[tasty_freeze]

For sure, they were written earlier. The point is two of the purported authors claim to be of the 12 disciples; the other two were scribes to two apostles. There is no evidence that this is true. It seems weird that the authorship was not reported for 140 years and then suddenly the authors were rediscovered.

Why does it matter? It is the difference between eyewitness testimony and hearsay. Either type of testimony could be true or false, but generally speaking we put more weight on eyewitness testimony and far less on hearsay.

[lambdaphagy]

The claim that the authorship was not reported for ~90 years (not 140!) is an inference based on the surviving material from a literary culture very different from our own, separated from us by 2,000 years. Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy is highly recommended to those interested in the question of how different typographical print culture can be from manuscript culture, let alone from oral culture (of which the 1st century Mediterranean was a kind of intermediate form).

The primary argument against the traditional assignation of authorship of the Gospels is that they're not referred to by name in the Church Fathers before Irenaus (~180 AD). But by the literary standards of the ancient world, that just doesn't seem that weird to me? The early Fathers were referring to works by authors in living memory, and the prevailing bibliographical standards were somewhat lax for even further removed sources. We wouldn't claim that anyone who referred to Aristotle as "the philosopher" or Isaiah as "the prophet", as often happened, didn't know their names. Moreover, Justin Martyr (~150 CE) is often cited as evidence against named Gospels, but in the same source he refers to the Gospels collectively as "the memoirs of the Apostles", which doesn't help the case for anonymous authorship.

The biggest problem for the anonymous theory, however, is simply that there are no manuscript witnesses to support it: all the early manuscripts have titles. So the anonymous theory has to posit:

- The last Gospel, John, was reduced to writing about ~95 AD.

- The Gospels circulated throughout the Mediterranean in anonymous form.

- At some point before 180 AD, the Church decided to get its story straight and assigned names to the Gospels.

- At that point, everyone from France to India started referring to the Gospels with their present names, without any controversies or mixups.

- All of the earlier anonymous manuscripts were lost to history.

I'm not saying that definitely could not have happened, just that it doesn't seem especially more plausible than the traditional account.

I've read a suspiciously large amount of historical criticism for someone who doesn't do this for a living, thinking I would finally get to the bottom of what the New Testament was "really" about. I came away with the impression that the optimal amount of attention to pay to NT hist crit is either a lot, or zero. Every generation of hist crit somehow comes away with the conclusion that the NT is really about the issues of concern to that generation. In fact this has been going on ever since the field was founded by 19th century German Romantics, who discovered that the NT was the product of national ur-spirits expressed through folklore [!]

Our cultural familiarity with the NT sometimes keeps us from seeing how strange a collection of documents it really is. It is perhaps the best attested collection of sources in the ancient world, yet contains a mixture of Greco-Roman biography and history, supernatural events, and mystical theology. I am not trying to persuade you of any particular view about NT scholarship so much as challenge the idea that there's anything cut and dry about it.

[tasty_freeze]

I appreciate your extensive and considered response.

There were dozens of other books often attributed to other apostles, and even by the time of Paul, he was warning about false gospels in circulation. The point is that we know that authorship was attributed to various books to give them weight and credibility.

It took around 200 more years before the current canonical list of books was settled on -- and then distributed around the world of Christianity without mixups (of course, Eastern Orthodox had their own ideas but the point stands). Considering how much less established and illiterate Christianity was in 180 vs 380 it seems even less surprising that the names of authorship could be chosen and settled.

[lambdaphagy]

Thanks, yours too!

My impression is that "gospel" (evangelion, G2098) is used exclusively to refer to something like "the good news of the Kingdom of God" rather than this or that manuscript or written account. The word is used extensively by Jesus in that sense: "the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the Gospel" (Mk 1:15) means "believe the good news that I am telling you", not the (rather meta-literary) "believe the literal document that you are now reading, in which I am a character".

This sense carries over straightforwardly to the Epistles. So "false gospels" seems better interpreted in context as "false teachings about Jesus" rather than "counterfeit manuscripts" in particular. In fact, AFAWCT there were no written Gospels when Paul was writing, so he couldn't have been referring to manuscripts.

We do know that there were non-canonical gospel manuscripts floating around at some point, which is not that surprising if we consider a gospel manuscript to be "something somebody wrote down about Jesus". But the non-canonical gospels are for the most part very late, and I'm not aware of any serious early debate about the list of canonical gospels, with one exception: Marcion rejected all of the canonical gospels, along with all of the OT, and substituted his own Gospel of Marcion (based on Luke and composed ~150 AD). There are debates about some of the minor Epistles, but there's no (surviving) argument about this or that community proposing to replace John with Thomas or anything like that.

There is a common misconception that if an Ecumenical Council pronounces a doctrine at a certain date, then the Church must have started believing it on that date. But more often the definitive ruling comes only when a long-held but unarticulated belief is challenged and the Church is forced to respond to the controversy. (Think of how the rules of sports evolve when a player exploits a loophole that obviously isn't in the spirit of the game.) So the fact that the canon was formally defined at a certain date doesn't seem to require that there was no practical fact of the matter as to which accounts were accepted before then: the early sources we have seem pretty unanimous on Gospel canonicity.

But I could be garbling all of this and don't want to overstate my case.