Who wrote the Gospels, and can we trust them?

The objection usually arrives in one sentence: the Gospels are anonymous, so nobody really knows who wrote them.

The first half is nearly true. The titles — “The Gospel according to Matthew” and so on — are not part of the original text; they were added when the books were copied and collected. The second half does not follow at all, and the reason why is the interesting part.

The names never varied. Anywhere.

Here is the fact that has to be accounted for.

These books were copied by hand and carried from Britain to Mesopotamia over more than a century. They were used by communities that argued fiercely with each other about almost everything else.

And on this, nobody disagreed. Every early Christian writer who names the authors names the same four.

• Papias, writing early in the 100s, reports what he had heard from people who knew the apostles. He names Matthew and Mark.
• Irenaeus, who as a boy listened to Polycarp — and Polycarp had known the apostle John — names all four.
• The Muratorian Fragment, a list of accepted books from around the year 180, names them too. So do Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Origen.

There is no rival tradition. Not one surviving source suggests a different author for any of the four. Not one manuscript carries a different name.

That is not what made-up attributions look like. We can watch Christians inventing authorship later, and it always goes the same way: the fake gospels get attached to the biggest possible names — Thomas, Peter, Mary. Which raises an obvious question about these four.

Nobody inventing names would pick these

Two of the four are a very strange choice.

Mark was not an apostle. He is a young assistant who, in the book of Acts, walks out on Paul in the middle of a journey and causes a serious falling-out.

Luke was not an apostle either. He was not even Jewish — a Greek doctor, a travelling companion of Paul, who was not present at any of the events he describes.

If you are making up an author to give your book authority, you do not choose the man who deserted and the foreign doctor. You choose Peter.

Matthew is a similar problem for the forgery theory. He was a tax collector — which in first-century Judea meant working for the Roman occupation, and being despised for it.

The books themselves fit the men named on them

This evidence is quieter, but it points the same way.

Matthew’s Gospel handles money with unusual precision, using specific coin terms the others do not, and it is the only one that records the episode about the temple tax. That is what you would expect from a tax collector.

Mark’s Greek is rough and full of Latin loan-words, which is what you would expect from a Gospel written in Rome. It also keeps describing scenes from Peter’s point of view.

Luke and the book of Acts are addressed to the same man, Theophilus, and share a vocabulary. Parts of Acts are written as “we” — meaning the author was there — and those sections put him beside Paul at a time when Paul writes that only Luke is still with him.

None of these settles anything on its own. Together they line up with the outside testimony instead of pulling against it, which is what you want when different kinds of evidence agree.

Objections answered

They’re anonymous, so the names are just guesses.

The books are anonymous. The tradition about them is not. Those are two different claims, and the objection needs the second one to do its work.

An anonymous book does not mean an unknown author. The first people to read Luke knew perfectly well who had handed them the scroll — not putting your name in the text was normal for that kind of writing, not a lost identity.

And what would actually show the names were guesses is disagreement about them. There is none to show.

The titles were only added in the second century.

That appears to be true of the physical titles. But look at how they appear: fully standardised, in places far apart, with no variations at all.

That is the opposite of what a guess produces. If four separate communities in four regions had each invented an author, they would have invented different ones, and we would see them disagreeing in the manuscripts. Instead, the moment the titles show up, they already agree.

The simplest explanation is that the titles were writing down what everyone already knew, rather than deciding it.

Critical scholars reject traditional authorship.

Many do, and some of their arguments are serious and worth reading properly.

But “scholars say” is not itself an argument — both sides can play that game — and the field is not as united as the objection suggests. The traditional view has substantial defenders.

The honest position is that this is a historical judgement about what is most likely, not a mathematical proof. It should be settled by weighing the evidence, not by counting heads on either side.

How to say it

Let Luke describe his own method

He opens by saying he traced everything from the beginning, in order, for a named reader. The author explains how he worked in his first sentence.

Luke 1:3KJVIt seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus.

Show John’s Gospel signing itself

“This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things.” The claim to be an eyewitness is inside the book, not only outside it.

John 21:24KJVThis is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true.

Quote Peter refusing the charge

Not cleverly invented stories, but eyewitnesses. The difference between the two was being drawn from the start, by the people accused of blurring it.

2 Peter 1:16KJVFor we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

Then point at the unimpressive names

Mark walked out on Paul. Luke was a foreign doctor who saw none of it. Nobody choosing names for authority picks those two.

Invite them to check it like the Bereans

Luke calls them noble for searching the Scriptures daily to see whether Paul was right. Anyone who does the same to you is doing what he praised.

Acts 17:11KJVThese were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.

Shared ground, and where traditions differ

All Christians hold

Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants receive the same four Gospels, in the same collection, and hold them to be reliable accounts of what Jesus said and did. No historic tradition adds a fifth or drops one of the four.

Catholic

Reads the Gospels within the church that recognised which books belonged, with the church’s teaching authority guiding how they are understood.

Orthodox

Receives them through the worship of the church and the agreement of the early Christian writers, which in practice settled the list long before anyone wrote one down.

Protestant

Holds Scripture as the final authority, and treats the church’s recognition of these books as evidence about them rather than as what made them authoritative.