$0.02 on the authorship of the Gospels. Despite widespread scholarly consensus, there has been no new evidence in 1700 years regarding their authorship. The consensus is driven by textual criticism, which to my knowledge has never been independently verified but is for some reason taken as literal gospel, and a several millenia-long rivalry between Germany and Rome. All the initial researchers into textual criticism were Germans just after the Reformation who had reason to be antagonistic for antagonism's sake.

Frankly, there has never been put forward any evidence that anyone else specifically wrote the Gospels, but we have historical evidence that the attributed authors did. Some of it is listed here:

https://clearlens.org/are-the-four-gospels-anonymous/

In my mind, either show me who really did write the Gospels or leave me be. Skepticism isn't evidence on its own.

edit for grammatical fixes now that I'm on a computer

Aggrad08 said:

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To quote the sources own self summary:
The evidence is thin, to summarize Shaw, both for Nero's persecution, and even for the possibility that Romans could so early have recognized Christians judicially or religiously as such. The persecution stands or falls on a single passage in the Annals of Tacitus, the Roman historian and imperial administrator, writing around 115 AD, some 50 years after the event:

Again, you make it is if I'm claiming there was never a lick of persecution, when all the while I'm claiming Christians are overselling it for the nascent church. If it wasn't unique Christian persecution but merely sporadic and largely local persecution often as being lumped in with Jews it paints a very different picture.

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The article does not even try to argue against an Empire-wide persecution of Christians. It only says that Nero's motivation for such may not have been blame-shifting after the great fire but instead collateral damage during an Empire-wide persecution of Jews and other non-Emperor worshiping sects. I'm sure the Christians being persecuted at the time would have been relieved to know Nero wasn't specifically trying to single them out, unless he actually was and your article is mistaken.

Aggrad08 said:

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This doesn't make sense, just because textural criticism can discredit a claimed author but not provide who actually did write it doesn't mean it should be dismissed or ignored. Which is the very reason it's gained an acceptance from biblical scholars.

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It makes perfect sense to me. Is there good, ancient, written evidence that the namesakes wrote the Gospels? Yes there is. I provided some of it. Is there any good, ancient, written evidence that any other person or group wrote the Gospels? No, there is not.

Whether we're in 500 AD working in Christian Orthodox Byzantium or in 1800 AD Enlightenment Europe the facts are the same. The Gospels are the same and the commentary written about their authorship is the same. From the time of their initial circulation to post-Reformation Germany, there is zero controversy over the authorship of the Gospels. None. So I feel perfectly comfortable requiring stronger evidence than dubious linguistic analysis to make me reconsider.

Aggrad08 said:

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It's not good evidence it's well after the fact and flies in the face of every ounce of evidence from textural criticism which discredits it. Again, you are basically alone in this, if the traditional authorship claims weren't incredibly weak compared to the textural criticism then scholars wouldn't have abandoned your view.

Also, this criticism does affirm traditional authorship at times (like some of the Pauline epistles). Basically you are dismissing out of hand because you are uncomfortable with what it says.

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"Evidence from textual criticism"? That doesn't even make sense. Textual criticism can't provide evidence; it can only provide analysis of available evidence. You can question my motivations all you want, but I really don't find it compelling at all. I think textual criticism in interesting in modern literature among voluminous authors such as Dickens where you have a large sample size and many works to compare. If someone came out with a "suddenly found unreleased Dickens novel", then textual criticism would be an excellent tool to determine if Dickens was a likely author. We could compare this new novel to all of Dickens other works and look at things like sentence length, commonly used words, and myriad of other markers to determine if Dickens was the most likely author.

You don't have any of that with the Gospel writers. Mark, for instance, has no other known surviving works. So how to you use his only attributed work as a basis to deny his authorship? You have to start playing around with cultural linguistics in general to make a best guess of date of authorship, then you have to try and prove that date of authorship is not in Mark's lifespan. So no, I don't consider using our understanding of generalized first century Greek linguistics to set a best guess of authorship date as a compelling argument as opposed to second century written references and the fact the oldest existent manuscripts were all attributed.

The fact that this is the scholarly consensus really just sounds like academic group-think to me. Like I said, it makes perfect sense to me that the attribution of the Gospels went entirely unchallenged until Protestant then atheist academic Europeans came along with an ax to grind against Catholic Tradition.

I'm not Catholic, so I don't really have any reason to defend the party line here. The Gospels might lose some of their traditional legitimacy if they weren't written by their attributed authors, but to me the message and it's impact speaks for itself.

Aggrad08 said:

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What is your evidence for empire wide persecution of Christians in this timeframe? There is no evidence romans even understood them as a separate group at this time.

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Seriously? I specifically mentioned the sources that reference persecution from the article you posted. The persecution of Jews in the first century is pretty well-documented, and the Jews and Christians didn't completely become separate entities until after 70 AD. Considering Nero was already dead by then, it's a little anachronistic to point out that he didn't solely target Christians. At that point in history targeting Christians would have overlapped to Jews and vice versa.

craigernaught said:

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The claim that literary evidence doesn't count as evidence is really weird.

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Maybe I'm parsing hairs, but I think it's important to be accurate with words. Textual criticism is a type of analysis and interpretation of current evidence. It does not provide new evidence. New evidence would be new texts or new historical accounts. Take King Tut's mummy. The body, the sarco****us, the associated items in the room, and the building itself are all evidence. Any historical references would also be consider evidence. The autopsy would be an analysis of evidence, in this case the mummy itself. Later, the development of the CT scan could provide further analysis of the existing evidence, which is still the mummy. Even later, we can DNA test the mummy, and get a different type of analysis of the evidence. All of this creates a vast amount of new information and data, but none of it is new evidence.

Aggrad08 said:

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That's the point, there was no significant unique threat of being a Christian. When and where they were threatened it was sporadically as Jews. It's not like they could deny Jesus and the romans would give a crap. You've got one line of text you are leaning on that appears anachronistic and likely inaccurate.

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I made the statement in the early thread that Nero persecuted Christians for practicing Christianity. Any Christian could have offered a sacrifice to Nero and escaped persecution, but they didn't because their faith forbid it. So he persecuted them. Nothing you have posted has come close to contradicting that fact. Whether Nero and his government thought they were Jews or were also persecuting other minority religions is beside the point. Whether he persecuted them specifically as a result of the great fire of 64 AD is beside the point.

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Again, you are dismissing it out of hand and unthoughtfully.

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The fact that I didn't want or see the need to expound in minute detail of textual criticism is not due to ignorance of the subject or lack of thought. But I'll indulge you. Keep in mind I'm not a scholar so I may not be up on the most recent arguments. But let's take John's Gospel as an example.

Textual criticism makes a few key points disputing his authorship:
1) Greek words and phrases are found in the document that are not in widespread use in other documents until the 90s AD. Therefore, the earliest date the Gospel could have been written was 90s AD or later.
2) John could not have lived into 90s AD to write the document.
3) There appear to be 3 different writing styles used in the document meaning it had 3 different authors.

Let's go in order. Point 1 assumes that grammatical and vocabulary changes could not have originated in the community in which the author lived or somewhere close. I find this point weak. Regional changes in dialect are common and can sometimes take a long time to become widespread, especially before modern communication methods. It might be unlikely for these changes to have arisen in his small corner of Asia Minor, but unlikely is not impossible. Maybe it took a decade or more for these changes to propagate, and therefore you could add a 10 year error bar to that 90 AD timeline.

Point 2 says that John could not have lived long enough to write the document. However, tradition says that John was the longest lived of all the Apostles. He was probably in his twenties when with Jesus, and he died in his 90's around 100 AD. So actually his lifespan falls well within dates of authorship.

Finally, for point 3 I have seen two reasonable explanations. First, John could have written this over the course of decades. His writing style as a 50 year old might not match his writing style as a 70 year old, especially considering that Greek was not his native language. Second, and more convincing to me, is the explanation that he had scribes. He dictated the event over some amount of time to several different scribes, who each then wrote the document. Unless it was a word-for-word dictation, the different writing styles of the different scribes would be noted in the text. The idea of John using scribes also makes sense to me, as I'm not certain he could write in Greek. His native language was Hebrew, and he could almost certainly read Hebrew like any other Jewish man. However, not all Jewish men could even write Hebrew. He could probably speak Greek seeing as it was pretty much the international language, but there is no reason to think he could write it.

So again, I don't see anything definitive here that clearly overturns all of the related historical documentation and 1700 years of consensus. Again, we know someone wrote this Gospel. The only historical candidate is John, and there is no other person ever considered for authorship. If you can't show me something incontrovertible that specifically says John didn't write this but this other guy did, then I remain unconvinced.

ramblin, you said,

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Despite widespread scholarly consensus, there has been no new evidence in 1700 years regarding their authorship.

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My statement about literary evidence not being evidence is referring to this statement. Apologies if this was confusing, but likely you were referring to evidence from textual criticism given your later comments. Internet forum discussions can get confused. There has been a lot of new evidence in the last 1700 years regarding authorship, in particular, from source (literary) and historical criticism.

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The consensus is driven by textual criticism, which to my knowledge has never been independently verified but is for some reason taken as literal gospel, and a several millenia-long rivalry between Germany and Rome.

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This is inaccurate. The consensus is not driven by textual criticism. While textual criticism certainly informs the issue of authorship and helps to strengthen the scholarly consensus, the scholarly authorship is primarily reliant on literary and historical criticism. This is especially true in the case of the Gospels which are anonymous. Authorship of Pauline letters is far more reliant on textual criticism using undisputed Pauline letters as a baseline. This isn't an option with the Gospels.

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Textual criticism makes a few key points disputing his authorship:
1) Greek words and phrases are found in the document that are not in widespread use in other documents until the 90s AD. Therefore, the earliest date the Gospel could have been written was 90s AD or later.
2) John could not have lived into 90s AD to write the document.
3) There appear to be 3 different writing styles used in the document meaning it had 3 different authors.

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You use these arguments about authorship, but these aren't really the main arguments used by modern scholars to question traditional authorship. While I don't think your restatements of the argument or your objections are adequate (this is an internet forum after all), I think it's a side issue rather than the main point.

I'll quote M. Eugene Boring from his New Interpreter's Bible Commentary, Matthew-Mark, "The Gospel of Matthew: Introduction" P 106 in reference to Matthew:

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Practically all critical scholars consider the evidence against apostolic authorship to be overwhelming: (1) The Gospel itself is anonymous. Apostolic authorship is a claim made for the book, not a claim made by the book itself. The case is thus different from the Deutero-Pauline letters. (2) The use of Mark and Q as sources undercuts its claim to eyewitness testimony. (3) The Greek language in which the Gospel was composed was the native language of the author and is of a higher quality than the relatively unpolished Greek of Mark. Given the author's setting and background, he may have known enough Hebrew and Aramaic to work with texts, but there is no evidence that he was affluent in these languages. (4) The claim to apostolic authority implicit in the title, is sufficiently accounted for by the historical and theological factors discussed above. (5) Evidence used to support authorship by the publican Matthew - e.g., the numerical patterns of the narrative, supposedly pointing to a tax collector's facility with figures - are fanciful and unconvincing. Rather, the real points of contact are with Haggadic and scribal composition.

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The main concern in authorship is in number 2, the literary relationship between the synoptic Gospels (source or literary criticism). With Mark as a source for both Matthew and Luke, dating Mark takes special importance. You can, of course, reject the two-source hypothesis as a minority of scholars do, some relying on Matthean priority (the two gospel hypothesis or the Griesbach hypothesis), but that has very little support and runs into more critical issues than the two-source hypothesis, which has a number of issues already. Any claim that this is taken "as gospel" ignores the many issues with the two-source hypothesis well-known to biblical scholars.

I was taught in seminary that the two-source hypothesis is the best available model, but that due to many of the issues, it's most likely that the literary relationship between the gospels is far more complicated than the neatness that the consensus model suggests if tightly constructed. My own further study has led me to believe that the two-source hypothesis, while indispensable, is even further complicated by reliance on oral sources and oral culture, particularly in early Christianity.

From Pheme Perkins in the NIB intro to Mark P 513-514: (of particular interest to the OP)

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The traditional view that Mark wrote down remembrances of Peter in Rome either before Peter's death or shortly thereafter lead to a number of hypotheses. The emphasis on suffering was thought to depict the persecutions in Rome under Nero's rule. However, as we know from Paul's letters (e.g., 2 Cor 1:8-11; 1 Thess 2:14-16), Christians suffered persecution elsewhere in the empire. Other readers have noted the concern with false messianic prophecies and with the fate of the Temple in Mark 13. They also point out that the advice to flee (Mark 13: 14-22) correlated with the promise that Jesus would go ahead of his disciples to Galilee...Therefore, they suggest, Mark was written somewhere in Syro-Palestine during the turmoil generated by the revolt against Rome. Because of their links to Judaism, Gentile Christians could not side with other Gentiles in the region. Because they know that Jesus was Messiah and not any of the false prophets or leaders of the Jewish rebellion, Gentile Christians could not be associated with the Jewish resistance.
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A number of details in the Gospel show that the author was not familiar with places referred to in his tradition; geographic mistakes occur at several points (5:1; 6:53; 7:31; 10:1). We also find Matthew correcting Mark's citation of Scripture... Mark must explain Jewish customs to his audience, and often does so with some uncertainty (7:34; cf. Lev 22:1-16; 7:11, 19b). He retains a number of Semitic words from his traditions but must explain them to readers (5:41; 7:34; 14:36; 15:22, 34, 42). Replacement of external purity rules by emphasizing moral virtues (7:14-23) may be typical of Hellenized Jews as well as Gentiles, but the assertion that "all foods are clean" (v. 19b) made by the narrator, would not be typical of that environment. Nor would challenges to sabbath observance (2:22-28) be characteristic of a Jewish community. Matthew modifies both stories so that the generalizing conclusions that Mark draws from them are no longer present... Those exegetes who agree that Mark's audience was Gentile Christians, but hold that Mark himself was a Palestinian Jew, seem to ignore both the internal evidence as well as the evidence from Matthean corrections that Mark is not personally familiar with Jewish practice.
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The traditional assumption that Mark was written at Rome was based on the tradition that linked Mark with Peter. Early Christian writings from Rome contain no evidence of familiarity with Mark. Therefore, the best one can say for the traditional view that mark's intended audience was the Roman house churches c. 70 CE is that the Gospel can be understood as reflecting that experience.

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Well, this is too much already. I don't mean to get into a whole deal here, especially as the topic doesn't interest me as much as it did in the past. I'd be happy to hear your response but probably won't engage in much back and forth. To be honest, I've about wore that out in school.

I will say that you'll find many pastors and interpreters who have rely so heavily on socio-literary and historical criticism of the late 1st century that moving to a traditional authorship, even if you could overcome the arguments of the scholarly consensus, wouldn't do so. They are too heavily invested in contextualized reading from post 70 CE in Syro-palestine. I'll include myself in that group. I don't know how I would break away. I think a similar case could be made for authority and authenticity of the Gospels of those who interpret from a traditional apostolic viewpoint. We're probably all too biased at this point to be reasoned away. Even with that great chasm, I pray for the Spirit to guide us in our interpretive work in charity and wisdom.