We can be confident about who wrote the Gospels because the majority of the New Testament was immediately recognized as God’s Word by the early church based on authorship.

Transcript

Question: Bare, honest answer from you both: It really does not bother you that you don’t know who wrote 74% of the New Testament, including all the Gospels? Could have been anybody.

Greg: Well, it couldn’t have been anybody. I don’t know where that comes from. What matters is what the early church understood about the authority of the Gospels. Let me back up and put it this way. When it comes to the Gospels, since that’s what’s in question, the Gospels were among the first things that virtually everybody who was aware of them acknowledged as being authoritative accounts of the life of Jesus. And they acknowledged that because of the source. The sources were reliable, and this was the most important question with regards to canon—the apostolic environment in which these books were written, either an apostle himself or a close associate of the apostles, such that the apostle is overseeing the process.

This actually follows very smoothly, I think, given the notion of canon. Canon means the authority. What is the authoritative source? What books are the authoritative books that tell us about God? Well, when Jesus was here, Jesus was the authority because he was Jesus. And then he passed that authority on to the disciples—the eleven disciples there, after Judas left—in the Upper Room Discourse. We have a couple of references to this. “He will bring to remembrance everything that I taught you”—the Holy Spirit would do that—“and guide you into all truth.” This is not a promise for all Christians, because, if it were, then the Holy Spirit failed since we don’t all agree. But we do have an understanding. The apostles are going to agree on these things, and that’s who the promise was given to. So, where Jesus was the rule or the authority, now the apostles, whom he trained to follow after him, were the rule and the authority. And when the apostles died, those things that the apostles had written were the rule and the authority. That’s what was left behind after they were gone. And even while they were still here, those epistles—and, in this case, the Gospels—were going out.

The early church understood the authoritative sources that were responsible for the Gospels. Do I know who those sources are? Well, Luke seems to be one of them, and John seems to be one of them, and Mark seems to be one of them, and Matthew seems to be one of them. And in the case of John and Matthew, these were direct eyewitnesses. Mark was John Mark, and he was the companion of Peter, who was a direct eyewitness. And Luke said he researched everything carefully, and he was a companion of Paul—we know this from the book of Acts. So, we have reason to believe the classical characterizations of the authors of the four Gospels.

But the most important thing is that the early church was in a better position to be confident about that, and they were supremely confident in this. The Gospels immediately received affirmation from the church. It is a 400-year process of finally stabilizing the 27 books of the New Testament, but the Gospels were the first ones to be completely accepted. And anything that Paul wrote and anything that John wrote—anything that was unmistakably Pauline—was instantly accepted as authoritative.

By the way, there’s a difference between being authoritative and being accepted as authoritative. All of these texts that were eventually accepted as being authoritative were authoritative the moment the ink dried because they were God’s Word then, even though they weren’t, maybe, recognized in some sense for a while. But the Gospels were accepted very early on.

Amy: And there was never any other name associated with those Gospels. Those are the only names associated with those Gospels.

Greg: And those are the Gospels that are in all the textual evidence. We don’t have the Gospel of Thomas in any New Testament manuscript at all, partly because it’s second century—acknowledged by all hands. And if it’s second century, it couldn’t have been written by Thomas, so it didn’t have an apostolic pedigree to it, and that was really important.

Amy: So, ultimately, your point, Greg, is that it couldn’t have been “anybody,” because the church accepted these—I don’t know, something like 20 or 21—immediately because of the apostolic origin of them.

Greg: Very quickly.