Were The Gospels Anonymous?

Someone asked the question on Reddit of whether the New Testament Gospels were anonymous. Here is the answer I provided.

My own view is that they were anonymous in the same way that most ancient works were originally and in most copies. In Judaism the biblical texts were known by their first words and not separate titles. In antiquity in general authorship circulated as paratextual information rather than as something written within the text. The custom of listing the author as we do today in books and articles was not a normative practice until long after this time.

Given that we have no real competing ascriptions for the Gospels, and that two of them are attributed to individuals with names that made clear they were not among the members of Jesus’ apostles, at the very least those two are likely to be correct. Whether the authors were a specific Mark or Luke mentioned elsewhere is another question, to which the answer is “not necessarily.”

In the case of John, the evidence that there was a John the Elder suggests that that individual (and not the son of Zebedee) likely played a role in the creation of the Gospel of John, although not necessarily as the source. It is clear from the final chapter that that work has been edited for publication by someone other than its source.

As for Matthew, here it may just have been a surmise from the change of the tax collector’s name from Levi to Matthew. For me, that clinches that this text was not by that individual named Matthew. If I were writing a Gospel and I knew Jesus myself, I might well still use an existing source written by someone else, but under no circumstance would I simply repeat that other author’s account of my own first encounter with Jesus. In ascribing this text to Matthew, a tradition about Matthew having written might have influenced the ascription of this work to him.

I have written on this before, more than a decade ago, long enough that I had forgotten doing so! Take a look at my posts “Were the Gospels Originally Anonymous” and “Are the Gospels Anonymous?”

Although not directly related to this, one of the things I’m considering for a future book project is exploring what it would mean to accept the claim in the Gospel of John that eyewitness testimony lies behind it, and accept and take equally seriously that this Gospel is so different from the others. Given how much study there has been of memory and our ability to distort and transform events and people in our recollections, those two things are not as incompatible as has typically been assumed.

Others have written about this recently, including the following:

Spencer McDaniel on how we know the Gospels are anonymous

Michael Kok wrote recently on this topic as well.

See as well Simon Gathercole’s article on the topic, if you have access to it.

See also my recent appearance on the History Valley YouTube channel talking about Q.