The Gospel Writers

[Realworldjack]

What can we know (demonstrate) about the authors of what we call "The Gospels"? Notice carefully that I am not talking about opinions here, but rather what we can know to be a fact, and how we would go about demonstrating it to be a fact we can know?

[Mithrae]

Modern biblical translations .. tend to be based on the earliest available Greek manuscripts (the original language).

So it seems that, at least for the case of Matthew, it was an original Greek composition which could not have been written by Matthew. And given that Matthew did not write "Matthew," shouldn't that fact lessen our confidence that Matthew was involved with it at all? After all, Papias was flat-out wrong about it being written in Hebrew or Aramaic. So the most parsimonious hypothesis is that the association of Matthew with "his" gospel was folkloric and/or theological, not historical.

It's possible that the hypothesized Q source was a Greek translation of Matthew's "sayings of Jesus"; if so it wouldn't be too surprising for the first book to incorporate it into a structured narrative to become associated with Matthew.

So in the steps between original composition and what we read today - and some known exceptions such as the adulteress pericope aside

But the adulteress pericope in John is proven problematic because the earlier manuscripts lack it and the latter ones don't. Given that this proves that John was fiddled with, shouldn't this fact make it more probable that others parts of John were similarly "edited." What wouldn't we find in earlier manuscripts of John?

Why can it not be the case that 99% of the content on which identified modern professional translators depend was simply transmitted from copy to copy by the ancient scribes, in its original language and as faithfully as possible?

In the case of John, it wasn't transmitted faithfully. The adulteress pericope proves that. Saying that it is 99% faithfully transmitted is like a husband saying he is 99% faithfull to his wife, or Mark Twain boasting that his stories were "mostly true."

Why would the detectable antics of a much later scribe increase the probability of unproven antics by earlier scribes? It would be truly remarkable if 100% of ancient and medieval scribes were strictly, ethically committed to accurate transmission: Simple human nature suggests that we should expect some cases of deliberate alterations. But the unsurprising fact that a few scribes did indeed tamper with their material doesn't imply that we should expect or speculate on tampering as a general rule. And certainly doesn't justify claiming to "know" that to be the case, as Zzxyz seems to.

If anything the evidence suggests quite the opposite: Christian scribes seem to have faithfully preserved even the weirdest tales (like Jesus riding on two donkeys in Matthew or telling people to hate their father and mother in Luke) and outright contradictions between different accounts. If editing or alteration were even remotely commonplace, these would surely be among the first things we'd expect to be 'smoothed out.'

[Zzyzx]

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We can 'know' that.... Their writing was repeatedly selected, translated, interpreted, and edited by multiple unidentified people.

How do you know that?

How do I know that writings were selected for inclusion in the Bible? That translation and editing are involved in production of Bibles? That interpretations are made in relation to the Bible?

If any of that actually is in doubt, kindly identify doubtful parts.

Modern biblical translations are done by identified scholars, and tend to be based on the earliest available Greek manuscripts (the original language).

Bible translation history is a bit more complex. A rather long read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations

So in the steps between original composition and what we read today - and some known exceptions such as the adulteress pericope aside - what makes you think that there was any translation, interpretation or editing by multiple unidentified people?

I feel safe in saying that the identity of not all bible translators, interpreters, editors is known – thus, 'multiple unidentified people'. See above reference.

Would anyone in their right mind claim that the identity of ALL Bible translators, interpreters, editors is known?

Why can it not be the case that 99% of the content on which identified modern professional translators depend was

Is that the case (99%)? See above reference (regarding copying errors)

simply transmitted from copy to copy by the ancient scribes,

Can ancient scribes be shown to have been inerrant in their copying? Unless they can, there is room for error in copying. Again

in its original language and as faithfully as possible?

What was the 'original language' used in speeches attributed to Jesus? In what 'original language' were they recorded?

On what basis do you know otherwise?

I do not claim to know what mistakes or changes were made in copying, translating, editing. I acknowledge that those processes are not infallible.

And if it comes to it, how do you know that the original authors wrote nothing more than thoughts, opinions, conjectures and stories?

Did I SAY “nothing more than�? Or did you add that?

I actually said: “We can 'know' that long ago various people wrote their thoughts / opinions / conjectures / stories about 'gods'.�

Where do you find 'nothing more than'? In your imagination?

Notice how easy it is to change what is said by creative editing, adding and/or deception. That was done to something written a few hours ago. How easy it must be for similar to have been done over thousands of years.

[Mithrae]

[Replying to post 31 by Zzyzx]

Fair enough. It seems then that what you wrote would apply with equal validity to Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin of Species and so on?

"We can 'know' that long ago various people wrote their thoughts / opinions / conjectures / stories about 'science'. Their writing was repeatedly selected, translated, interpreted, and edited by multiple unidentified people."

In fact it would apply to pretty much everything that has ever been written, besides the "long ago" part in some cases. That being the case, I wonder if it's a meaningful contribution to discussion of the gospels specifically? We can also know that they were a visual medium. We can know that they used markings on papyrus/parchment/etc. to convey linguistic meaning. We can know that other people considered them important enough to copy and preserve. We can know that their contents helped shape world history. . . .

[Zzyzx]

.

[Replying to post 31 by Zzyzx]

Fair enough. It seems then that what you wrote would apply with equal validity to Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin of Species and so on?

"We can 'know' that long ago various people wrote their thoughts / opinions / conjectures / stories about 'science'. Their writing was repeatedly selected, translated, interpreted, and edited by multiple unidentified people."

Exactly -- and that SHOULD be applied to the writings of Newton and Darwin. Edited to add: The work of both those men HAS been significantly modified and improved upon over the years -- which is NOT a defect of science but a strength.

Scientific writing does NOT pretend to be the final word on any subject -- but to be along the path to knowledge and understanding.

As new, refined, more accurate information becomes available the older "thoughts, opinions, conjectures, stories (theories) are EXPECTED to be modified or replaced. This is in strong contrast to ideological systems that insist that ancient thoughts, opinions, conjectures, stories" are true and accurate (regardless any contradicting information becoming available) and are not subject to change or abandonment.

Many still insist that donkeys and snakes conversed in human language, the Earth stopped rotating, a flood covered the Earth 'to the tops of mountains', many long-dead bodies came back to life, someone pushed down a large building by brute strength, etc, etc.

It is not surprising that information-deprived and superstitious people long ago believed such fanciful tales. But modern people . . . . ???

[Goose]

[Replying to post 1 by Realworldjack]

I’m assuming by fact, you must mean historical fact, not some kind of fact which can be unequivocally proven true. I’m assuming you must mean this kind of historical fact in context to historical knowledge, not some kind of absolute knowledge. If you mean fact in the sense of a fact which can be unequivocally proven true and/or knowledge in the sense of some kind of absolute knowledge then the burden of proof is set so high in regards to the authors of the Gospels it cannot be reached even in principle. I’m not sure anything from history, let alone anything from ancient history, can be demonstrated with that kind of certainty. If, however, you mean facts and knowledge in a historical sense then we can use standard historical methodology to demonstrate historical facts about the authors of the Gospels. Typically, that involves looking at external and internal evidence.

In this latter case, where we use standard historical methodology, it would be my contention the external evidence for the Gospels is just as strong, perhaps even stronger, than the evidence for other ancient secular texts from the same era generally not questioned in regards to authorship. Put another way, whatever we say about the strength of the external evidence for the authorship of many other secular works we will likewise have to say about the strength of the external evidence for the Gospels since the external evidence for the Gospels is just as strong, perhaps even stronger. Or whatever we say about the weakness of the external evidence for the Gospels we will likewise have to say about the weakness of the external evidence for the authorship of many secular works since they suffer many similar evidential problems as the Gospels. Even though the evidence for the authorship for those secular works is generally considered strong enough to demonstrate authorship.

[elphidium55]

Mithrae wrote:

It's possible that the hypothesized Q source was a Greek translation of Matthew's "sayings of Jesus"; if so it wouldn't be too surprising for the first book to incorporate it into a structured narrative to become associated with Matthew.

I think I agree, maybe. I would amend your premise as follows: It's most likely that the hypothesized Q source, if it exists, was an original Greek composition. This hypothetical Q could have used some Aramaic "sayings of Jesus" as one of it's sources and these sayings at some point became associated with Matthew.

Mithrae wrote:

But the unsurprising fact that a few scribes did indeed tamper with their material doesn't imply that we should expect or speculate on tampering as a general rule.

I agee. What this does show is that at least one of the Gospels is not fully historically reliable.

Mithrae wrote:

Christian scribes seem to have faithfully preserved even the weirdest tales ... and outright contradictions between different accounts.

Assuming that there are outright contradicions between Gospel accounts, which I do, then this seems to entail that at least one of each contradictory account is not true. Once again, the most parsimonious hypothesis is that at least one of the Gospels is not fully historically reliable.

[Mithrae]

Mithrae wrote:

But the unsurprising fact that a few scribes did indeed tamper with their material doesn't imply that we should expect or speculate on tampering as a general rule.

I agee. What this does show is that at least one of the Gospels is not fully historically reliable.

I would say that it's demonstrable to a high level of confidence that at least three of the gospels are not fully historically reliable even as they were originally written. Mark gets off primarily because we have no earlier source to compare and see whether or not he too changed the stories as 'Matthew' and Luke clearly did. In fairness though, it also seems that John (even written by a disciple) and probably 'Matthew' didn't intend their works to be taken as strictly historical, with John introducing his story as an clearly theological work and gMatthew starting with a contrived, presumably allegorical story paralleling Jesus' early life to that of Moses. Luke by contrast does obviously purport to be writing history, so the liberties he takes with his material are even more problematic.
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[Difflugia]

The gospel of Mark was written before Matthew, hence probably around 65-71CE, apparently for a Gentile audience. I don't know of any real reason to suppose it wasn't written by Mark, but the evidence for Markan authorship isn't exactly overwhelming. I'd give it 50/50 odds maybe. One particularly interesting theory about Mark is the strong possibility that its final chapters were based on a very early written Passion narrative. . . .

So, I've been getting sucked into the giant morass that is historiography and realized that I'd never actually read Eusebius aside from the "Fragments of Papias" in Schaff's Ante-Nicene Fathers, more-or-less out of context. At the same time, after some of the discussions I've had about the Gospels as fiction, I've been pushing myself through Acts in its Ancient Literary Context. The authors make an interesting observation about Herodotus that, while it's within the context of a discussion about Acts, it also bears on the discussion at least of Papias and Eusebius. This is from chapter 6, pp. 140-142:

Herodotus thus bequeathed to Greek historical tradition a barrage of techniques for distinguishing fact from fiction - or from unconfirmed report - within historical narrative. And by displaying their ability to use these techniques in their opening chapters, Herodotus and his successors could convince their readers that everything that followed had been subjected to the same careful, sifting process by a critical, analytical mind. The narrative itself tends to proceed with a minimum of authorial intervention: the ancient historians do not cite sources in the modern fashion, but leave the story to tell its own tale. But the use of the authorial voice in the preface, and the sensitivity to critical issues displayed there, has the effect of framing the whole story as the perception of a particular, rational - but not omniscient - narrator. The effect is reminiscent of mediaeval illuminations of the Apocalypse, which are careful to include the seer in the framework of his pictured visions - presumably as a reminder that the management takes no overall responsibility for what is, ultimately, a private vision. And this effect is maintained within the narrative by bracketing particular items as reports - logoi - passed on to them by others: we might compare the dissociative effect of Private Eye's 'allegedly', or the quotation marks of the tabloid newspapers. Certain kinds of 'things said' seem to attract especial suspicion and thus a particular need for distancing: reports from distant places; tales of the distant past; and anything to do with religion. Here the Greek historians, like a modern anthropologist, tend to take the outsider's role: whatever their private religious viewpoint, they observe and record religious rite and monument as 'fact' but reserve judgement on the theological explanations offered by insiders. This careful distancing of the recording self from religious belief remains characteristic of Greek and Roman historiography.

A few paragraphs later:

There are a number of reasons for this. The first, I would suggest, is an ambivalence which lies at the heart of the Herodotean critical methodology itself. Herodotus made the distinctly postmodern discovery that beliefs and traditions are 'facts' in their own right, even if the things they report are not. The critical historian may doubt that X exists or Y happened, but it remains a fact that A believes - or that the story (logos) exists - that X exists or Y happened. The historian is therefore free to include any number of fanciful or marvellous reports of monsters and miracles, provided that they are bracketed with the ubiquitous 'so they say...'. The training of the rhetorical schools meant that Greek writers learnt early to be proficient in turning stories into oratio obliqua, a proficiency that is not only a tour de force in itself but also an insistent reminder that the narrator is refusing to take full responsibility for the content of what is related. This is, of course, a wonderful method of having your cake and eating it, of enjoying all the pleasures of fiction without abandoning the respectability of fact. Herodotus exploits this duality to the full, and it is abundantly clear that later readers found this one of the most rewarding and exciting aspects of historiography. But the recounting of marvels need not conflict in principle with a commitment to the pursuit of 'truth'.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, both Papias and Eusebius, though separated by a couple hundred years, seem to be mirroring some of the technique of Herodotus in the framing of tradition itself as a fact to be interpreted by the reader. The following is from a modern translation that includes an important opinion expressed by Eusebius, but that is omitted in the "Fragments of Papias" in Schaff. I've bolded it below:

And the same author presents other accounts as having come to him from unwritten tradition, and some strange parables of the Saviour and teachings of His and other more mythical accounts. Among these he says that there will be a period of about a thousand years after the resurrection of the dead, when the kingdom of Christ will be established on this earth in material form. I suppose that he got these ideas through a perverse reading of the accounts of the Apostles, not realizing that these were expressed by them mystically in figures. For he appears to be a man of very little intelligence, to speak judging from his books, but he was responsible for the great number of Church writers after him holding the same opinion as himself, who proposed in their support the antiquity of the man, as, for instance, Irenaeus and whoever else appeared to hold similar views.

In his own writing he also passes on interpretations of the Lord's words from Aristion, who has been mentioned before, and traditions from John the presbyter. After referring the studious to these, we shall now of necessity add to his words already quoted a tradition about Mark who wrote the Gospel, which he gives in these words: 'This also the Presbyter used to say, "When Mark became Peter's interpreter..."

I had never read Eusebius' own synthesis of the tradition of Markan authorship in chapters 15-16 of Church History, Book 2:

Thus, then, when the divine Word had made its home among them, the power of Simon was extinguished and straightway perished with the man also. And so great a light of religion shone upon the minds of the hearers of Peter that they were not satisfied with merely a single hearing or with the unwritten teaching of the divine Gospel, but with all sorts of entreaties they besought Mark, who was a follower of Peter and whose Gospel is extant, to leave behind with them in writing a record of the teaching passed on to them orally; and they did not cease until they had prevailed upon the man and so became responsible for the Scripture which is called the Gospel according to Mark. And they say that the Apostle, knowing what had been done, since the Spirit had revealed it to him, rejoiced at the zeal of the men and authorized the Scripture for reading in the churches. Clement has quoted the story in Book 6 of the Hypotyposes, and the Bishop of Hierapolis, Papias by name, confirms him, saying that Peter mentions Mark in his first Epistle, which they say he composed in Rome itself; and they say that he himself indicates this by referring to the city metaphorically as Babylon in these words: 'the church which is at Babylon, chosen together with you, greets you; and so does my son Mark.'"

I notice three things about this. First, if we assume that Eusebius is quoting verbatim from Papias, then Papias himself is passing the responsibility for the identification of Mark to "John the presbyter," who Eusebius argued wasn't the Apostle John. Second, Eusebius himself isn't particularly impressed with Papias. Third, if I'm not reading too much into what Eusebius wrote and the earlier observation about Herodotus, the lack of "they say" at the beginning means that Eusebius believes the tradition that Mark was a friend of Peter's and wrote the Gospel of Mark, but grudgingly admits to an opinion that Papias (through Irenaeus) is ultimately the only source of the tradition as related by later writers.

I haven't gotten to Justin, yet and I'm still curious if Justin reads as an independent source of the same tradition.

[Realworldjack]

What can we know (demonstrate) about the authors of what we call "The Gospels"? Notice carefully that I am not talking about opinions here, but rather what we can know to be a fact, and how we would go about demonstrating it to be a fact we can know?

I apologize for the long delay but I had trouble logging in after the upgrade to the site, and am just now able to join in again. At any rate, after reading through most of the responses, we seem to all agree that there is not much we can know with certainty about these authors. With this being the case, then can we say that, "the authors may indeed have lived at the time of the events they report, and could have been witnesses of some of the events, if not all of them"? In other words, if we agree that we can know very little concerning the authors, or when they wrote, then we cannot say with certainty that, "the authors could not have been those they have been attributed to?" Nor can we say, "the writings would have been authored long after the death of the Apostles?" Or, is it that we can know these things would not have been authored by those they have been attributed to, and we can know the events would have been authored long after the death of the Apostles?

[Diagoras]

we seem to all agree that there is not much we can know with certainty about these authors. With this being the case, then can we say that, "the authors may indeed have lived at the time of the events they report, and could have been witnesses of some of the events, if not all of them"?

Yes, we can.

With the same level of confidence as stating exactly the opposite, of course. That’s the problem with ‘not much we can know with certainty’.