[Jedd]

> which would make it the oldest surviving manuscript of the New Testament, copied less than 30 years after Mark had actually written it.

I thought it was well understood that 'Mark' didn't write this, at least not the Mark the book is named after, and that we're not really sure who did write that first story, or indeed precisely when or where.

[AnimalMuppet]

That's disputed, not "well understood". Precisely when or where are also disputed, as you said.

[GlenTheMachine]

Nowhere in the Gospel of Mark is there a claim of authorship. The book is commonly attributed to John Mark, an associate of Peter, but this is just an (admittedly very early) church tradition.

That being said, it had to have been written by someone, and shorthand that person is often referred to as “Mark”.

[thaumasiotes]

This comes up surprisingly often in discussions of old texts. There are a bunch of related questions you might ask:

- These texts are all attributed to the same author. Were they all written by the same person?

- This text is attributed to a historical person. Did he write it?

- This text is attributed to a single person. Is it the work of a single person? Is it a compilation?

And so forth. It is not in general true that an ancient text has to have been written by someone, unless by "writing the text" you mean nothing more than that a single person copied or bound other sources into one more comprehensive document. (Even that isn't true; there's no conceptual problem with multiple scribes copying different pieces of a long text.)

All that said, I see no problem with using a convenient designation to refer to a hypothetical author. The opinion of other people varies; I have seen the argument made that the reason we don't consider medieval European philosophy to have accomplished anything is that medieval European philosophy texts are generally not attributed to a named author. I think this is ridiculous; if the texts were significant, they would have attributed authors, or conventionalized authors, because of their frequent use in society -- just as, in your example, the Gospel of Mark is attributed to an entity named "Mark" for no particular reason.

[Jedd]

The rational wiki seems to be reasonably well researched, and isn't committed to traditional interpretations, so their observations around the authorship of Mark (which basically provided the source material for the 'Matthew' and 'Luke' books)

From: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark

> Although written anonymously and in third-person, the author of the Gospel of Mark is believed, per Christian tradition, to be Mark, the interpreter of Peter the Apostle. However, this tradition should be taken with a grain of salt, for Papias, the originator of this tradition, was, by far, no scholar. It has been suggested that the book was originally intended as fiction and further that its author understood the non-historicity of Jesus.

> The Gospel of Mark is considered the first of the gospels written because the only material it contains that is not contained in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are a few insignificant details that anyone in his right mind would edit out. It can be dated to 67 CE by its apocalyptic Oliviet Discourse, for it mentions "wars and rumors of wars", a reference to the First Jewish Revolt, tells of the persecution of Christians under Nero, who died in the summer of 68 CE, tells the Judeans to "flee to the mountains", which would be stupid after the autumn of 67 CE, and, especially telling, prays that the flight of the Judeans may not be in the Winter. Documentation of these events sets the lower limit on the date of authorship at about 67 CE, but does not rule out the possibility that the gospel was actually written much later.

[Jedd]

Actually, more specifically, I have a problem with:

> All that said, I see no problem with using a convenient designation to refer to a hypothetical author.

And that is -- it's not terribly convenient if it distracts the under-informed reader about the provenance of the source material.

In this specific case there's the insinuation of authority by proximity / familiarity.

While it's a convenient designation, continuing to imply the author of the primary source of the new testament was someone we can identify gives it more credibility than attributing the story to an unknown source, or an amalgam of sources.

Compare and contrast, say, Greensleeves -- a piece that everyone in the UK and AU recognises as indicating soft-serve ice cream is in the area, where the composer / author 's actual identity is at best secondary -- attributing a work of fiction to a (likely wrongly) named author grants credence that may be inappropriate.

[thaumasiotes]

Bah. Everyone knows the sound of an ice cream truck is Turkey in the Straw. ;D