by the premise (the authors hid their identities due to fear of persecution), which is supported by the conclusion (he Gospels were anonymous).

Gospel eyewitnesses: I agree with you on what they are attempting to convey as far as the authors themselves being eyewitnesses.  The only thing I’d say here is that arguments about anonymity and eyewitnesses are different.  The only Gospel expressly purporting to give the account of an identified eyewitness is John.  But even John does not expressly state that the eyewitness is the author of the Gospel.  And then we have the “we” passages in Acts, which I do think purport to be eyewitness accounts.  Finally, we have Luke’s Gospel, which I’ll get to below.

So when you say that the tradition of eyewitnesses was a later tradition, I assume you are referring to Matthew being an apostle, Mark being the companion of Peter and Luke being the companion of Paul?  You may be correct here.  Those very well may be later traditions.  And/but I don’t think those bear upon the anonymity issue.  For, assuming you are correct about the eyewitness tradition being later, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to add the eyewitness tradition at around the same time that the names are being added, and then come up with the obscure names we get: Matthew, Mark and Luke.  It would make far more sense that the names were already in place, when the eyewitness tradition was added.  Indeed, it makes for a good reason to explain why such authority is being placed in works by such obscure authors.

Finally, apart from the tradition about Luke being a companion of Paul, the author of Luke actually tells us where he gets his information, in his introduction to the Gospel: he says he bases it essentially on written reports.  These “reports” almost certainly included Mark, probably included something(s) reflecting the idea of Q, and (I believe) also included Matthew.  And, it almost certainly included other types of “reports,” which comprise the unique Lukan material.  In addition, the author of Luke also tells us (IMO) that he was a companion of Paul; we find that is his sequel, Acts.  However, since Paul wasn’t around for the events depicted in Luke’s Gospel, that relationship with Paul is not bearing on the eyewitness issue for the Gospel According to Luke.

godspell said
There is a stronger basis for part of Acts being eyewitness testimony, but because we know there are NT texts that make false claims of authorship, how can we ever be sure?  

There is room for argument, and as I understand it, the argument is still ongoing in scholarly circles.  And may be ongoing for centuries to come, assuming there are still centuries to come.  One might suspect that the argument is made more complicated by the fact that there are many who want to believe the gospels are all eyewitness accounts (that contradict each other in myriad significant ways).  

The problem with calling the gospels or Acts eyewitness testimony, of course, is that all attest to events that nobody not motivated by a certain type of religious faith can believe ever happened as described.  Even if ‘Luke’ is Luke, he didn’t see most of what he’s writing about (or any, in the case of the gospel).

Too much credulity, too much skepticism–hard to strike the right balance.  And impossible to know if you have or not.  

There are good reasons to be highly skeptical of eyewitness claims — both as to whether the person is an eyewitness and as to the content of the alleged eyewitness testimony.  I do think it’s interesting that the “we” passages contain far less of the supernatural and implausible accounts found in other areas of Acts.

godspell said
That is an interesting point, yes.  Stories tend to get bigger when the storyteller is further away from the source.  Precisely why it was necessary that the gospel authors not know the human Jesus.  Mark’s Jesus is the most human, but still capable of controlling the very elements.  

Personally, Acts is less convincing to me than any of the synoptics, and even parts of John.  Which doesn’t mean that none of it happened, but it does mean they’re trying harder.  Peter and Paul were remarkable men–still less so, I’d say, than the one who inspired them.  So when miraculous events are attributed to them, there’s less conviction about it–it seems more forced, less organic.  If Jesus was not a man who could work true miracles, he was a man of whom such things could be readily believed.    

“Precisely why it was necessary that the gospel authors not know the human Jesus.”  My only bone of contention here is trying to figure out the relationship between the “author” of John and the “testifier” of John.  This is one of the central mysteries I’d love to figure out.  The evidence that the identified “disciple who Jesus loved” is John the son of Zebedee is pretty strong.  Yet, Acts tells us that John was illiterate.  So it’s safe to assume that his actual hand did not compose that Gospel.  On the other hand, could John have supervised or otherwise contributed to the composition orally?  It’s an intriguing question.

I agree with you that the miracles in Acts are not persuasive.  However, the history in Acts is very interesting in my mind.