[dwashbur]

1. No copy of an anonymous Gospel has ever been discovered.

Did you miss the part where I said all the mss that have author supercscriptions post-date Eusebius?

We don't have Papias' writings, we have fragmentary quotes by later authors.

The papyri are anonymous where the beginning of a gospel has been preserved. Your source is flawed.

I personally have no problem with the traditional authorships. But if I'm in a discussion with another scholar I'm not about to go to the wall for them. I also don't buy the two-document hypothesis, I don't buy that Q ever existed. I advocate for Matthean priority.

Although sometimes if someone gets too hung up on Matthean priority, I'll argue for Mark and Q just to be a snot. I must be true to my nature.

[jlisenbe]

Did you miss the part where I said all the mss that have author supercscriptions post-date Eusebius?

You seem to be assuming that Eusebius oversaw a massive effort to post superscripts to ALL of the Gospel accounts falsely attributing authorship to Matthew, et al. Doesn't that sound fantastic to you? To have propagated such a lie over parts of three continents would have been an incredible undertaking. And yet he managed to do it while not leaving a hint of it behind. And then to have chosen Mark? Matthew and John would make sense. Luke much less so, and Mark?

We don't have Papias' writings, we have fragmentary quotes by later authors.

True. I never said otherwise.

The papyri are anonymous where the beginning of a gospel has been preserved. Your source is flawed.

Which ones?

What is your view of the claims of Patheos concerning the traditional authorship of the Gospels?

Although sometimes if someone gets too hung up on Matthean priority, I'll argue for Mark and Q just to be a snot. I must be true to my nature.

That one made me laugh. I must confess I have not found you to be a "snot".

[jlisenbe]

Did you miss the part where I said all the mss that have author supercscriptions post-date Eusebius?

The papyri are anonymous where the beginning of a gospel has been preserved.

I assume your second statement is only referring to very early manuscripts?

[dwashbur]

I assume your second statement is only referring to very early manuscripts?

That's what the papyri are. They're the earliest ones we have, and most are fairly fragmentary. Egypt continued to use papyrus for writing for some time after everybody else started using parchment, which is good for us because the dry climate of Egypt helped preserve what we have. Most are a single book, they pretty well predate the establishment of the New Testament canon.

I have no problem with the traditional gospel authors, and for the most part I accept Eusebius' explanations. The only one I have a problem with is Matthew being written in "Hebrew", i.e. Aramaic, and then everybody and his dog translated it. The Greek of Matthew gives no hints of being a translation, and there are things like Jesus' little Peter/rock pun that are only possible in Greek.

The usual story is that Matthew wrote for the Jews. But considering the apostles got scattered to the four winds when the Romans clamped down on Judea, it's not unreasonable to assume he wrote it in Greek for Jews of the diaspora.

There are those who question whether Mark wrote down Peter's recollections, since he was technically a companion of Paul. Except he wasn't, contention over him was what caused the split between Paul and Barnabas. Paul's next mention of him is in 2 Timothy, where he indicates that Mark isn't with him. Nobody bothered to tell us what Mark was doing in the interim, so it's not beyond reason to conclude that he attached himself to Peter and became his companion and amanuensis.

The thing is, none of this is evidence enough to convince a critical scholar. That's why I don't press authorship. I press date. Most critical scholarship denies traditional authorship because, or perhaps in order to, late date the gospels to a time after they could have been eyewitness accounts. That's why when I get into it with one of them, I say "Never mind who. Tell me when, and how you know." We have a lot stronger evidence for dating the synoptics well before the fall of Jerusalem, than we have for determining who wrote them. That means when they were published there were still plenty of people around who could validate their stories.

I've been giving you the critical answer to things such as you've brought up. I suggest you shift your focus and join me in solidifying their dates. Authorship isn't a big loss, most of the Old Testament is anonymous, and so is the book of Hebrews. All four gospels bear the hallmarks of an account by someone who was there, and they were written well within the lifetimes of the people who were there.

That's good enough for me.

[jlisenbe]

I've been giving you the critical answer to things such as you've brought up. I suggest you shift your focus and join me in solidifying their dates. Authorship isn't a big loss, most of the Old Testament is anonymous, and so is the book of Hebrews. All four gospels bear the hallmarks of an account by someone who was there, and they were written well within the lifetimes of the people who were there.

I've enjoyed your insights. My concern about authorship revolves around the idea of taking four Gospels that were either anonymous or written, perhaps, by lessor individuals, and then going through the incredibly difficult process of changing ALL of them to Matthew and so forth. It would have amounted to monstrous lying. Even worse, it must have been done with no one noticing it since it is never talked about. It's such a preposterous idea that I can't imagine anyone supporting it,

Still, your comments are enlightening and I do enjoy reading them. Perhaps Matthew did not write IN Hebrew as much as he wrote TO Hebrews?

Have a great day.