The Four Gospels and Their Traditional Authors - Essay Example

The Four Gospels and their Traditional None of the four canonical Gospels identify their by within their text. Early Church tradition, however, associated each of the Gospels with a character mentioned elsewhere in the New Testament. As a result, the authorship of the Gospels, as well as the textual interrelations that undeniably exist between them in terms of their sources, has become an important issue in scholarly discussion of the New Testament. In particular, the close agreement of Matthew and Luke with Mark, and, where they differ with Mark, with each other, establishes some sort of dependency among them, hence they are called the Synoptic Gospels, while John has a far more independent tradition (Farmer 1964; Koester 1990; Nickle 2001). Traditional Gospel Authors The character to whom the Gospel we call Mark is attributed by tradition appears in the book of Acts ("Mark" in Smith 2009). He was evidently a Jew of Jerusalem named John who took the Roman name Marcus (conventionally Mark in English) when he moved to Rome. His mother Mary was on intimate terms with the Apostle Peter, and we first hear of Mark when Peter goes to her house after escaping form prison (Acts 12:12). Tradition further identifies this figure with the Marcus mentioned by Paul (Col 4:10; Philm 1:24) as his companion in prison in Rome and with the Marcus Peter calls his son (perhaps in the sense of a spiritual son) in 1 Peter (5:13). The tradition that associated Mark with the authorship of the Gospel is post Biblical. In the middle of the second century Papias the Bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor collected saying of Jesus from his presbyters based on their memories of what had been taught at the earliest foundation of the church and published them in a book called Interpretations of the Sayings of the Lord (Koester 1990, 32-35). This has been lost but quotations from it are preserved in the Church History of Eusebius. Part of the tradition (Eusebius 3.39.15) Papias wrote down described Mark acting as Peter's secretary and writing down (in Greek) everything that Peter said (in Aramaic) about Jesus, thus producing the Gospel of Mark (Koester 1990, 274-75). In the Gospels of Mark (3:18) and Luke (6;15) Jesus calls as an apostle a tax collector named Levi. In the parallel passage in Matthew (10:3) he is called Matthew. Tradition, once again attested by Papias, soon made this the same figure, called Levi before his conversion and Matthew afterward, and identified him with the Apostle Matthew and with the Gospel author ( "Mathew" in Catholic Encyclopedia 1917). According to Papias (Eusebius, Church History 3.39.16) he first wrote his Gospel in Hebrew and it was only later translated into (Koester 1990, 315-19). Irenaeus the Bishop of Lyons in the late second century, in his Against Heresies (14.1) gives the earliest attestation of Luke as the author of that Gospel and the Book of Acts. He calls attention to the fact that the author of Acts, although he never gives his name, on three occasions identifies himself as a companion of Paul by referring to himself and Paul in the first person plural (16:10-17, 20:5-15, 21:1-18). Irenaeus further identifies this author with the Luke named as one of his companions of Paul in the Pauline Epistles. Paul mentions Luke in Philemon (1:24) and in Colossians (4:14) refers to him as a physician (Koester 1990, 334-36) . One of the most important characters in the Gospel of John is the unnamed 'disciple whom Jesus loved.' At the end of the Gospel, the narrative framework of the text is nearly broken when Jesus tells Peter about him: "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you (21:22). The narrator immediately denies that Jesus means that the beloved disciple will live until he returns, but rather says: "This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true" (21:24), claiming the authority of this disciple for the authorship of the Gospel. Papias, again, is the earliest source of the tradition linking the authorship of this gospel to the Apostle John (Eusebius, Church History 3.39.6-7). John is well known from the synoptic Gospels as one of Jesus first disciples (Mk 3:13) and in Acts (3) as a close associate of Peter (Koester 1990, 245-47.). The Gospels As mentioned above, the Gospels of Mark and Mathew and Luke seem to have a direct relationship with each other. Mark is generally thought to be the oldest of them and to have served as a source for the other two because of very close correspondences in the text of the three Gospels. In addition, most of the texts of Matthew and Luke which does not appear to come from Mark closely agrees between the two Gospels and consists of sayings of Jesus. These common passages are thought to have come from a now lost written source called the Sayings Source or Q, from Quelle, the German term for 'source'(Koester 1990, 128-72; Nickle 2001, 88-102). Mark (13:1-2) mentions the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD (albeit as a prophecy), which suggests that it must have been written later than that. Matthew and Luke, then, if they used Mark as a source must have been written after Mark. Just as much to the point they are more sophisticated from the viewpoint of literature and theology and this factor also would tend to suggest a later date. Mark presents a simple narrative in which some sayings of Jesus, some stories of Jesus' miracles, and particularly the story of Jesus' death, the Passion narrative, are loosely strung together without much narrative framework. Jesus is presented as a divine man who performs miracles of healing and exorcism, up until the Passion narrative, he is careful to keep his messianic identity a secret. This would suggest that Mark was familiar with separate oral or written sources containing sayings and acts of Jesus and a passion narrative, which he arranged into a uniform literary text for the first time. Probably he did so for a community that was loosing contact with oral traditions and needed a written version of their foundation narrative. The text provides no information about the nature or location of this community. In some ways what can be deduced from the text of Mark would accord with a community somewhere in the Mediterranean Jewish Diaspora dependent ultimately upon the oral tradition of it founders and thus might seem to support the traditional ascription to Mark, but the apparent mediation of this text through three different sources, as well as the late date, would rather seem to rule out dictation taken from Peter as the source of the Gospel and leave its authorship uncertain (Nickle 2001, 63-87). The Gospel of Matthew, based as it almost certainly is, on two other Greek documents (Mark and Q) can hardly have been written in Hebrew as the tradition preserved by Papias claimed. Since that tradition is unreliable to that extent, there seems little reason to embrace Matthew as its author. Perhaps the fact that the author of this Gospel chose to rename the tax collector Levi as Matthew (and perhaps identify him with Matthew the Apostle) gave rise to the tradition. In any case, Matthew is notably more interested in the Jewish background of Christianity than the other Gospels, for instance in the dense reference to the Hebrew Bible in the story of Jesus' birth in the second chapter (Brown 1993, 96-229), and to a greater degree presents Jesus as a fulfiller of the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible and this may suggest it was created in a community more closely connected to its Jewish heritage (Nickle 2001, 103-34). Luke is substantially identical to Matthew in its content but is very different in style. Its Greek is more sophisticated than any other writing in the New Testament. The author of Luke includes a dedication of a patron at the beginning of the text (1:1-4; cf. Acts 1:1), a feature common to Greek literature but unknown in other New Testament books. The form of the text also more nearly approaches the Greek understanding of history. This is especially true in the continuation of the Gospel in the book of Acts which shares the same author as the Gospel. While the author does implicitly claim to have been a companion of Paul, it is difficult that a man who must have been in his thirties or older (because already having completed medical studies) in the 40s and 50s of the first century, could have written a book at the time of the conventional dating of Luke, a generation after Mark (around 100). But, given Acts' great interest in Paul, it is not hard to imagine the Gospel emerging within a distinctly Pauline tradition (Koester 1990, 332-348; Nickle 2001, 135-160). John stands apart from the Synoptic Gospels. While the author seems to have been familiar with the Synoptic tradition in that he follows roughly the same order of Jesus' ministry and passion narrative (though drastically changing the detailed order of events) he does not directly rely on any Synoptic documents as a source. John's approach to theology is also dramatically different. As if reacting to the miracles in Mark, John's miracles are magnified so as to specifically exceed any claims of a divine man and to approach a cosmic level (e.g. in the prologue). They are clearly part of a public announcement of Jesus' Messianic identity in contrast to the 'Messianic Secret' approach of Mark. John also clearly sets its community apart from Jews: for example, for John it is the 'Jews' who force Pilate to crucify Jesus ( 19:24), and much secrecy on the part of the disciples is necessary "for fear of the Jews" (19:38, 20:19). Tradition (Eusebius, Church History 6.14.7) places the composition of the Gospel after the completion of the Synoptics, but it need not be very much later than Mark. Therefore there is no chronological problem with ascribing authorship to a younger disciple of Jesus, but the fact that this Gospel seems to depend in its form on Mark and to have used other written sources suggests that it too is mediated through the tradition of a community (Koester 1990, 244-72). The four canonical Gospels were composed as part of a process of tradition which first produced written versions in simple literary forms (such as the Sayings Source) and eventually produced the Gospels, as much through editing as through original composition. This means that the authors/compilers of the final form of the Gospels-and it is clear that there were different redactions even of the canonical texts as is apparent from the addition of later endings to Mark (Koester 1990, 275-76, 284-86) and John (Koester 1990, 246-50), for instance, make the traditional ascriptions of authorship unlikely. Once the nature of the composition of he Gospels had been forgotten, emphasis turned to an insistence on the authority of their authors as eyewitnesses as is clear already in the text of Luke (1:2) and John (21:24) and in the writings of Papias. So the individual Gospels became attached to the names of New Testament characters who could plausibly have seen the events described in the Gospels or received eye-witness testimony from those who did. Works Cited Bible: Revised Standard Version. 1997. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. On-line. Available from Internet, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/r/rsv/index.html, accesses 21 January 2009. Brown, Raymond E. 1993. The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Anchor Bible Reference Library. New York: Doubleday. Catholic Encyclopedia. 1917. New Advent. On-line. Available from Internet, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/, accessed 21 January 2009. Eusebius Pamphilus 1890. Church History. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers vol. I. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds. Edinburgh T & T Clark. Farmer, William Reuben. 1964. The Synoptic Problem: A Critical Analysis. New York: MacMillan. Irenaeus. 1887. Against Heresies in The Apostolic Fathers. Ante-Nicene Christian Fathers vil. I Alexader Roberts and James Donaldson, eds. Edinburgh T & T Clark, 309-460. Koester, Helmut. 1990. Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development. London: SCM Press. Nickle, Keith Fullerton. 2001. The Synoptic Gospels. 2nd edition. Louisville, KY: Westmisnter John Knox. Smith's Bible Dictionary. 2009. Crosswalk.com. On-line. Available from Internet, http://bible.crosswalk.com/Dictionaries/SmithsBibleDictionary/, accessed 21 January 2009. Read More