Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Evanghelia după Marcu" in Romanian language version.
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
We do not know who wrote the gospels. They presently have headings: ‘according to Matthew’, ‘according to Mark’, ‘according to Luke’ and ‘according to John’. The Matthew and John who are meant were two of the original disciples of Jesus. Mark was a follower of Paul, and possibly also of Peter; Luke was one of Paul's converts.5 These men – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – really lived, but we do not know that they wrote gospels. Present evidence indicates that the gospels remained untitled until the second half of the second century.
Why then do we call them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Because sometime in the second century, when proto-orthodox Christians recognized the need for apostolic authorities, they attributed these books to apostles (Matthew and John) and close companions of apostles (Mark, the secretary of Peter; and Luke, the traveling companion of Paul). 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.
Matthew, like the other three Gospels is an anonymous document.[nefuncțională]
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.
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.
We call these books, of course, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And for centuries Christians have believed they were actually written by these people: two of the disciples of Jesus, Matthew the tax collector (see Matt. 9:9) and John, the “beloved disciple” (John 21:24), and two companions of the apostles, Mark, the secretary of Peter, and Luke, the traveling companion of Paul. These are, after all, the names found in the titles of these books. But what most people don’t realize is that these titles were added later, by second-century Christians, decades after the books themselves had been written, in order to be able to claim that they were apostolic in origin. Why would later Christians do this? Recall our earlier discussion of the formation of the New Testament canon: only those books that were apostolic could be included. What was one to do with Gospels that were widely read and accepted as authoritative but that in fact were written anonymously, as all four of the New Testament Gospels were? They had to be associated with apostles in order to be included in the canon, and so apostolic names were attached to them.
Most critical scholars deny that Mark was the author or that he wrote on the basis of Peter's recollections
Most critical scholars deny that Mark was the author or that he wrote on the basis of Peter's recollections
Most critical scholars deny that Mark was the author or that he wrote on the basis of Peter's recollections
I wanted to use that quotation in order to show that the results of historical scholarship can be made known to the public—especially to believers—only with difficulty. Many Christians feel threatened if they hear that most of what was written in the Bible is (in historical terms) untrue and that none of the four New Testament Gospels was written by the author listed at the top of the text.
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.
The Gospels of the New Testament are therefore our earliest accounts. These do not claim to be written by eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus, and historians have long recognized that they were produced by second- or third-generation Christians living in different countries than Jesus (and Judas) did, speaking a different language (Greek instead of Aramaic), experiencing different situations, and addressing different audiences.
We have already learned significant bits of information about these books. They were written thirty-five to sixty-five years after Jesus’ death by authors who did not know him, authors living in different countries who were writing at different times to different communities with different problems and concerns. The authors all wrote in Greek and they all used sources for the stories they narrate. Luke explicitly indicates that his sources were both written and oral. These sources appear to have recounted the words and deeds of Jesus that had been circulating among Christian congregations throughout the Mediterranean world. At a later stage we will consider the question of the historical reliability of these stories. Here we are interested in the Gospels as pieces of early Christian literature.
Beginning with Papias in the second century, a tradition developed in various forms that attributed the authorship of the Gospel of Mark to this John Mark, who had been the companion of both Paul and Peter (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.15). In all its variations, the ancient tradition makes clear that Mark’s Gospel was accepted and valued in the church, not because of its historical accuracy, but because it represented Peter’s apostolic authority. The Gospel of Mark itself makes no claim to have been written by an eyewitness and gives no evidence of such authorship. While most critical scholars consider the actual author’s name to be unknown, the traditional view that Mark was written in Rome by a companion of Peter is still defended by some scholars who begin with the church tradition cited above and do not find convincing historical evidence to disprove it.6 For convenience, in this book we continue to refer to the Gospels by the names of their traditional authors.
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"
Furthermore, it is more than doubtful whether evangelists like Mark or Luke ever caught sight of a map of Palestine.
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 Palestine. 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).
Authorship by an apostle was so unimportant to early recognition of a writing's authority that names of apostles (Matthew and John) or names of people thought to be associated with apostles (Mark and Luke respectively with Peter and Paul) were only attached to the four Gospels at the beginning of the second century, after those had gained recognition primarily because of churchly appreciation of their content. Having studied the content of John and Matthew, historical-critical scholarship massively doubts that the Hellenistic Fourth Gospel was authored by the apostle John, and widely doubts that the First Gospel was written by the apostle Matthew. That the author of Mark was Peter's associate also seems unlikely, since that Gospel is very Hellenistic and Peter—according to both Acts and Paul—was highly Jewish. Similarly, that the author of Luke was Paul's companion is most improbable, since Acts's accounts concerning Paul conflict much with what Paul's epistles report. Again, had any of the Gospels been written by apostles, why were their names attached so late?125 Nor would apostle associates have been apostles!
During this period Disciples scholars such as Willett began to study at interdenominational theological schools and secular universities, and for the first time the Stone-Campbell Movement engaged historical criticism as the primary perspective on biblical interpretation. While Campbell's "Seven Rules" had advocated a kind of historical criticism, traditional conclusions about authorship, date, and the nature of biblical documents had been assumed, so that no one in the first generation had supposed that the consistent application of Campbell's own principles would lead to results that challenged and overturned these conclusions. By the end of the nineteenth century, those who followed the critical method arrived at a new set of conclusions that made the Bible look entirely different. Among these new conclusions: the Pentateuch was not written by Moses but represented a long development within history, the prophets were not making long-range predictions about Jesus and the church, but spoke to the issues of their own time; the Gospels were not independent 'testimonies" that provided "evidence" for the historical facts about Jesus' life and teaching, but were interdependent (Matthew and Luke used Mark and "Q"); also, the Gospels were not written by apostles and contained several layers of reinterpreted traditions.
