authorship Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Was John the Son of Zebedee Capable of Writing a Gospel?

I deal with an interesting question in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: is it plausible that the apostle John could compose a Gospel in Greek? If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away, and I will add it to my long list! QUESTION: You mention in your book Forgeries and Counter Forgeries that John most likely did not write the Gospel attributed to him as he almost certainly could not write in Greek. I seem to remember you writing that the Greek of that Gospel was good and fairly nuanced. However, I am being told by someone who is fairly conversant in these matters that John could easily have learned the Greek necessary to write the Gospel, since he lived for over 60 years on the mission field and that his Greek is the most basic of the NT. Is he right? And if so how would you respond? RESPONSE Yes, I get asked this question a lot, or rather, get told this a lot – that if an [...]

BDEhrman2021-01-20T00:51:04-05:00August 20th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

How Do We Know What “Most Scholars” Think?

I have received a particularly interesting question that has led to a bit of back and forth between me and a person on the blog. This person pointed out that in my writings I often indicate that a view that I have (e.g., that the Gospel of John was not written by John the son of Zebedee; that the book of Ephesians was not really written by Paul even though the author claims to be Paul; or that the Gospels are all 40-65 years after the death of Jesus, etc.) is held by the majority of scholars. But fundamentalist and conservative evangelical scholars say just the opposite, that their views (e.g., that John the son of Zebedee did write the Gospel of John, or that the Gospels date to before the destruction of the Jerusalem in the year 70) are the views of the majority of scholars. So who is right? And how can a person know? In my initial response to this person, I told him that what I always try to say (maybe [...]

BDEhrman2017-09-22T13:49:54-04:00January 20th, 2017|Bart's Critics, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did John Write the Fourth Gospel?

In my previous post I explained why the author of the book of Revelation, someone named John, was not claiming to be John the son of Zebedee and in fact probably was not John the son of Zebedee. I also showed why this author was not the same one who produced the fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John. Now I want to talk about the Gospel to show that it too was probably not written by John. The first thing to stress – it can’t be stressed enough – is that like the other Gospels of the New Testament, the Gospel of John (as I’ll continue to call it, for the sake of convenience, since that is, after all, the title that was later given to it) is completely anonymous. The author does not tell us his name or identify himself in any way. I have already explained why people in the early church came to *think* the book was written by Jesus’ earthly disciple, John the son of Zebedee (see https://ehrmanblog.org/who-wrote-the-book-of-revelation-and-the-fourth-gospel/ from a few [...]

BDEhrman2021-01-20T00:54:47-05:00August 2nd, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

The Author of Revelation

In this post I want to explain why it is almost universally thought that the same author did not write the fourth Gospel and the book of Revelation, and then to show why the latter author was almost certainly not John the son of Zebedee, Jesus’ close disciple. So far as I know, only fundamentalists today think that John the son of Zebedee did write the book of Revelation. There are really only three things that speak in favor of this view: (1) The author was someone named John (hey! If he was John he was John, right? Well, John was a very common name, and he doesn’t claim to be *that* John) (2) The book of Revelation, like the Gospel of John, speaks of Christ as a lamb who was slain and thinks of him as the Word of God (that shows that it had similar views, not that it had the same author) (3) Church tradition for centuries has maintained that John the son of Zebedee was the author. The evidence on the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:28:28-04:00August 1st, 2016|Public Forum, Revelation of John|

Who Wrote the Book of Revelation and the Fourth Gospel?

Speaking of the Apocalypse (from the previous post giving that odd video): Someone recently asked me if the same author could have written both the book of Revelation and the Gospel of John. Interesting question! Traditionally, both books have been identified as coming from the same person, John the son of Zebedee, the fisherman who was one of Jesus’ closest disciples. In answering the question I would like to stress two points: first, they almost certainly were not written by the same person (note: they do not claim to be); and second, whoever these two authors were, neither one of them was John the son of Zebedee. Before making these two points, I need to explain the traditional view: same author for both, John the son of Zebedee. With the book of Revelation, the reason for the identification was simple: the author explicitly says that he was named John. Already in v. 1 he indicates that the Revelation was given to himself, John, and in v. 9 he is even more explicit: “I, John, your [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:28:42-04:00July 28th, 2016|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Revelation of John|

Did Matthew Write in Hebrew? Did Jesus Institute the Lord’s Supper? Did Josephus Mention Jesus? Weekly Readers’ Mailbag July 9, 2016

Was the Gospel of Matthew written in Hebrew? Did Jesus have a Last Supper? And does Josephus mention Jesus’ brother James? These are the three questions I will be addressing in this week’s Reader’s Weekly Mailbag. If you have any question for me to address, let me know! ************************************************ QUESTION: Just a short question: is there any possibility that Matthew gospel’s was written in Hebrew or Aramaic ? RESPONSE There was a long tradition throughout early and medieval Christianity that maintained that Matthew – commonly called the “most Jewish” of the Gospels – was written in Hebrew (or Aramaic). Given its heightened Jewish concerns (see, for example, 5:17-20, verses found in no other Gospel), wasn’t it probably written to Jews in their native language? There are two preliminary points to be made. First, a number of scholars doubt if Matthew, or his community, was Jewish. It is widely thought, instead, that Matthew portrays a Jesus who insists that his followers keep the Jewish law precisely because they were not accustomed to doing so, that [...]

BDEhrman2017-11-06T21:17:38-05:00July 9th, 2016|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Did the Beloved Disciple Write the Gospel of John?

I have started a series of posts dealing with the authorship of the Gospels – specifically, why they were eventually named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. My first point, in my previous post and in this one, is that the books are completely anonymous. Their authors never divulge their names. Eventually I may want to address the question of why that is. But for now, my point is that despite what people might commonly think, the books are anonymous. I pointed out yesterday that even though the author of Luke does not tell us his name, he does write in the first person (“I”/ “we”) in the opening of his Gospel. That never happens in either Matthew or Mark, but it does happen again in the Gospel of John. In fact, it is widely claimed – sometimes even by scholars who should know better – that the author identifies himself as the “beloved disciple” who appears several times in the Gospel of John, and only in this Gospel. On a number of occasions the author [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:21:13-04:00November 14th, 2014|Canonical Gospels|

Our Anonymous Gospels, Starting with Luke

Over the past few weeks I’ve had several people ask me about why the Gospels of the New Testament are attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It’s a great question, and one that I want to do some more intense thinking and reading about myself. So I thought I would lay out some of the basics here in a series of posts, and think aloud a bit about why I think the Gospels got the names they did. To begin with, it’s important to recognize that the Gospels themselves are completely anonymous. None of the authors identifies himself by name. The Gospels are all written in the third person about what “they” – other people – were doing (including, of course, and principally, Jesus). There are only a couple of exceptions to the third-person narratives of the Gospels, and even in these cases the authors do not given their own names. The first is in the Prologue to Luke’s Gospel, Luke 1:1-4, where the author says: Just as many have attempted to write a [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:21:20-04:00November 14th, 2014|Canonical Gospels|

Summing Up: Was Luke Luke?

I started this thread over a week ago on the authorship of the Third Gospel, and would like now simply to bring some closure to it before moving on to other things. To sum up: there is a kind of interpretive logic that can lead one to think that this Gospel was written by Luke, a Gentile physician who was a traveling companion of Paul. This is what I myself thought for years, and it was based on this logic, that: The author of Acts also wrote the Gospel of Luke That the author of Acts, and therefore of Luke, must have been a traveling companion of Paul (since he speaks of himself in the first person on four occasions) That this author was probably a Gentile because he was so concerned with the spread of the Christian movement among Gentiles (the whole point of the book of Acts) Paul himself speaks of a Gentile among his traveling companions in Colossians 4, naming him as Luke the beloved physician. Therefore this person was likely the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:32:07-04:00September 6th, 2013|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Who Wrote Luke and Acts?

In this thread I have been discussing whether Luke, the gentile physician, the traveling companion of Paul, wrote the Third Gospel. The first point I’ve made, over a couple of posts, is that the idea that Paul *had* a gentile physician as a traveling companion is dubious. That notion is derived from the mention of Luke in the book of Colossians, but Paul almost certainly did not *write* Colossians. Paul does mention a companion named Luke in the book of Philemon, but he does not say anything at all about him (not, for example, that he was a gentile or that he was a physician). Still, one could argue – and many have! – that whatever his name, it was a companion of Paul who wrote the books of Luke and Acts. The main argument in favor of that thesis – with which I heartily disagree – is the presence of the “we-passages” in Acts, that I mentioned previously. My view is that these passages do NOT demonstrate that the author was Paul’s traveling companion. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:37:48-04:00September 3rd, 2013|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Not for the Faint of Heart (Authorship of Colossians)

As I was writing up my post yesterday on the evidence that speaks against Paul having written Colossians, it occurred to me (as I indicated at the time) that it might be instructive to show the difference between how I might present that case to a lay audience and how I might present it to fellow scholars. The following is how I cover the same material in Forgery and Counterforgery . (All of this is related to the larger thread I have going on just now on whether the Third Gospel was written by Luke the Gentile physician, traveling companion of Paul; see yesterday’s post on the connection. In my next post I’ll return to that thread and point out other problems with the “logic” that says Luke wrote the Gospel. This current post will not be to everyone’s taste. If not, just sample it – or spit it out!) ************************************************************************************ As with every instance of forgery, the case of Colossians is cumulative, involving multiple factors. None has proved more decisive over the past thirty [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T17:26:17-04:00September 2nd, 2013|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

Problems with Luke as the Author of Luke

In my previous post I gave the logic that can be adduced for thinking that the Third Gospel was probably written by Luke, the gentile physician who was a companion of Paul for part of his missionary journeys. The short story, in sum: the author of Luke also wrote the book of Acts; the book of Acts in four places talks about what “we” (companions with Paul) were doing; both books were therefore written by one of Paul’s companions; Acts and Luke appear to have a gentile bias; only three of Paul’s companions were known to be gentiles (Colossians 4:7-14); Luke there is a gentile physician; Luke-Acts appears to have an enhanced interest in medical terminology; therefore Luke the gentile physician was probably its author. Now, for a couple of posts or so, I’ll try to explain why, in my opinion, this logic is flawed. In this post and the next (at least) I’ll deal with a lynchpin of the argument, that we know that Luke the gentile physician was a travelling companion of Paul. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T17:31:37-04:00September 1st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Luke is Thought To Have Written Luke

I made an off the cuff comment in a previous post that there was a certain logic that has led readers over the years to identify “Luke” as the author of the Third Gospel. Let me stress again that the book itself is written anonymously; the author never identifies himself in any way. Moreover, we do not have the identification of the author as Luke until some 100 years after he wrote, in a statement by Irenaeus in his book Against Heresies, where he names the four Gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So why Luke? Irenaeus doesn’t tell us, but there appears to be a kind of “exegetical logic” that led to this decision. The way it works is a bit complicated, but it goes like this: I mentioned in the previous post that the author of this Gospel also wrote the book of Acts. It too is anonymous. But in four passages in the book of Acts, when the author is describing some of the journeys and activities of the apostle Paul, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:14:48-04:00August 31st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

The Jewish Emphases of Matthew

In evaluating whether Matthew was himself Jewish or not – the theme of my current thread — it is important to get a sense of his distinctive emphases in his portrayal of Jesus. Here there can be little doubt. The focus of attention in Matthew’s Gospel is on to the nature of Jesus’ relationship to Judaism. You see this off the bat in chapter 1. Whereas Mark’s Gospel begins with Jesus as an adult being baptized by John the Baptist, Matthew’s begins with a clear resonance of Jewish Scripture – with a genealogy of Jewish and Israelite ancestors. And before he begins the genealogy, Matthew tells us that it will be one that traces the line of Jesus back to David and Abraham (“The Book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham”). And why does he highlight these two names in particular? Because David was the greatest king of Israel, whose descendant was to be the “messiah” (as Jesus is called here: Jesus “Christ”), and Abraham was “the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:24:55-04:00June 26th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, Reader’s Questions|

Was the Author of Matthew Matthew?

In my previous post I showed that the claim that Matthew, the tax-collector, was the author of the Gospel of Matthew (as we continue to call it) cannot be traced earlier than about 180 CE. It is not found in Justin, who lived in Rome in 150 CE and who quotes the Gospel – along with Mark and Luke – without indicating who wrote them. And the evidence of Papias (120-140 CE) is more than just ambiguous: he actually does not appear to be referring to *our* Gospel of Matthew when he says that the disciple Matthew collected the sayings of Jesus in the Hebrew language. In this post I want to give two reasons for thinking that the Gospel was not in fact written by Jesus’ disciple Matthew (and at every point it needs to be remembered that the Gospel does not *claim* to be written by Matthew; quite the contrary, not only is it anonymous: it speaks of Matthew as one of the characters in the story in the third person). FIRST point. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:25:04-04:00June 25th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

When Was Matthew Called Matthew?

For years I agreed with those scholars who claim that we have very early “evidence” that the Gospel of Matthew was actually written by Matthew, the tax-collector who was a disciple of Jesus. I no longer think so. Let me give some of the relevant information. The anonymity of this author – as is true for the other three NT Gospels as well, was respected by Christians for decades. When the Gospels of the New Testament are alluded to and quoted by authors of the early second century, they are never entitled, never named. Even Justin Martyr, writing around 150-60 CE, quotes verses from the Gospels, but does not indicate what the Gospels were named. For Justin, these books are simply known, collectively, as the “Memoirs of the Apostles.” It was about a century after the Gospels had been originally put in circulation that this book was called Matthew, and the others were called Mark, Luke, and John. This comes, for the first time, in the writings of the church father and heresy-hunter Irenaeus, around [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:25:12-04:00June 24th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

The Identity of “Matthew”

In a previous post I dealt very briefly with the question of whether the author of the Gospel of Matthew was Jewish. I want to say a few more things about the issue, although I’m not planning on providing anything like an exhaustive treatment. It’s a complicated issue. At the end of the day, my view is that we simply don’t know. In this post I want to say something about what we know about the identity of the author more generally. We call this author "Matthew” because that is the name traditionally associated with the Gospel. The Gospel is called “According to Matthew” in all of the surviving manuscripts that have a title (i.e., all the manuscripts that still have their first page.) It is never called anything else – although the *form* of the ascription to Matthew differs in different manuscripts: e.g., is it entitled “According to Matthew” or “The Gospel according to Matthew” or “The Holy Gospel according to Matthew,” or something else? But in all the ascriptions, the person named is [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:25:19-04:00June 23rd, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Why The Gospels Are Anonymous

Among the interesting questions I’ve received recently is the following. It’s on something other than How Jesus Became God! Rather than type out a completely new answer, I’ve resorted to the discussion I set out in my book Forged, cited here, as relevant, in full. QUESTION: I still can’t quite grasp why the Gospels were written anonymously. What is the prevailing theory? Why did the authors not attempt to pass themselves off as disciples by stating so at the beginning of their writings? RESPONSE: It is always interesting to ask why an author chose to remain anonymous, never more so than with the Gospels of the New Testament. In some instances an ancient author did not need to name himself because his readers knew perfectly well who he was and did not need to be told. That is almost certainly the case with the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John. These are private letters send from someone who calls himself “the elder” to a church in another location. It is safe to assume that [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:38:44-04:00April 12th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Why Was The Letter of Barnabas Attributed to Barnabas?

QUESTION: So why was the Letter of Barnabas thought to have been written by Barnabas? BACKGROUND: This question was asked in reference to my discussion of “Gematria” in the Letter of Barnabas. For fuller background, if you’re interested, you should refer to this post: “Another Instance of Gematria (For Members)” (the search function on the blog is very good, btw; it is in the upper right hand corner of your screen). In that post I note that the “Letter of Barnabas” was not actually written by Barnabas. In fact, it could not have been, since it is almost certainly to be dated to the 130s CE (for reasons I could explain if anyone really wants to know….). Barnabas, the companion of Paul, must have died no later than the 70s CE, more likely the 60s – some seventy years before this letter was written. So Barnabas couldn’t have written it. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, THE YEAR IS [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:06:21-04:00December 30th, 2012|Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|