Gospel Authorship

When it comes to authorship, I know these debates get heated and apologetic versus anti-apologetic. I would just probably defend maybe three theses where I would say the Gospels are formally anonymous. The titles of the Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John are secondary, so they are added by scribes. And that we can kind of look at the traditions in the second century and kind of piece together why they ascribe them to those figures. And I think those Christians in the second century were answering questions in the second century, so they’re more helpful for how did they receive the Gospels? And maybe not necessarily are they historically accurate to how the Gospels originated?

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How are things, Dan?

Man, things are good. It’s a million degrees right now in

Salt Lake City, but yeah, I got 96 right now. It was 100 yesterday, so.

So, you know, we’re. We’re out here melting. But that’s all right. That’s all right. We. Fortunately, we’re spending today talking to a Canadian, so maybe that will cool things down. I don’t know.

Yeah, we’re gonna aim at the first half of our two rhetorical goals for this podcast. Increasing public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion by bringing on longtime friend of mine and specialist in gospel authorship, Michael Kok. Welcome to the show, Michael.

Oh, thanks for having me. Longtime fan.

Well, appreciate that very much. And we go all the way back to. Ooh, the. Back when we were bibliobloggers.

2009 was when I started that. So, yeah, I had a lecturer doing the same thing, so I copied him.

Yeah, it was. That was a different world back then. But Michael is the New Testament lecturer at Morling College, Perth Campus. Excuse me. In lovely Australia, on the. On the. The Western third, where you can drive for a few days to get to the east coast. But are there places to stop along the way or is it pretty rough?

I think it’s pretty rough all the way. I’ve never tried to drive myself. My wife had when she had to bring over a car from Sydney to Perth.

Yeah, I think you just have to keep going for most of it.

Just provision yourself well and. And yeah, watch out for kangaroos.

Yes, exactly.

And, Michael, last year you published with Fortress Press a book entitled Tax Collector to Gospel Writer: Patristic Traditions about the Evangelist Matthew. And you’ve done books on the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Mark , particularly on authorship of those. Would you mind letting the folks know a little bit about yourself and, and maybe what got you interested in gospel authorship?

Sure. Yeah. So I grew up in a Baptist home. So when I was going to do undergrad, I was going to Bible college thinking maybe be a pastor. And then I liked what my professors were doing and thought I could do the same thing. But in that context, it was also a Baptist college, learned the critical scholarship about who wrote the Gospels, when, where, or just the New Testament in general. But in that kind of faith context where you can try to say what scholarship saying, and how can I integrate that into my worldview?

If I may interrupt briefly, I was at Trinity Western University for one of my master’s degrees, and there were some folks coming there from MDivs and from Bible colleges. And that was a big discussion was we’re learning this critical scholarship, and there seems to be a giant gulf between the academy and the pews. And my understanding is that, you know, between seminaries and Bible colleges, you have a broad range of approaches to this, where some. Sometimes they’re teaching you this just so you can debunk it. Sometimes they’re teaching you this not expecting you to incorporate anything into, you know, what’s being discussed in the, in the, the congregations. I’m curious what your experience was, who your, your professors, what their approach was and how you responded to it.

Yeah, I mean, I thought they did pretty honest stuff. I mean, I, I think you probably had a range of perspectives on the faculty. And even so, I’m teaching at Baptist College now. I, I think there’s one principle of the freedom of conscience, okay? So it’s kind of follow the evidence where you think it leads, but also think about how it then applies to your worldview and your practices.

So yeah, I think that was the approach I received. But you know, that was where I did my undergrad, but my master’s and PhD were more in public universities. So I went and did a master’s in religious studies in my hometown. And I didn’t know what to. That’s what got me into the second century stuff because it’s just hard to find new ideas where, you know, everyone talks about Paul or Mark, but if you look at the reception of a biblical book, you have 2,000 years to work with. So that’s where I kind of got into the second century Christianity. And they’re starting to develop the traditions about the authors of the Gospels and they’re systematizing doctrines and trying to organize church government. So after that I went and did my PhD in England at the University of Sheffield, and it was in Biblical studies, but it was also a public.

It was established by a scholar who was independent of the Church of England. So it wasn’t officially connected to the church. Like a lot of departments are in the UK or at least theological programs. And so Biblical studies, they are interested a lot in the cultural and political reception of the Bible. And so I took my second century and then combined it with my interest in gospels. And that’s how I ended up exploring gospel authorship. And that’s the niche I’ve tried to carve out.

Yeah, I like that. You know, I, I was, I was deep into my adulthood before I knew that there was any controversy at all regarding the authorship of the Gospels. I just took it for granted that the, you know, if the gospel had a name on it, that’s who wrote it. And, and it was a lot. I was surprisingly old before I, before I knew that there was any question about that whatsoever. So maybe you can set the stage with, you know, where the idea of, of the authorship, you know, the attributed authorship started and, and, and when people started to question that.

Sure, yeah. I mean, I could share from my own experience. I remember trying to memorize some of the arguments in the book Case for Christ, which came out when I was a teenager.

Strobel, right?

Yeah, that’s right.

So, you know, really convincing to me at that time of my life. But one of the scholars interviewed tried to say, well, Matthew, Mark and Luke, they’re not, well, like they’re not the famous Peter or Paul or. So why would the church attribute gospels to these names? So let’s try the argument that they’re reliable attributions because they’re not as significant. Matthew’s an apostle, but he’s not one of the leading apostles. And Mark and Luke are. They’re associated with the apostles Peter and Paul. While the only case it doesn’t work for is John because he’s one of the three main apostles in that group of 12. So. But yeah, I remember learning these arguments and trying to defend it and then going to undergrad and learning the arguments for and against the traditions. I think what I would want to say is that when it comes to authorship, I know these debates get heated and apologetic versus anti-apologetic stuff online.

So I think what I wouldn’t want to deny that eyewitnesses could have played a role in the formation of the Gospel traditions or some of the earliest Gospels were within a generation of Jesus’s life or even that you can’t make a case for some of the traditional authorship. I would just probably defend maybe three theses where I would say the Gospels are formally anonymous. The titles of the Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke or John are secondary. So they were added by scribes and that we can kind of look at the traditions in the second century and try to piece together why they made those, why they ascribed them to those figures and trace the history and development of that. And I think those Christians in the second century were answering questions in the second century. So they’re more helpful for how did they receive the Gospels and maybe not necessarily are they historically accurate to how the Gospels originated.

So that would be the approach I’d start with.

Now your, your statement that the, the titles, the attributions of authorship seem to be secondary. My understanding is that that is primarily based on the fact that our earliest manuscripts, where we have attribution of authorship, they’re found in different places. They haven’t seemed to settle into a specific framework, which is not usually how things are copied. When they’re part of an original, that’s usually how scribes will go about adding information to manuscripts. Is that accurate or are there other data that influence that conclusion?

I’d have to think about it. I think the main issue is just that the manuscript evidence is late. So I, I’m not aware if there’s any manuscripts that lack the title. There’s an article by Simon Gathercole on the titles of the Gospels which really just compiles all the manuscript evidence. And I think he’s posted it on his Academia edu page, so it’s really accessible. So you can kind of look at that. So I just, I think the main issue is that the titles are found probably in the late second century. And so I guess I know there’s some renewed debate about dating some of those manuscripts. I know Brent Nongbri has written some things where he dates them later than some would traditionally assign. But let me put it this way. I think with the title “The Gospel According to,” it sort of implies that there’s more than one gospel, because otherwise you wouldn’t say. You’d say maybe “The Gospel of Mark .”

But because you say “The Gospel According to Mark,” there’s knowledge that there’s another one according to Matthew.

So my take would be this is probably when the four gospels have been collected together into an authoritative collection and you need to differentiate them in some way. So you say this one’s according to Matthew and this one’s according to Mark or Luke, and then the manuscript evidence comes after that collection’s been formed. Okay. And, you know, some of the figures in the late second century, like Irenaeus, who’s a bishop in the late second century, he knows those titles. So he’s probably inherited gospel manuscripts with those titles attached. And then everyone defends that collection.

And my understanding is that Irenaeus is the first to actually attribute the four gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as we know them. Is that accurate?

Yeah, well, I. He’s the first that really makes explicit where he, he will, like, let’s say he’ll quote Mark and he’ll ascribe it to a Gospel according to Mark, which he has right before him. So we’ll probably dive into these traditions. But like, we have an early second century, a bishop named Papias who lives in what’s modern day Turkey in Asia Minor, and he talks about Mark and Matthew and something they wrote, and there’s some discussion about what he’s referring to. You get other early 2nd century authors who, there, they’ll quote things the Lord said or did. But there’s debate about are they quoting our gospels or are they quoting oral traditions that they know because they, they don’t assign them to a named author.

So, for instance, I know Ignatius, who’s a bishop in Antioch in the early second century. He gives a phrase about how Jesus was baptized to fulfill all righteousness. That seems to be picking up on something the Gospel of Matthew says because it’s Matthew’s way of defending the baptism. Mark just tells the baptism of Jesus. Matthew tries to say Jesus was baptized, when John the Baptist protests about, “I should be baptized by you and not you by me,” Jesus tells him this is done to fulfill all righteousness. So it looks like Ignatius is picking up on something in Matthew, but he doesn’t attribute it to Matthew. He just sort of references it and moves on. Right. Or another text called the Didache. It talks about a prayer that’s found in a gospel. It looks like the Lord’s Prayer and it looks like Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. But he doesn’t say the Gospel of Matthew . He just, he knows it’s a text called the Gospel, unless he’s talking about the oral good news that Jesus preached.

So that’s the difficulty in the first half of the second century.

And you have folks like Justin Martyr who are referring to the memoirs of the apostles, just kind of generically.

Yeah. And Justin, I think there’s really good evidence that he does know Matthew and Luke when he’s quoting the memoirs of the apostles. Like you’ll cite traditions that are unique to them or traditions where it looks like, again, Matthew and Luke are editing Mark and Justin knows the editing of that.

It connects that with baptism. But when he actually cites the memoirs, there’s some debate about is it just the synoptics and other things, or sorry, is it just Matthew, Mark and Luke? I’ve written an article about this because he does talk about the memoirs of the apostles and those who followed them. And some try to say, well, that’s him saying, well, Matthew and John are apostles and Mark and Luke are their followers, the followers of Peter and Paul. But I think it’s more likely he means he thinks all the Gospels are written jointly by the apostles as a collective group and their followers who maybe were like their scribes or secretaries. So I don’t think you can establish he knows the four traditional titles. I think you’re right that Irenaeus is our earliest evidence, though I think it was in place before Irenaeus, but okay, yeah.

And then Papias is coming. This is around like 120, 130 CE or even later, some date them.

I actually would date them earlier around 100 to 110.

Oh, really?

The reason is so Eusebius seems to imply like he’s coming about when Ignatius was around. And also I’m trying to remember the Roman bishop, but he seems to put him earlier in the second century. Papias seems to be writing before some developments that happen. Like he’s not refuting Marcion or these various other Christian teachers that were developing ideas like Marcion or Valentinus or Basilides. The reason he gets dated to as late as you did there was these fragments that seem to suggest that he mentioned resurrected saints to the time of Hadrian who are alive. But it seems like the fragments aren’t actually. It comes from a later summary of Eusebius’s history in the 4th century. And they weren’t actually quoting Papias. He was quoting someone else named Quadratus.

So I think the best evidence is Papias is probably early second century. And I think that’s all that might be a majority view among a lot of people. So there’s William Schoedel, who’s written some things about this, Ulrich Koertner, Robert Gundry. There’s some names I can think of.

Okay, Now Papias has, as you mentioned before, the references to what may be the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew , but they don’t fit as conveniently as many people would like into what we understand today about Mark and Matthew. Could you briefly talk about what Papias seems to be talking about and the relationship you think that might have to the Gospels as we understand them?

Yeah. So what Papias tells us is he has a tradition that he says is from the elder, who. He has a prologue where he. He wants to learn things from a true and living voice. So he’s asking who he calls the elders, what the disciples of the Lord said. He names a bunch of disciples like Peter, James, and then he names. So what they said. And then he names what they, John the Elder and Aristion were saying. So it’s a really convoluted prologue where it’s like, are the elders the same group as the disciples or two separate groups and the elders are passing along the words of the disciples. Is this elder John a separate figure from the John the disciple who had. So John said things. The elder John is saying things, which seems to imply that the elder is alive while the other John’s passed away.

Right, Because I’ve heard that argument a bunch that this is the beloved disciple who’s reporting things to Papias. But that’s not. That’s an assumption that some folks make.

I. Yeah. And I don’t go there myself. I think the elder John most you can say someone in Asia Minor who was some figure that Papias consulted and that he eventually gets confused with the apostle John. So in the late second century, Irenaeus just says Papias is a hearer of John and he seems to imply he calls him John, the disciple of the Lord, but he thinks. I think he means the apostle. Well, Eusebius, who’s quoting Papias. So Papias’s books haven’t survived. We actually only hear quotes from him. And Eusebius is the one who’s recording these quotes in the 4th century.

But anyways, the Elder John has this tradition that Mark was the interpreter of Peter, which probably means his translator; that Peter was preaching as the needs demanded for his audience and that Mark wrote it down. But then he makes a statement that Mark wrote down not in order, and he says these are the things the Lord said and did. So Peter’s recalling anecdotes about things Jesus had done and Mark wrote it down, but he didn’t get the order right because he’s a follower of Peter. And then Papias goes on to say Matthew wrote down what he calls the oracles in the Hebrew language, and everyone interprets, or I’d say translates, them as best they can. So that’s what he gives us. The reason there is debate is… so Papias calls Mark’s an account of the things the Lord said and did.

But he also calls it an account of the Oracles of the Lord—and then the oracles, right?

Yeah. This is logia in Greek, right?

That’s right.

The sayings. Yeah.

So, well, it’d be interesting. What are these sayings? So are these oracles said by Jesus? Which would make it like, I think in the past video you did a sayings collection of things Jesus said, or are they oracles about Jesus? It’s a bit… when you call it “oracles of the Lord,” it’s a bit ambiguous about whether it’s the person speaking or the person being spoken about.

Yeah, the subjective or objective genitive.

That old chestnut.

So that’ll trip you up every time. That’ll get you every time.

Taking Greek and Hebrew is what helped me learn grammar rules. That’s why I studied biblical languages. But like, so I take it that they’re the oracles about the Lord.

Stephen Carlson wrote a big book on Papias where he thinks it’s a collection of prophecies about Jesus. But I think, and some other scholars would back me up, would say it’s oral traditions about Jesus. So things people spoke, but about the things that Jesus said and did. So that’s how I would… so I do think Papias is referring to narrative gospels that consist of things Jesus said and did, and it was the oracles describing these things. So an analogy would be in First Peter, he talks about those who speak the oracles of God. You know, he’s talking about gifts that people are giving. So, yeah, there are preachers talking about Jesus. And so according to the tradition, Peter is talking about Jesus and Mark’s writing it down and Matthew is talking about Jesus and other people are translating it. That’s… that’s how I would understand what Papias is saying. I get where it’s not a slam dunk, though, because it would have helped if people quoted one of the gospels.

So if he was like, “Mark, the interpreter of Peter, wrote the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” then you could say, right, oh, that’s the first verse of Mark, and he’s talking about Mark. So we don’t have Papias’s works. We just have these fragmentary traditions that he said. So there is going to be debate. I tend to think he is talking about Mark and Matthew and maybe we could talk about reasons why or why not.

But I, I would love to hear the reasons why or why not. And I also think I seem to recall a recent blog post of yours where you talked about the idea of—I don’t remember the exact language you use, but not necessarily versions—but that things were being edited, that they were being maybe disseminated and then more editing was going on afterwards. I’d be interested to hear about both. Why… why you think those are references to what we have today and the relationship of this process of editing to that.

Yeah, well, let me do the first question. So, like, when Papias says “not in order” with Mark, there’s some debate about whether he means chronological order like that. Oh, Mark was not an eyewitness of Jesus. He was depending on the things Peter preached, that Peter was giving sermons on different times, and Mark just wrote down and couldn’t get the order of what happened when. Right, but there’s another… some scholars would say, no, it means more like rhetorical order, that if you look at the Gospel of Mark , sometimes it looks like stories are put together very loosely. Like, it’s like, “And immediately Jesus went out to the synagogue and did this miracle on the Sabbath.” He was going along the grain fields. So the connections aren’t like…

The one exception is when you get to Jesus’ Passion, the account of Jesus’ suffering when he goes to Jerusalem and he teaches in the temple and gets arrested and executed and rises again. That’s a very close narrative. So that’s why there’s some debate about whether that was an originally connected story. And Christians were like, we have to tell this story about why this happened to Jesus. They came up with this narrative of his Passion. And then they had other independent stories. Well, he told this parable one day and he did this miracle one day. And Mark’s just putting things together. But someone like the Elder John says, oh, I don’t like the arrangement of this. Or the other thing is, I think it looks incomplete. You know, Mark just starts: Jesus is baptized. Here’s some prophecies about Jesus. And then he’s at John the Baptist. And the way Mark ends, the tomb is empty. The young man dressed in white said, he’s risen and he’s going to Galilee.

Tell Peter and the disciples. The women don’t say anything. And it ends, right? So you can think of an ancient reader saying, this looks incomplete and not well organized. And then they turn to Matthew’s Gospel and they say, Matthew starts out with the birth story. You know, you have Jesus’ genealogy, you have his virgin birth. So you get the Christmas stories. It has five discourses of Jesus’ teachings. They’re well organized. Most famously the Sermon on the Mount, which you’d see in any Jesus movie where Jesus is preaching on a mountain. It ends with the resurrection, and Jesus is on a mountain giving the Great Commission to his disciples to make disciples of all nations. So it seems it’s complete, it’s well organized. So I think Papias is comparing these two gospels. So that would be my case, I would say, in the early reception of these gospels, that’s how they took Papias.

So I think when Justin calls them the memoirs of the apostles and their followers, he might be influenced by Papias, because Papias says we have an apostle Peter and Matthew, and we have their followers, Mark and the unnamed translators who help Matthew. One more thing I would say is Mark was really unpopular in the early church. Like, it’s rarely cited. We have fewer manuscripts of it. There’s all these. Like Papias says it’s not in order. Mark gets called. He gets this nickname called stump-fingered, which they try to explain what this means, but I think it might be an allusion to it not being complete. Or I think Clement of Alexandria talks about Matthew and Luke, the gospels of the genealogies published openly, while Mark wrote some notes from Peter’s preaching and Peter did not officially endorse them. So there’s all this ambiguity about Mark in the early church because I think they wanted.

They saw Matthew and they really liked it. Matthew has all these teachings of Jesus. It’s this complete narrative. Well, when you have Matthew, you say, why have Mark? Because over 90 percent of Mark’s content is in Matthew. And then Matthew also has Christmas stories, Easter stories, and all Jesus’ teachings. So I think that’s the reason for the preference. So I think without Papias’s tradition that Mark was attached to Peter, Mark would not survive. Probably we’d be reading Matthew and Luke because they had. They took over Mark’s contents. Yeah, I think the reason Mark continued to be copied and circulated is because you had this early tradition from Papias linking it with Peter, who’s the chief apostle. That’s the case, at least the case I made. That’s why I think Papias is talking about those two gospels. But I recognize there is debate on that.

Interesting. I wanted to get into specifically Matthew because that’s, you know, your latest book is about the authorship of the Gospel of Matthew . And it starts with this problem of a story of a tax collector that doesn’t quite match up between different gospels. Talk a little bit about that and why the name of the tax collector might have been changed or what may have happened there.

Sure, sure. So I think when I said, like, the first thesis about gospels being formally anonymous is that when you read the Gospel of Matthew , you know, no author is introduced. Like, it just starts like, this is the account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of Abraham, son of David. So it just jumps into the narrative. It never uses the first person to say, you know, here’s who I am and how I’m connected to the subject. So it just. Internally, it doesn’t say anything about the author.

Yeah, because a lot, a good percentage of the book, Matthew couldn’t have been present for the story that he’s telling.

Yeah, well, at least especially the narrative of Jesus’s death and resurrection, because, you know, the Twelve run away. Right. Or of course, the birth stories. Right. He couldn’t be there as well. So, yeah, he’s introduced in chapter nine, so everything before that… So onto that story about the tax collector. The one incident where Matthew does make a prominent appearance, appearance in this Gospel is he’s at the toll booth. So it’s a toll booth near the village of Capernaum. So people are probably transporting goods from one area to another, and he’s collecting tolls on these things. And Jesus sees him and says, “Follow me.” And he leaves everything and follows him. The problem is in the Gospels of Mark and Luke, same story, but the toll collector is called Levi. In Mark, he’s called Levi, the son of Alphaeus. So he’s trying to figure out what’s going on here. So in the early church, we have a couple 4th century commentaries on the Gospel of Matthew .

And one of the explanations they give is Matthew was so humble, he was willing to use his more known name to confess, “Yeah, I was this bad toll collector, and Jesus called me out of that.” While Mark and Luke wanted to protect Matthew’s reputation, so they used his less known name, Levi. Okay, so an interesting kind of way to reconcile all these things. But like… so the problem… So Richard Bauckham has written a famous book on Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. And, you know, it’s a conservative book that defends a lot of the traditional authorship of the Gospels. But he does research names and he says it’s not very common to have two common Semitic names like Matthew and Levi. So you have other characters like Paul himself—his Semitic name is Saul, and then he goes by Paul—or John Mark is another. John’s a Semitic name, Mark’s a Roman name. So it’s very odd to have the same person have two common Semitic names.

And there’s no indication that Jesus gives him that. Like, you could argue that maybe he was named Levi and Jesus gave him the nickname Matthew. But there’s no story about this. So that’s different from, you know, you have an apostle named Simon, and according to the Gospel of Matthew , Jesus says you’ll be called Peter. Right. Which means rock. Right. So… and the other problem is, in none of the lists of the Twelve is Matthew ever also, like, “Matthew, also known as Levi,” right, which would clarify that. Or some… some of the copyists actually added Levi’s name into the list of Twelve. They gave him the Lebbaeus name. So some people didn’t… they’re like, “Are these two different characters, Levi and Matthew, or what’s going on here?” So the way I solve this problem… So I think Mark’s the earliest Gospel; for one, it’s shorter. The Gospel of Matthew improves its grammar and style.

There’s all kinds of arguments for Mark being first, and Mark has Levi the toll collector. So the Gospel of Matthew repeats the same story, sometimes word for word. It’s only in a single verse.

He changes Levi to Matthew. And so scholars debate, why did he do this? He does a similar thing where the Gospel of Mark has a woman named Salome at the empty tomb of Jesus. And in Matthew, the Gospel writer—it’s not Salome, it’s the mother of James and John. So he doesn’t mind switching one character for another. So just a question: why? So there’s different theories about that that I can go into, if you’re happy.

Well, I mean, one of the things that’s interesting is that… so is the idea that the appearance of this character, this now known as Matthew, in this toll booth, you know, this tax collector… is that why this book was then attributed to Matthew, as a thing, because it’s such a small little moment? Yeah, it’s kind of… it’s so weird.

Yeah, that’s what I suspect. But so I guess the theories are like, if you… if you agree with me, that Levi was in Mark and he’s been switched out for Matthew, scholars have kind of asked why. So one theory is they wanted… it’s such a significant moment of Jesus calling a disciple, and they wanted it to be one of the Twelve apostles.

They picked one at random. So that’s one approach. Some people have tried to connect Matthew with… like, they’ve done things with the name Matthew, which is very close to the Greek word for disciple. So they tried to say, “Oh, he was playing a word game,” and that’s why he put Matthew, this disciple who’s been called.

So could it be they picked up that from a list and then gave the backstory? And they had Mark’s gospel. It told this great story about Jesus calling a toll collector and that that was the basis for it. So, you know, different theories, scholars will argue that. But I wonder if Papias sees that detail. You know, he sees Mark, sees Matthew here and says, oh, Matthew must be correcting the account of Mark. And that’s why. So I wonder if that’s connected to that detail, that they noticed that difference.

Interesting.

Otherwise, I guess you could say, if you don’t think Papias was talking about Matthew—so let’s say you think Papias was talking about a sayings collection or a collection of scriptural prophecies they attributed to Matthew—then what you could argue is that later in the church they looked at Papias writing that Matthew wrote some oracles and they looked at the gospel which singles out Matthew, and they connected the two. So that’s, I guess, another approach you could take.

I think it was instrumental in why the Gospel of Matthew got attributed to Matthew.

Now, what about Papias’s claim that this was all written in Hebrew? Is this linked with the fact that Matthew is so concerned for Hebrew Bible prophecy? Does this have something to do with the Gospel to the Hebrews? What are your thoughts on the Hebrew character of Matthew?

I think he’s probably just mistaken. I think it’s an easy assumption to make that, oh, if it’s one of the twelve who wrote this and they’re apostles from Galilee, that they would have spoken their native language. I mean, he thinks the same about Mark because it’s Peter preaching and Mark translating as his interpreter. Right. So I think it’s a natural assumption. But I think you’re right, though, that he notices kind of some of the features of Matthew, that it’s really linked to the Hebrew Bible. Like it’s the gospel that constantly uses this phrase, “this was done to fulfill the prophets” such and such. Or it really goes out of its way to portray Jesus as like a new Moses giving his law in the Sermon on the Mount, or seems to be written to a Jewish audience. So Mark will sometimes explain Jewish customs and Matthew will delete all the explanations. So it’s like he presupposes the audience.

So I think those are the two things. Thinking it’s by an apostle and noticing that it was probably written to a Jewish audience leads Papias to infer that it was originally written in Hebrew. Because all the copies we have of Matthew are in Greek. So the reason scholars reject this today is they would say, look, our Gospel of Matthew is a Greek text. It seems to copy Mark’s Gospel, which is a Greek text, and in fact improves the Greek grammar of Mark’s Gospel. So one example of this: Mark will use the phrase “and immediately” all the time. And immediately Jesus did this and immediately he did that. And it gets a bit redundant. And so the gospel writer who wrote Matthew, he deletes those references. Or Mark will quote Aramaic phrases of Jesus that he kind of transliterates into Greek, and Matthew will remove those phrases. So that makes it more likely that this started as a Greek text and Papias is just wrong about that.

The only other option, like I said, you could do the other scenario where Papias is referring to something else, like, oh, if it’s a lost sayings collection, maybe it originated in Hebrew. Right. But at least, you know, I don’t know what your audience thinks about scholarship about Q. There’s this idea that the Gospel of Matthew and Luke copied Mark’s narrative, but Matthew and Luke share all these sayings in common and a few stories that are not found in Mark. So the idea is that, oh, they must have got a lost source that is primarily Jesus’ sayings. But even that lost source at least looks like it’s a Greek source, if it existed. Right. Because in Matthew and Luke, some of the sayings are word-for-word in Greek, which is unlikely.

Maybe I’ll come at your last point. Gospel according to the Hebrews—we have these Jewish gospels that we don’t have, that various church leaders will say, “This is what is said in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.” So we find some Christian leaders in Alexandria, in Egypt, in the 3rd and 4th century quoting this work. And then we have a couple 4th century people who seem to cite this work, like a guy named Jerome, but—

A guy named Jerome responsible for the Vulgate. Yeah.

So he knew his languages. Yeah, he learned Hebrew in the desert or something like that. So he’s quoting this work, but he’s attributing it to Matthew now, but that’s the 4th century. So what I think happened is you have this anonymous Gospel according to the Hebrews; Jerome’s connecting it with the tradition that Papias wrote something, and he said Matthew wrote something in Hebrew, and he’s saying, “Oh, it must be that gospel.” Okay, so I think that’s what happened. There’s one more complication: there might have been another Greek gospel that gets misidentified with the Gospel according to the Hebrews. I just wrote a journal article—sometimes scholars call it the Gospel of the Ebionites—but it’s quoted by another 4th century leader named Epiphanius. But it seems to be harmonizing our Greek gospels. So that would be Matthew’s Hebrew work. So I think these later Jewish gospels had nothing to do with Matthew. They get attributed to Matthew because Papias has this tradition that Matthew wrote something in Hebrew and the early church leaders are looking for what fits that.

So that would seem to support the notion that Papias’s attribution of Mark’s Gospel to the testimony of Peter was influential, given that this apparent just kind of one-off reference to Matthew being written in Hebrew sounds like it sent ripples throughout early Christianity, and that there was an awful lot that was influenced by that testimony, even though we don’t know exactly what he had in his head.

Yeah, I think Papias—so yeah, I think he was influential over what he said about Mark and Matthew. So if we kind of go through the history, I don’t think Papias won right away because, like I said, there’s Ignatius and the Didache and other first half of the second century, they’re still referencing the gospels anonymously. Right. And we even—I mean, Papias doesn’t say anything about Luke from what survives. We have another church leader, someone who is rejected, named Marcion. He gets accused of editing and mutilating Luke’s gospel. But we have one church leader say Marcion attached no name to his gospel. So if he had a version of Luke, he didn’t call it the Gospel according to Luke.

Oh, interesting.

So Papias, the name traditions took time for him to influence. I think he influenced Justin when he talks about the memoirs of the apostles. One clue about this is Justin seems to refer to “his memoirs,” and he’s referring to—it seems to be—the memoirs of Peter. And then he does cite Mark’s gospel—or he doesn’t quote it, but he alludes to a tradition of Jesus giving James and John the nickname Sons of Thunder. And that’s only found in Mark.

Right.

And it’s found in a line where he seems to suggest he’s calling it the memoirs of Peter. So that would be Papias. And then when you get to Irenaeus at the end of the second century, you have him citing “Matthew writes to the Hebrews in their own language.” So that looks like Papias. “Mark, the interpreter of Peter, who wrote down after Peter’s death”—Papias doesn’t say anything about Peter’s death. So that’s Irenaeus building on the tradition, but still Papias at the bottom of it. Right. He also adds a note about Matthew writing while Peter and Paul were in Rome and Mark writing after Peter’s—he technically says “departure,” but probably a euphemism for his death.

Right, right.

But then Irenaeus adds the traditions about Luke and John. So I don’t think those go back to Papias, but I think they were developed before Irenaeus.

And we can look at why.

Now, the references you mentioned that there were some criticisms of Marcion saying he’s butchering the Gospel of Luke —these are coming after Marcion’s death, right? These are coming late second century.

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Okay, so what do you, what are your thoughts on the idea that, that Luke is second century and that maybe Marcion had a version of Luke that maybe didn’t have the Nativity account and that was added on later? I, I’m, I’m hearing that these, these theories are out there in circulation. I’m just curious your thoughts on those theories.

Yeah, I’m definitely, I, I’m not sure yet. So I have dated Luke to the early second century.

So I guess part of the thing with dating the Gospels is when are the earliest references to them? So I think. So if you presuppose that Matthew copied Mark. So Matthew, in my view, seems to be referenced by texts like the Didache, Ignatius and Papias, who are probably. I know there’s debate about Ignatius being later, but let’s just guess, at least for Didache and Papias, let’s just say.

Early 100 to 110. Somewhere around there.

Yeah. So that puts limit. So you say, oh, Matthew dates earlier and then Mark dates earlier than that. The other clue about dating those gospels is that, you know, they seem to imply that this generation, a bunch of things will happen up to the destruction of the temple and then the Son of Man will soon come back and some won’t taste death before they see that happening. It suggests, well, maybe they’re writing, they’re expecting it within that time frame. Right. Luke doesn’t, in my mind, seem to be referenced as early. And Luke inserts things like he has a longer time where he’s like, there’s going to be this time where the nations are going to trample Jerusalem. So it seems to be like he’s allowing for a longer time frame so he could be dated a bit later. Luke also, Mark tells us that there’s going to be this abomination that’s going to desecrate the temple. And then Luke comes around, says that’s when the Roman armies laid siege to Jerusalem.

So it seems to suggest that he knows the temple was destroyed in 70. And he’s not quoted early. I think he’s. Him and Papias share a lot of similar traditions. So I think some of this evidence points to him being in the early second century. There. There’s talk about Luke. He quotes some things that the Jewish historian Josephus quotes or like. So both Luke and Josephus talk about these various rebel leaders. So there’s one Theudas and Judas the Galilean and Josephus narrates these two rebels in the wrong order. And Luke has the same wrong order. So it’s like that might be a clue that Luke knows Josephus and Josephus wrote his history at the end of the first century.

Right.

So these are the arguments.

The Marcion thing I’m just not sure about yet. So basically, so Justin refers to Marcion’s views but doesn’t talk about his gospel. So it’s Irenaeus and later that they’re talking about Marcion’s gospel and they’re all claiming he edited Luke. Right. So that’s. They’re also saying he had some version of Luke and their view is that he tampered with it. Right. So, you know, I think they like what you noted. They note that Marcion’s gospel doesn’t have a birth narrative. So I think it starts with Jesus coming into the village of Capernaum. So they’re like, oh, Marcion cut out the birth narrative because he didn’t even believe Jesus was fully human.

Right.

And therefore he didn’t want him to be born. Right. So I think that’s Tertullian. That tells us that Tertullian is this early third century writer. But now scholars are kind of reopening that question and they’re saying, well, maybe there was a version of Luke that Marcion just inherited and that. Yeah. So maybe still edited it some, but. But he wasn’t wildly cutting out things because one of the problems with him editing is. So, for instance, Marcion, his theology was he wanted to say the God of the Hebrew Bible was a separate. He was a lower creator, and he was not the supreme deity who was the father of Jesus, who sent Jesus to deliver us from that, the God of the Hebrew Bible. Right. But Marcion leaves a lot of stuff that’s tied in with the Jewish scriptures in Luke’s gospel. So if you want to edit it, he didn’t do a very good job editing Luke according to his own theology.

So that’s why some scholars are saying, well, maybe Marcion just inherited a different version of Luke.

Than what we have come to know as Luke-Acts. I don’t know if I’m yet comfortable with dating Luke-Acts after Marcion, but it is an option. I think it’s early. I think it’s in the second century. I date it a bit earlier than Marcion. The tradition—he seems to be kicked out of church around 144, or disfellowshipped from some Roman Christians around 144. So some say he was ministering earlier, but how much earlier? And can we date Luke-Acts that late? I don’t know. Maybe. With Luke-Acts, Marcion has a version of Luke, but he doesn’t have Acts. Now, if he had an earlier version of Luke, the final form of Luke, it looks like it’s connected with Acts, because the Gospel of Luke , right before the birth story, it opens with a prologue where he addresses someone named Theophilus, who may be this wealthy patron who’s sponsoring the publication of the work.

And then the Book of Acts starts with: “In my last book, Theophilus, I said this, and now I’m going to keep telling the story.” Right, right. So it’s interesting that Marcion only has a version of Luke, but not Luke-Acts. Now, the reason why that’s important to authorship is the reason why the Gospel of Luke gets attributed to Luke is because of the Book of Acts . Because the Book of Acts has these select moments where the narrator is usually telling the story about the spread of the Good News from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. And the narrator is sometimes talking about Paul and how Paul spread the message. But he’s traveling with Paul and then all of a sudden he’ll say, “and we went there.” So this first person will show up. So someone like Irenaeus, he sees the “we” in Acts and says, “Oh, this must be someone who’s associated with Paul.” So who could that be? And then he turns to another letter that Marcion didn’t have in his collection.

Because Marcion loved Paul’s letters, but he didn’t have First Timothy in his—or no. Well, he didn’t have 1 Timothy.

He didn’t have any of the Pastorals.

He didn’t have Second Timothy in his collection. So in Second Timothy, Paul—because the letter is attributed to Paul, at least—he says “only Luke is with me.” Right. So that’s the dots that are being connected. There’s a “we” who’s with Paul. The “we” shows up at the end of the Book of Acts in Rome with Paul. Second Timothy is supposed to be sent by Paul in Roman imprisonment and Luke alone is with him. That’s why Irenaeus could say, “Oh, it was written by Luke, the companion of Paul.”

What are your thoughts on—you think there’s something to the idea that the four gospels, the authors of the four gospels are there because they are connected to the main disciples: Peter, James, John, and Paul? We have Luke connected with Paul, that tags that base. John is already there. Peter is connected with Mark and then James dies too early to write a gospel. So let’s just pick up Matthew. You think there’s anything to that—that observation?

I—I think it’s probably more that helped solidify the authorship that, you know, I think you made that point in a past video that maybe that’s why no one questions the authors. Like it’s still, you know, you got your bases covered that you got Matthew and John are apostles. And John, like you say, is in that—Jesus has a group of the inner three. Peter, James, and John are his three main apostles. John’s on the list, Peter’s technically on the list through Mark. Paul is another main apostle, so that Luke is associated with him. And yeah, James has died. So Matthew, at least they got one of the 12 there. But I—I don’t know. I think it’s probably that there’s an early tradition from Papias naming Mark and Matthew. So everyone just thought when they accept the authorship, they go to Papias with them. That and then as far as Luke and John, I think they reason it out.

I think so. Oh, I guess I should say—so Papias tells them Mark and Matthew, but then they read the Gospel of Matthew , which highlights Matthew, so there’s no reason to question that. And Luke and John, they do what Irenaeus did. They connect the “we” in Acts to the “Luke alone is with me” in 2 Timothy. With John, what they do is you have in the Gospel of John a character known as the disciple whom Jesus loves. And he shows up at the Last Supper, at the cross, at the empty tomb. And he’s kind of contrasted with Peter. So, you know, Peter has to ask him—you know, ask Jesus who’s going to betray me at the Last Supper. Or the beloved disciple and Peter run to the empty tomb. Peter sees the clothes. He has no idea what’s happening. But the beloved disciple believes. So it’s like the beloved disciple is better than Peter.

Right? So I think what the early church does is say, “Who of Jesus’ disciples could be close enough that’s superior to Peter, right?” And well, we look at Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and Jesus has this inner group of the 12 apostles.

The problem is the beloved disciple is still anonymous and the Gospel itself barely mentions the 12. I think it lists the 12 like four times, but it mentions other disciples. You have Nathanael, you have Lazarus. So the beloved disciple could be an anonymous follower of Jesus, who the Gospel writer really idealized saying, you know, that’s someone who has the real insight. So I don’t think the internal evidence demands the apostle John, but that’s how the early church did it.

Right.

And Irenaeus tells us that, but he wasn’t the first one to do it. So he’s battling against another, you might call him a Gnostic commentator named Ptolemy. And Ptolemy has already said, John the Apostle says this in his prologue. So probably in the latter half of the second century, this is what the church has done. They’ve looked at the beloved disciple, looked at the other Gospels and said, oh, it must be the apostle John. And Irenaeus is repeating that information.

Interesting. Well, I. It’s clear that this could be an extended conversation. And we will extend this conversation, but not on this episode. We’re gonna talk to you more, Michael, if you’re willing to in the afterparty for our patrons. So anyone who is a patron at the $10 a month or higher level can come and check out what we’re talking about over there. But for the rest of us, for the rest of you listening at home, that’s it. Thank you so much, Michael, for joining us today. We really appreciate you coming out.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

It’s been great.

And just for those who want to read a little more, we’ve talked about some of your books, From Tax Collector to Gospel Writer, The Gospel on the Margins. But you also have a blog that you publish on fairly regularly, more so than I have published on my blog in the last 10 years. Where can people find you online?

Yeah, it’s called The Jesus Memoirs and it’s meant to be kind of a play on Justin Martyr’s Memoirs of the Apostles and a kind of catchy name. So that’s mainly where I blog.

Okay, excellent.

Well, again, thank you so much for joining us. If you friends would like to become a patron and listen to more of our conversation with Michael, please go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you’d like to write into us about anything you’ve heard today, feel free to do so. contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the place to do that. And we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Gospel Authorship

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology