Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Mark the Evangelist" in English language version.
St. Mark iconography.
10. Just as historical critical scholars deny the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, so they also deny the authorship of the four Gospels by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. [...] But today, these persons are not thought to have been the actual authors.
Most scholars today have abandoned these identifications,11 and recognize that the books were written by otherwise unknown but relatively well-educated Greek-speaking (and writing) Christians during the second half of the first century.
We must candidly acknowledge that all three of the Synoptic Gospels are anonymous documents. None of the three gains any importance by association with those traditional figures out of the life of the early church. Neither do they lose anything in importance by being recognized to be anonymous. Throughout this book the traditional names are used to refer to the authors of the first three Gospels, but we shall do so simply as a device of convenience.
5. The geography of Gospel Palestine, like the geography of Old Testament Palestine, is symbolic rather than actual. It is not clear whether any of the evangelists had ever been there.
Mark's knowledge even of Palestine's geography is likewise defective. [...] Kümmel (1975, p. 97) writes of Mark's "numerous geographical errors"
Like the other synoptics, Mark's Gospel is anonymous. Whether it was originally so is, however, difficult to know. Nevertheless, we can be fairly certain that it was written by someone named Mark. [...] The difficulty is ascertaining the identity of Mark. Scholars debate [...] or another person simply named Mark who was not native to the region. Many scholars have opted for the latter option due to the Gospel's lack of understanding of Jewish laws (1:40–45; 2:23–28; 7:1–23), incorrect Palestinian geography (5:1–2, 12–13; 7:31), and concern for Gentiles (7:24–28:10) (e.g. Marcus 1999: 17–21)
suggest that the evangelist was a Hellenized Jew who lived outside of Palestine.
Francis Moloney suggests the author was someone named Mark, though maybe not any of the Marks mentioned in the New Testament (Moloney, 11-12).
The historical narratives, the Gospels and Acts, are anonymous, the attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John being first reported in the mid-second century by Irenaeus
Finally it is important to realize that none of the four gospels originally included an attribution to an author. All were anonymous, and it is only from the fragmentary and enigmatic and—according to Eusebius, from whom we derive the quotation—unreliable evidence of Papias in 120/130 CE that we can begin to piece together any external evidence about the names of their authors and their compilers. This evidence is so difficult to interpret that most modern scholars form their opinions from the content of the gospels themselves, and only then appeal selectively to the external evidence for confirmation of their findings.
