It seems quite nerdy to admit that I have been blogging on the Bible since 2009. Although I was not one of the original “bibliobloggers,” I actively participated in this community when it used to be one of the main methods for disseminating biblical scholarship online. The Hebrew Bible scholar Daniel McClellan also had a well-known blog and now has a major impact spreading scholarship on Youtube and Tiktok. I am impressed with the depth of his knowledge on a range of topics in the academic study of the Bible and religion and his ability to disseminate this information to the wider public. I have only done a few podcasts on Youtube and wish I could present as well as him. Since I have been discussing the anonymity of the Gospels, I thought that I could engage with a few of his videos entitled “On Gospel Authorship” and “Responding to Concerns with My Video on Gospel Authorship.” The second video is part of a debate with another Youtube comment creator with the nickname “In Philosopher’s Garb” and his videos such as “Traditional Authorship of the Gospels: A Response to Dan McClellan,” “Responding to Dan on Gospel Authorship,” “Responding to Dan on Gospel Authorship: Part 2,” “Is Gospel Authorship Controversial in Academia,” and “A Final Response to Dan McClellan: Part 1.”
At the risk of generating more heat than light, especially since the rhetoric of Dan’s interlocutor already seemed quite heated, I want to weigh in on this debate that took place almost a year ago. While I side with Dan overall on the anonymity of the Gospels, I do agree with some of the Philosopher’s counter-arguments and think he fairly represented the scholarship on the other side (e.g., Simon Gathercole, Craig Evans, Richard Bauckham, Martin Hengel, Graham Stanton, Mike Licona). I also would not want to dismiss any scholarship that is deemed confessional, since I teach in a theological context myself. I will not examine here whether the traditional authors assigned to the Gospels is supported by the internal evidence within the texts, though I have some blog series on the various theories about why Matthew replaces Levi in the Gospel of Matthew here, about why the author of Acts uses the first-person plural here (bibliography), and about the identity of the beloved disciple here and discuss these issues further in my publications. I have not engaged Bauckham’s arguments about the frequency in which Peter is named in Mark’s Gospel, about Mark’s alleged use of an inclusio where Peter is the first and last named disciple, and about whether there is a “plural to singular narrative device” that uniquely reflects Peter’s perspective in Mark’s Gospel on the blog, but I have in my published work. In this post, I will stick with the external evidence. I also recognize that this evidence is extremely fragmentary, especially since we only have select quotations from Papias preserved in much later authors, and we all might be wrong on some points. I have offered blog summaries of Carlson’s recent study of the fragments of Papias and my most recent book goes over the options about what Papias may have been referring to in his excerpts on Mark and Matthew. The following simply reflects my own reconstruction, but it could easily be falsified with further textual discoveries (e.g., re-discovering earlier Gospel manuscripts, Papias’s lost work, or other early Patristic writings that refer to the named Gospel authors).
First, I agree with the Philosopher that the Elder John was really referring to Mark’s Gospel and Papias to Matthew’s Gospel. In my reading of the title and fragments of Papias’s work, the logia should be translated more specifically as “oracles” rather than just “sayings” and they are the “oracles about the Lord.” I have argued that he was using this term as a shorthand for the inspired oral traditions spoken about Jesus and included in the Gospels. Peter, the Elder John alleged, passed on the oracles or the things Jesus said and did to Mark, indicating that Mark wrote a narrative Gospel. I also agree with the Philosopher that F. H. Colson (“Τάξει in Papias [The Gospels and the Rhetorical Schools]” JTS 14 [1912]: 62–69) was right over 100 years ago when he argued that Papias was using the term taxis to refer to a rhetorical, rather than a chronological, arrangement. If he wants to update his bibliography, a persuasive case is advanced by Alistair Stewart-Sykes (“Taxei in Papias: Again.” JECS 3.4 [1995]: 487-492) and more recently by Matthew Larsen (Gospels Before the Book [Oxford: OUP, 2018]) and Nicholas A. Elder (Gospel Media: Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024). The idea is that Mark was not a follower of Jesus, but just followed Peter and had some disconnected anecdotes from Peter about Jesus that he failed to put in a sophisticated and complete literary arrangement. Some examples of Mark’s careful arrangement could be cited to contradict the Elder John’s judgment, but the Elder John was not a modern literary critic. Papias then contended that our Gospel of Matthew reflects a better arrangement of the oracles (= oral traditions about Jesus’s words and deeds) than Mark’s Gospel, but he was simply wrong that Matthew originally wrote them up in his native “Hebrew” (i.e. Aramaic) language before we got a Greek translation of his Gospel. I appreciate Dan’s points that this case is difficult to prove since Papias does not accompany these traditions with a citation from Mark’s or Matthew’s Gospel and that Papias’s account of the death of Judas (even as reconstructed by Stephen Carlson) is quite different than the account in Matthew’s Gospel, but I would just respond that the early Patristic reception of Papias took it for granted that he was referring to our Gospels and that Papias could have picked up an earlier oral tradition about Judas circulating in Asia Minor and we do not know how he might have tried to harmonize it with Matthew’s Gospel.
Where I agree with Dan against the Philosopher is that, although I know some scholars identify the Apostle John with the Elder John (e.g., Gundry, Shanks, Evans), I think that there is a better case for distinguishing them. The former likely died with the other six apostles (cf. Mark 10:39), hence Papias’s use of the past tense “said,” and the latter seems to be grouped with Aristion as two non-apostolic witnesses who had plenty to “say” in the present tense when Papias was writing his work. I have gone on to argue in my work that it was the Elder John who was an aged Christian who died in Ephesus in the early years of the Roman Emperor Trajan’s reign and was known to both Papias and Polycarp, but that Irenaeus confused the Elder John with the Apostle John and combined it with the tradition of the Apostle John authoring a Gospel. Moreover, the Philosopher cites Craig Evans (Jesus and the Manuscripts [Peabody: Hendrickson, 2020]) in arguing that the Elder John was referring to Mark’s earlier draft before his completed Gospel, which was earlier defended by George Kennedy George Kennedy (“Classical and Christian Source Criticism,” The Relationship among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue [ed. W.O. Walker; San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1978], 130-37), but I follow Nicholas Elder (and partially Larsen) in arguing that the Elder John identified Mark’s work itself as like a rough draft and Papias added that it was superseded by Matthew’s more refined publication. The question, though, is whether they were reliable source on these points.
Finally, I agree with Dan that, as noted in a previous post, the Gospels truly are formally anonymous as the names of the evangelists never appear in them and the first two Synoptic Gospels differ from other historians and biographers who identify their connection to their sources by using the first-person pronoun. Luke-Acts does use the first-person pronoun in the prologue and in the latter volume, while the anonymous “disciple whom Jesus loved” is portrayed as a significant eyewitness in select scenes in John’s passion narrative and as the one who “wrote these things” in John’s epilogue. Again, though, Dan is right in his reading that John 21:24 does distinguish a “we” group from the beloved disciple, for Armin Baum (“The Original Epilogue [Joh 20:30-31], the Secondary Appendix [21:1-23], and the Editorial Epilogues [21:24-25] of John’s Gospel. Observations against the Background of Ancient Literary Conventions” in Earliest Christian History: History, Literature, and Theology. Essays from the Tyndale Fellowship in Honor of Martin Hengel [ed. Mike F. Bird and Jason Maston; WUNT 2/320; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012], 227-270) makes a strong case that there are no real ancient parallels for an author to refer to himself with the first-person plural and the third person singular in the same context. My reading of the Johannine epilogue is that it was added to the Gospel after its original conclusion in John 20:30-31 by a group of editors after the beloved disciple’s death and that they claim that the beloved disciple wrote a previous edition of the Gospel, but unfortunately they still do not name this character even though they likely knew who he was. Excluding the Elder John and Papias, there is not only evidence that certain Christian writers in some locales in the first half of the second century CE referenced or alluded to the Gospels without naming their authors, there is positive evidence that Marcion had a copy of Luke’s Gospel that did not have a named author attached to it (e.g., Hengel tries to argue that Marcion suppressed the tradition of Lukan authorship). In my article (“Justin Martyr and the Authorship of Luke’s Gospel” JGRCJ 18 [2022]: 9-36), I have argued that Justin was influenced by Papias but that Dialogue 103.8 need not imply that Justin held the traditional authorship of the four Gospels. My case is that he identified the Synoptic Gospels, but not the Fourth Gospel, as the “memoirs of the apostles” and argued that each memoir was jointly produced by the apostles and their followers (thus 106.3 most likely refers to the memoirs of Peter and Justin could have known from Papias’s account that Mark was Peter’s follower).
Therefore, what I would conclude is that the traditions about Mark and Matthew do go back right to the beginning of the second century and likely a little earlier as they were first recorded by Papias. They were not held unanimously, but they managed to persuade Justin. My theory is close to Dan’s in that I think that it was when the four Gospels circulated together in a collection that the names of the four evangelists were affixed to the texts and that Irenaeus and his Patristic successors inherited this collection. The reasoning for why Luke and John were attached to the latter two Gospels is that Luke seemed to best explain the “we” passages in Acts, since Luke was alone was with Paul in Rome (cf. 2 Timothy 4:11; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.14.1), and John seemed to make the best sense of the beloved disciple when the readers noted that John was in Jesus’s inner circle in the Synoptic Gospels and was paired with Peter in the book of Acts. Dan is right to point out that Peter, Paul, and John were leading apostles, so they are connected directly or indirectly with the Gospels (i.e. Mark is linked to Peter and Luke to Paul), and the Apostle Matthew was named in the early tradition from Papias. The problem with arguing that the manuscript evidence shows that the Gospels were not anonymous is that the earliest handful that include Gospel titles date no earlier than the late second century.
The Jesus Memoirs 