Authorship of the Gospels

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I’ve seen a number of Scripture guides which state that the authors of the four Gospels were not really the four men with whom we’ve associated them during the past 2,000 years.

Where did this teaching originate, and what is the Church’s stance on this?
 
I can only give a partial answers because of my limited knowledge.
  1. The title names Matthew, Mark, Luke & John were not part of the original writings of the Apostles and therefore are not inspired by God and they are subject to error. They were added sometime later.
  2. The last 11 verses of Mark and the story of the woman caught in adultery in John were not in the originals. They were added sometime later by an unknown person. The Church has recognized this since the 300’s but made them cannocal anyway.
Thanks,
Chris G
 
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chrisg93:
I can only give a partial answers because of my limited knowledge.
  1. The title names Matthew, Mark, Luke & John were not part of the original writings of the Apostles and therefore are not inspired by God and they are subject to error. They were added sometime later.
  2. The last 11 verses of Mark and the story of the woman caught in adultery in John were not in the originals. They were added sometime later by an unknown person. The Church has recognized this since the 300’s but made them cannocal anyway.
Thanks,
Chris G
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  1. This seems to imply that if it’s not in the Scriptures it’s not infallible. Wrong! That is not Catholic teaching. Scripture is part of Divine Revelation. What the Church proposes is that Matthew wrote Matthew, Mark wrote Mark, John wrote John, and Luke wrote Luke. That Matthew was written first.
  2. Where do you get that from? Has somebody been hiding an Original Gospel under their bed all these years?
 
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chrisg93:
I can only give a partial answers because of my limited knowledge.
  1. The title names Matthew, Mark, Luke & John were not part of the original writings of the Apostles and therefore are not inspired by God and they are subject to error. They were added sometime later.
Thanks,
Chris G
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I’m not trying to be a know-it-all or to call you out, but you may want to check your sources on what you posted here.
 
Br. Rich SFO said:
2. Where do you get that from? Has somebody been hiding an Original Gospel under their bed all these years?
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I was just reading the story of the woman caught in adultery, today (in the NAB, i admit 🙂 ), and the footnote mentioned the same thing about it being added:
The story of the adulteress is missing from the best early Greek MSS. Where it does appear, it is found in different places in different MSS: here [Jn 7:53]; or after Jn 7, 36; or at the end of this gospel; or after Lk 21, 38. It seems to have been preserved largely in Western and Latin circles. There are many non-Johannine features in the language, and there are also many doubtful readings. It appears in Jerome’s Vulgate. However, it is certainly out of place here; it fits better with the general situation in Lk 21, 38. The Catholic Church accepts it as inspired scripture.
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But like you, I tend to be skeptical of claims asserting certainty that a certain book was not authored by the author named.
 
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zzzimbob:
I’ve seen a number of Scripture guides which state that the authors of the four Gospels were not really the four men with whom we’ve associated them during the past 2,000 years.

Where did this teaching originate, and what is the Church’s stance on this?
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“The Church has always and everywhere held and continues to hold that the four Gospels are of apostolic origin. For what the Apostles preached in fulfillment of the commission of Christ, afterwards they themselves and apostolic men, under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, handed on to us in writing: the foundation of faith, namely, the fourfold Gospel, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” (Dei Verbum, 18)

The statements of some modern Bible scholars notwithstanding, this official statement from the fathers of the Second Vatican Council seems to say the Church holds that the Gospels were written by Apostles, apparently referring to Matthew and John, and by apostolic men, which I take to mean associates of the Apostles, apparently referring to Mark (Peter’s interpreter) and Luke (Paul’s physician).
 
All the Gospel writers were not Apostles. For instance Luke was not one of the twelve. The Church has never wavered. See the four major Church documents concerning Sacred Scripture.

To say (as the footnote says) that the earliest MSS or fragment that we have today does not contain this or that is not the same as saying that the Original did or did not contain it. The copier of that MSS may have missed it? Your talking about most of the time with fragments and manuscripts copies that were copies of copies of copies of the Original.
 
Br. Rich SFO:
1…That Matthew was written first.
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Actually, it’s my understanding that Mark’s gospel may have been written first. But I suppose it doesn’t really matter which one came first since they are all inspired.

Here’s one source on this possibility:

campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipedia/g/go/gospel.html
Gospel reference:
…the most dominant view is that Mark is the first Gospel, with Matthew and Luke borrowing passages both from that Gospel and from another, lost source, known as Q. This view is known as the “Two Source” hypothesis.
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I can speak first hand here. I suffered through all of this “Redaction Criticism” “Form Criticism” ******** etc in College and Seminary. Oy, did I suffer. Anyone who loves the Lord Jesus and the Church would have. This whole mess arose in the “Aufklaerung”, Enlightment of the late 18th Century—remember the mobs worshipping “Reason” in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and Voltaire saying “Well, we have finally buried God”. In the 19th Century, beginning with German scholars, they sought to find the original “form” of the writings in Holy Scripture— first of all the Old Testament with the 2 stories of Creation for example, the book of Isaiah, the book of Job with its very different sections. Not content with the OT, they moved to the NEW Testament, for example the missing end of the Gospel of Mark, the story of the Woman caught in Adultery. It has given rise to this awful Modernism with which we are saddled today. Its worst excresence is currently the “Jesus Seminar” where they vote on which words in the Gospls are the actual words of Jesus.

I got around all of that mess and survived through God’s Grace by clinging to the Lord Jesus Who loved me and gave Himself for me. There are planty of folks who are not as lucky. It was almost as if they wanted to destroy the simplicity of the Faith.
 
It’s not anything I worry about. It is probably impossible to know for certain. What is important is what they are about, and that the Church teaches that they are inspired (a whole other question as to what that means!!!).
 
The first four historical books of the New Testament are supplied with titles (Euaggelion kata Matthaion, Euaggelion kata Markon, etc.), which, however ancient, do not go back to the respective authors of those sacred writings.
Catholic Encyclopedia at New Advent.
 
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Stylteralmaldo:
Actually, it’s my understanding that Mark’s gospel may have been written first. But I suppose it doesn’t really matter which one came first since they are all inspired.

Here’s one source on this possibility:

campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipedia/g/go/gospel.html]

The first thing I noted was the offer to purchase the Gospel of Thomas from Amazon? That was it for me, I need not look any further!
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this is a snippet from a paper I once wrote for my nephew addressing questions of biblical scholarship…
  • So did the men whose names appear on the gospels really write them? The secularist say no; although they have little evidence for disputing traditional authorship, and they offer little in the way of alternatives. Most secularist scholars argue that the authors are simply ‘anonymous’. A few go a step further and argue that Mark was written by ‘a Mark’, but not the disciple of Peter, and that John was written by ‘a John’, but not the apostle John. The reason for this conjecture is twofold. First, they believe that most of the content of the gospels is embellishment, and admitting the traditional authors would put them to close to first hand accounts of what happened. This would strongly argue against the embellishment theory. Secondly, by assuming later dates for the writing of the gospels, they assume that these men would not have been around at these later dates to author the gospels.
On the other side of the aisle, there are several strong arguments for accepting traditional authorship. First is the fact that the earliest and only real evidence supports traditional authorship. From the early second century on we have the unanimous testimony of the church fathers recognizing these men as the authors. No other authors were ever suggested for any of the gospels until after the 18th century or so.

Second is the fact that no text or manuscript exists from any time or place attributing any of the gospels’ authorship to any other names. If the names of the gospels were attributed to them years after they were actually written, as the secularist argue, then we would expect that different names would have been attributed at different locations. The church was already geographically diverse by this time (and the gospels along with it), and it is ridiculous to believe that all these different locations attributed each of the gospels to the same name by sheer coincidence.

Probably the strongest argument in favor of traditional authorship is the relative obscurity of 3 of the 4 authors of the gospels. If the early church was going to fabricate names to associate with the texts in order to give them more weight, they certainly didn’t choose very wisely. Why Mark and Luke? Neither of them were even apostles. Mark was even criticized in one of the apostles Paul’s letters for abandoning him. Neither Mark or Luke ever even saw Jesus in person. They only knew him second hand from the apostles. Why Matthew? While Matthew was an apostle, he was certainly never in Jesus’ inner circle. If you are choosing names to impress, you choose Peter, Paul, James, or Andrew, not Matthew, Mark and Luke. It seems more likely that these obscure names rather than being attributed to the gospels, are the names of the actual authors.*
 
Actually, John Mark—the traditional author of the Gospel, recording the teachings of St. Peter in Rome—did indeed see Our Lord. Traditionally the Last Supper was held in the Upper Room of Mark’s mother’s house, and he is traditionally regarded as the young man who follows Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane and, when apprehended by the guards, escapes by slipping out of the sheet in which he is wrapped and running away naked. This is the same John Mark who is the nephew of St, Barnabas, accompanies him and St. Paul on the first missionary journey as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and then turns back, much to St. Paul’s displeasure. This occasions a rift and St. Barnabas is replaced by Silas as St. Paul’s companion. Later Barnabas & Paul are reconciled to each other, as is St. Mark, whom St. Paul refers to in a couple of the epistles, as “my beloved son and co-worker.” John Mark was at Rome and recorded the teaching of St. Peter, hence so much of the “immediacy” of Mark’s Gospel and the inclusion of details that would only have been known to an eyewitness, e.g. Jesus asleep on the leather cushion at the back of the boat before He calms the storm.
 
I suggest reading the entire Vatican II document Dei Verbum - this will give you a solid understanding as to how to read Sacred Scripture properly. If you need interpretation, get Fr. Corapi’s 6 CD set - one CD for each section of Dei Verbum.

vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html

One point I would like to make is that Sacred Tradition has equal weight of Truth as Sacred Scripture. It is Tradition that infallibly determined the authors of the Gospels. This is not up for debate. Whereas there is much evidence that scientifically would show the names on the Gospels are the actual authors, it is not up to science to determine the truth of revelation.

Those that want to assign different authors to the Gospels also want to say that the Gospels have errors - in direct opposition to Dei Verbum.

As far as the adultery section in John goes, those that want to say it was added later usually have a separate motivation (it really all comes down to motivation, both in reading scripture and in living life as to whether you are doing it faithfully or not) for saying this. They want to say that this moral story doesn’t belong in John - it was stuck in there many years after the original manuscript. You see, it had been taken out of Luke’s original Gospel because the early Church did not want to portray Jesus as soft on adultery when, in fact, he was - he really did not care about our moral lives - he only cares that we take care of the needy. This “story” regarding the Gospels doesn’t hold any water, especially considering Jesus said “Go and sin no more.” Why would He say that if didn’t care about sin? Why didn’t He say “go and help someone?”.

Thus, the motivation for those that want to say the adultery story was placed in John is to make immoral activities sinless. This takes an awful lot of dancing considering the Bible has an innumerable number of verses that directly contradict this - but many will do much to justify sin and live the way of the world.
 
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Brad:
Thus, the motivation for those that want to say the adultery story was placed in John is to make immoral activities sinless. This takes an awful lot of dancing considering the Bible has an innumerable number of verses that directly contradict this - but many will do much to justify sin and live the way of the world.
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Correction to my post. I didn’t mean to imply that there isn’t very good scholarship that indicates this story was not in John’s original manuscript. I do not mean to paint all of these scholars with the same brush - far from it - many of these scholars do belief in the sin and immorality of adultery. However, I have seen many others use this fact to come to the above mentioned conclusion - and this is just not plausible.
 
When I first read that the last part of Mark was an addition, the adulterious woman store was an addition and the title names were not part of the original writings – I was schocked. I thought everything in the Bible was clear as a bell. Was I surprised.

St. Augustine said that it is possible for us to have faulty manuscripts and bad translations. I think we do have them. There are often new Catholic Bibles with new and different translations. So it is not as clear as some might think.
 
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