Pseudonymous books are not anonymous.\u00a0 They have a name clearly attached to them, it’s just that the name is either fraudulent or fictitious (depending on whether the author intended the reader to be deceived).<\/p>\n

A book of the New Testament which actually is anonymous is the Epistle to the Hebrews.\u00a0 The author was clearly known to the original readers, but in its published form it says nothing about authorship.\u00a0 Although it is traditionally attributed to St. Paul, the text itself nowhere says this, and there are significant differences in writing style (as I know from personal experience trying to translate it one time\u2014the Greek <\/em>is difficult and uses classical words; I only got four verses in).\u00a0 The later history of Hebrews was exactly as you would expect for a truly anonymous document: discussion and disagreement about whether it was really written by Paul or several other proposed candidate authors, and uncertainty about whether or not it should be included in the canon.\u00a0 From the 4th century on there was\u00a0 a near consensus that the letter was written by Paul, but this consensus fell apart after the Reformation.\u00a0 By contrast, the other 13 Pauline epistles have Paul’s name clearly stated in the salutation, and are therefore each either <\/em>genuine or pseudonymous.<\/em><\/p>\n

Now, it’s certainly logically possible that the Gospels were all originally anonymous.\u00a0 However, achieving this would require a complicated historical process.\u00a0 It would require believing that for each gospel 1) the gospel was actually written by some person of sufficiently little importance that their name was not recorded, 2) so that the document was published and first circulated without any names attached, 3) then, at some later time, someone speculated that it was really written by the proposed author, 4) belief in this authorship became widespread without any recorded dissent, and 5) all copies of the text which have descendants were modified to include the title.\u00a0 This has to have happened, not once, but four times.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Gospel of John is a special case, because the author is mentioned in the text specifically, although not by name, by the title “the disciple whom Jesus loved”.\u00a0 There’s been a lot of ink spilled about the identity of this person, but I think much of it is an effort to deny the obvious.\u00a0 The scenes with this person strongly indicate that he was one of the Twelve Apostles.\u00a0 Moreover, the statement of authorship in John 21:24, “This [disciple whom Jesus loved] is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true,” doesn’t make much sense if the identity of the apostle was intended to be mysterious.\u00a0 But it all makes sense if the Gospel was originally circulated with the name “John” attached to it (as it is in every copy we have).\u00a0 This isn’t a watertight proof by any means, but I think it is significant when combined with the other evidence.<\/p>\n

So I think the skeptic would do better to say that the Gospels are pseudonymous.\u00a0 However, they have to pay a probability price for this too.\u00a0 In addition to bucking the standard presumption of genuine authorship, we also have testimony from other early documents.\u00a0 This includes the writings of St. Papias (as preserved in Eusebius) and St. Irenaeus explicitly stating the authorship of the Gospels, and even providing details about how they were written (e.g. that Mark was based on St. Peter’s preaching).\u00a0 These two individuals are connected by very short chains to the original generation of apostles.\u00a0 In fact, both Irenaeus and Papias assert that Papias was a disciple of John<\/em>, although some scholars try to argue (in my view unconvincingly) that this was a different John than the apostle.\u00a0 In any case, he seems to have been related by multiple two-step chains to the original apostles, so it would be hard for a pseudonymous work to fool him.\u00a0 Irenaeus, in turn, was a disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of John, again a very short chain of transmission.<\/p>\n

This is excellent evidence for the traditional authorship of the Gospels, although it may be a more efficient investment of “improbability” for the skeptic to dismiss Papias and Iranaeus rather than accept the fact that two of the four Gospels were written by direct eyewitnesses to the events in question.\u00a0 (The question of whether apostolic authorship is consistent with textual evidence of date and style will have to wait for another post.)<\/p>\n

I’m reminded that at one time it was popular for scholars to believe that Homer never really existed.\u00a0 Somehow, contrary to all modern experiences of authorship, they thought that the Illiad<\/em> and Odyssey<\/em> must have precipitated out of the folk-consciousness, without any definite author.\u00a0 That’s pretty crazy.\u00a0 But let’s suppose that there was some definite author, and we simply don’t know what his name was.\u00a0 Seem plausible?\u00a0 Well, this would require believing that a class of professional singers, specially trained to memorize over 27,000 lines of poetry, were completely unable to remember a single word<\/em> accurately.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: I should clarify that Papias only refers to the circumstances of the authorship of Matthew and Mark; he does not (at least in the fragment preserved by Eusebius) discuss the authorship of the Third and Fourth Gospels.\u00a0 Irenaeus, on the other hand, bears witness to all four canonical Gospels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"