Who Wrote the Gospels?: The Case for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

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Virtually everything that we can know about Jesus comes from the four gospels contained in the New Testament. The gospels are by far our earliest and best historical sources regarding the life, ministry, and teachings of Jesus. Since the gospels are so central to our understanding of Jesus, it is important that we know where this information is coming from. It is important that we know who authored the gospels, that the authors were well-placed to know what they were talking about, and that what they report is true.

But who exactly wrote the gospels? Were they in a good position to know what they were talking about, and are their accounts trustworthy? The traditional answer to these questions has been that the gospels were written by Matthew, a tax collector turned disciple of Jesus; Mark, a companion of the Apostle Paul and later of Peter; Luke, typically thought to be a physician and a companion of Paul; and finally, John, a fishing partner with Peter and disciple of Jesus.

If the traditional account is right, then Matthew and John constitute firsthand eyewitness testimony with respect to much of what they report. Mark and Luke would be second-hand testimony, received from eyewitnesses and thus very close to the events which they report.

But this traditional answer has come under heavy fire in the past several decades of biblical scholarship, to the point that it is seldom ever discussed, even by ostensibly conservative Christian scholars today. The four gospels are typically regarded as late, anonymous sources which depict a largely legendary picture of Jesus. Bart Ehrman sums up the current attitude fairly well, saying, "The first thing to emphasize about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is that all four are completely anonymous. The authors never indicate who they are. They never name themselves. They never give any direct personal identification of any kind whatsoever."

This is in contrast to the witness of the early church, which regarded these documents as credible sources from the apostles and their immediate followers. Ancient writers were unanimous in their attribution of the gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

This video will argue against the popular thesis that the gospels were ever anonymous. I will argue that the ancient witnesses have too quickly been ignored by modern scholars, that the objections to their reliability do not stand up to scrutiny, and that they provide strong testimonial evidence for the traditional authorship of the gospels. I will also argue that various internal considerations strongly support the traditional ascriptions of authorship.

Modern New Testament scholarship overwhelmingly affirms the thesis that the four canonical gospels were written anonymously. But before we can assess this idea, we will need to get clear on the definition of anonymity. According to some, a document is anonymous just in case the author does not identify themselves by name in the body of written text. Obviously, the gospels will come up as being anonymous by this definition. But then again, so will J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Lord of the Rings*. In fact, it is not all that uncommon for authors to never identify themselves within the body of written text. This is often because it is not necessary, since the author's name is present on the cover or under the title. Yet no one seriously considers such works to be anonymous.

For this video, I will be using the term "anonymity of the gospels" to refer to the idea that the original authors of the gospels are unknown, either to us or to the original recipients of the gospels. The names which we associate with them were not present when they were originally penned, but were added on much later. It is this concept of anonymity which I will be critiquing in this video, and not some trivial, harmless sense of anonymity according to which the authors of the gospels do not name themselves in the text.

I will be using three categories of evidence to argue against the idea that the gospels are anonymous. First, I shall argue that the titles of these documents in the manuscript tradition provide strong evidence against their anonymity. Second, I shall argue that there are internal clues within the gospels themselves which comport well with the traditional assignments to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And finally, I shall argue that there is early and weighty testimonial evidence identifying the authors which challenges the anonymity thesis.

Perhaps the most obvious evidence for the traditional authorship comes from the very titles which these documents unanimously have in virtually all extant copies. Where a title is present, they are always titled "The Gospel According to Matthew," "Mark," "Luke," and "John." While the anonymity thesis holds that these titles were added to these documents late in the second century, there is in fact no manuscript evidence to support this claim. We possess no anonymous copies. The one possible exception is P1, which includes portions of Matthew's gospel, including the beginning, but no title. However, because titles were sometimes affixed to scrolls of this sort as tags, this identifier could have very easily been lost in the case of P1. If the gospels were originally anonymous, we would expect to find a great many older manuscripts without names, but we don't. And this supports the idea that the names were always affixed to these documents.

Moreover, the idea that the titles were a later addition is implausible, since as soon as more than one gospel was written, the early Christians would have needed some practical way to tell them apart. As Brant Petrie says, "To suggest that no titles whatsoever were added to the gospels until the late 2nd Century A.D. completely fails to take into account the fact that multiple gospels were already circulating before Luke ever set pen to papyrus and that there would be a practical need to identify these books." Simon Gathercole makes a similar point, saying, "When gospels left their original contexts and were read elsewhere, it is hard to imagine at least some hearers not thinking, 'Says who?' Even before the presence of multiple gospels in one congregation, Christians might well have wanted to know where a gospel came from. Hence, it is not necessarily the case that the names must only have become a concern at the earliest when two or more gospels were gathered together."

Another piece of evidence which is telling against the anonymity thesis is the presence of literary dependence among the synoptic Gospels. It seems unlikely that the synoptic Gospels would have depended upon one another if their authors were unknown. This is especially so in the case of Luke, who claims to have been very careful in how he selected his sources and claims to have gotten his information from eyewitnesses. Since Luke clearly used other gospels in the composition of his own, it is hard to imagine that the other gospels were anonymous. Again, Gathercole's comments are excellent: "It is one thing to assume that Christians in a first-century congregation would simply have taken on trust what they heard read out without asking the 'says who?' question. It is a considerable step beyond that, and beyond what I, at least, can believe, to suppose that a professionally conscientious investigator like Luke would, without any accompanying testimony, follow by ancient standards very closely a naked, anonymous account."

Skeptics will make much of the fact that the gospel authors never identify themselves in the text, or that they sometimes speak about themselves in the third person. Randall Helms says, "Nowhere in their text do any of the four gospels name their writers." Similarly, Michael argues, "Matthew as a character in the text never speaks in the first person. The reader does not get the impression that Matthew was narrating the events in the gospel." But such objections are terribly anachronistic, born out of modern expectations of what eyewitness testimony should look like and a failure to appreciate how ancient people wrote. For example, Julius Caesar writes about himself in the third person in *The Conquest of Gaul*. Does anyone seriously doubt that Julius Caesar was the author of this work? Xenophon never names himself as the author of *Anabasis*. Tacitus never names himself as the author of *The Annals*, nor does Plutarch ever name himself as the author of any of his biographies, which he authored. As Mike Licona observes, "It was not unusual for ancient authors to leave their names out of their works. Plutarch was a Greek author who penned more than 50 known biographies during the late first to early second centuries. Plutarch's name is absent from all of them. It is the tradition that has been passed down through the centuries that gives us information pertaining to who wrote these biographies. No one questions that Plutarch is the author."

Moving into a consideration of the internal evidence, it is very difficult to see why anyone should want to invent Mark and Luke as the authors of the gospels which bear their names, as neither of them would have been an eyewitness and neither was particularly prominent in the early church. As Craig Blomberg argues, "It is hard to believe that the oldest traditions would uniformly associate the first two gospels with Mark and Luke without some good historical reason, because neither was otherwise viewed as a significant figure in first-century Christianity." Indeed, Mark, in particular, was known for abandoning Paul on one of his missionary journeys. Matthew, whose gospel is the most Jewish in style, would also be an odd choice to invent as being the author. This is because Matthew is identified as a tax collector for the Romans within the gospel, and the Jews were just not fond of these individuals. It would be strange and counterproductive, then, to invent him as being the author of a gospel which is directed towards a largely Jewish audience. This evidence is all easily explained if we posit that the synoptic gospels are attributed to Matthew, Mark, and Luke because these men were really the authors. It's very difficult to imagine why these three names were selected if they did not belong to the authors of these documents.

Several other internal considerations also render anonymity improbable. For example, the author of the Gospel of Matthew has a penchant for money. He goes out of his way to include parables involving money. He includes the story of Peter finding a shekel in a fish's mouth. He takes great pains to mention specific types of coins in his narrative. He stresses that Jesus said that the disciples were not to bring gold, silver, or copper when ministering to the surrounding villages. I don't think that it is a mere coincidence that the one gospel which shows a greater interest in money than the others is also the one gospel which is attributed to a tax collector. As Edgar Goodspeed puts it, "Certainly, if one demands a signature of Matthew the tax collector, this looks very much like it. We are struck with several features of the Gospel of Matthew that decidedly favor tax collector authorship."

Mark's gospel mentions Peter a lot more than the others. Indeed, in many parallel stories where the other gospels will just mention the disciples, Mark will mention Peter. After the resurrection, in Mark, the young man at the tomb tells the women to tell the disciples and Peter that the Lord will meet them soon. This harmonizes nicely with the substantial amount of external testimony that Peter was Mark's mentor and that his preaching formed the basis for Mark's gospel.

The author of Luke's gospel was almost certainly known. For the author addresses Theophilus by name in the preface. Theophilus was likely the patron for whom the Gospel of Luke was written. It is scarcely conceivable that Theophilus did not know who was writing this gospel for him and to him. As Harold Riley says, "Whatever may be true of Matthew and Mark, Luke was certainly not published anonymously. No one writes to a named person, Theophilus, and says, 'It seemed good to me to write,' without letting it be known who the writer is."

It is also quite unlikely that the author of the Gospel of John was unknown. The author is identified as "the disciple whom Jesus loved" in John 21:24. Skeptics are well aware of this verse but point out that whoever wrote it seems to be distinguishing themselves from the disciple whom Jesus loved. As Bart Ehrman objects, "For some reason which I have never been able to understand, readers frequently take this verse to mean that the Beloved Disciple is claiming to have written the Gospel of John. But that's not the case at all. The author cannot be the disciple himself because he clearly differentiates between himself ('we') and the Beloved Disciple ('his testimony')."

Richard Bauckham maintains that the Beloved Disciple did indeed write this verse. He argues at some length that John 21:24 represents an idiom which he calls "the we of authoritative testimony." The idea is that an author refers to themself with a plural pronoun, such as "we," rather than the singular pronoun "I," for the sake of emphasizing their authority and therefore increasing their credibility. His conclusion is that John 21:24 employs a particular Johannine idiom that occurs elsewhere in the Johannine writings (the gospel and the three letters of John in John 3:11, 1 John 1:1-5, 1 John 4:14, and 3 John 9-10, as well as 12), and that John uses the first-person plural pronouns and verbs as a substitute for "I."

As it happens, I am inclined to agree with Ehrman over Bauckham that the author of John 21:24 was not the Beloved Disciple. But I adamantly disagree with Ehrman that this means that the Beloved Disciple did not write the Gospel of John. Ehrman seems to assume that either all of the fourth gospel was written by John or none of it was, but this is just clearly a false dichotomy. It is entirely possible that John wrote the vast majority of the gospel, but that this coda in John 21:24 was not written by John. Such a proposal is eminently plausible from the verse itself, given that it affirms that the Beloved Disciple wrote these things, but also differentiates the person speaking in this verse from the disciple. Why should we assume with Ehrman that every last word was penned by a single author, especially when the content of the fourth gospel itself strongly tells against this?

As Lydia McGrew notes, "It is difficult to see how much more explicit verse 24 could be that the disciple whom Jesus loved wrote the Gospel." Bauckham's argument concerning what he dubs "the we of authoritative testimony" is fascinating and worth considering. If I am not entirely convinced by Bauckham's argument about 21:24, it is only because he does not present any specific example in which "the we of authoritative testimony" is immediately followed by a switch to the third person. This is not to say that the third person by itself is problematic or unlikely to be written by the author, only that the combination of "we" and "he" in the same sentence seems to me probably best interpreted as being written by someone other than the author himself. Hence, there may be a short coda to the gospel of two or at most three verses written by another hand. But even if we grant that 21:24 is written by someone other than the author, the verse itself says that "the disciple Jesus loved wrote what comes before."

What I propose is that our canonical Gospel of John is probably a later copy of the gospel, published shortly after the death of the Apostle John, with a few editorial clarifications, including this one in John 21:24. My reason for thinking this is found in the immediately preceding verse, where we read, "Therefore this account went out among the brethren that the disciple would not die; yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but only, 'If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you?'" So it looks like this editor of the Gospel of John is keen to correct a rumor that John the Apostle would live until Jesus returned. This was most likely motivated by John's recent death.

This hypothesis can make sense of a number of facts, in addition to the distinction which seems to be drawn between the author of John's gospel and the writer of John 21:24. For example, it makes sense of the fact that the Gospel of John appears to describe the Sheep Gate by the Pool of Bethesda as still existing in John 5:2, even though it was destroyed in 70 A.D., and also that our canonical Gospel of John probably dates to some time in the 90s A.D., around the time that John died. The upshot of this apparent desire on the part of the editor to clarify that John's gospel never actually said that John was going to live until Jesus returned is that the identity of the author of John's gospel was widely known. If no one knew the identity of this Beloved Disciple who is said to have written this gospel, the editor of this second edition of John's gospel wouldn't have felt the need to clarify what Jesus had actually said. Moreover, given that this clarification seems to have been added to John's gospel soon after John passed away, this further suggests that the Beloved Disciple was also widely known to have been John the Apostle. In other words, the Gospel of John was never regarded as being anonymous. As Bauckham concludes, "These verses allow no ambiguity for the first readers or hearers of this final form of the Gospel as to the identity of the author or of the Beloved Disciple. They presuppose that the identity of the Beloved Disciple was well known."

Compare this evidence, which we have just surveyed, to the genuinely anonymous book of Hebrews. Hebrews provides an interesting test case because it is uncontroversially anonymous. As such, it can tell us what we should expect our evidence to look like when dealing with an anonymous book. In various ancient manuscripts, in ancient sources, we find Hebrews attributed to no one, to Paul, to Timothy, and to Luke. So what should we expect from anonymous texts copied from this period? We should expect to find anonymous copies of the text, as well as disagreement in external sources over who authored it. But this is not the case when it comes to the gospels. With just one possible exception in the case of Matthew, whenever the manuscripts for the gospels include titles, they are without exception attributed to the same four authors, and the external witnesses agree that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were the authors of these texts. This is not what we should expect if these documents were originally anonymous.

As Petrie concludes, "That's what you get with a truly anonymous book of the New Testament: actual anonymous manuscripts and actual ancient debates over who wrote it. But that's precisely what you don't find when it comes to the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: no anonymous copies and no debate among ancient Christians over who wrote the gospels." In short, the theory of the anonymous gospels suffers from not only a lack of manuscript evidence but also from a lack of logic.

The one possible exception here is Gaius of Rome, who allegedly attributed the fourth gospel to Cerinthus. However, this is really far from clear. The evidence here is quite messy. We do not possess any writings from Gaius, and frankly, it's very difficult to know much about him with any confidence. The idea that Gaius claimed that Cerinthus authored the fourth gospel first comes to us in the writings of Dionysius Barcelibai in the 12th century. Barcelibai claimed that Hippolytus had written a work responding to Gaius, in which Hippolytus refutes Gaius's claim that the fourth gospel was written by Cerinthus. So, right off the bat, there are some real problems here. We are getting this information at least third-hand from a source written almost a thousand years after the fact. Even if Barcelibai is accurately reporting something Hippolytus had really said, as opposed to a fictional work about Hippolytus or a pseudo-epigraphical work attributed to him, we don't know that Hippolytus was accurately presenting what Gaius said. And in any case, Hippolytus lived more than a century later than Gaius, making his claims about what Gaius said quite dubious. Furthermore, the way Gaius was accepted by others in the early church, who clearly did accept John as the author of the fourth gospel, suggests that he did not attribute this gospel to Cerinthus. Eusebius, for example, when discussing Gaius, gives no indication that Gaius held that Cerinthus authored the fourth gospel. C.E. Hill bluntly concludes, "The common portrayal of Gaius as a high-profile Roman presbyter and defender of Orthodox sensibilities in Rome who wanted to reinforce a long-held mistrust of the Gnostically tainted Johannine gospel is a figment of the modern critical imagination." Consequently, it is quite dubious that Gaius provides a genuine counter-example to the otherwise unanimous attribution of the fourth gospel to John. Moreover, he certainly doesn't provide a counter-example to the unanimous attribution of the synoptics to Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

In a previous video, I surveyed the ancient testimony bearing on the gospels in detail. Thus, in the interest of keeping this video as concise as possible, I will only briefly review the ancient witnesses here.

Papias of Hierapolis is the earliest witness to discuss the writing of the gospels, writing sometime between 90 and 130 A.D. He said, "The Elder used to say: Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord's discourses. So that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one thing: not to omit any of the things which he had heard and not to state any of them falsely. So then Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew language, and everyone interpreted them as he was able."

A second witness is Irenaeus of Lyons in the mid-second century. Irenaeus wrote, "Matthew also issued a written gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and laying the foundations of the church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also handed down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, did himself publish a gospel during his residence at Ephesus."

Clement of Alexandria is our third witness, writing in the later second century. He said, "The Gospels containing the genealogies were written first, and that the Gospel according to Mark was composed in the following circumstances: Peter having preached the word publicly at Rome, and by the Spirit proclaimed the gospel, those who were present, who were numerous, entreated Mark on his composing the gospel. He handed it to those who had made the request to him. But John, the last of all, seeing that what was corporeal was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual gospel."

Next, we shall consider the testimony of Tertullian. He wrote at the beginning of the third century, saying, "I lay it down to begin with, that the documents of the Gospel have the apostles for their authors. In short, from among the apostles, John and Matthew, and [implant] in us the faith; while from among the apostolic men, Luke and Mark reaffirm it."

Additionally, Origen tells us, "The first gospel written was that according to Matthew, who was once a tax collector, but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, who published it for those who from Judaism came to believe, composed as it was in the Hebrew language. Secondly, that according to Mark, who composed it in accordance with the instructions of Peter; and thirdly, that according to Luke, for those who from the Gentiles came to believe. After them all, that according to John."

Lastly, Augustine of Hippo tells us, "Now, those four evangelists whose names have gained the most remarkable circulation over the whole world, and whose number has been fixed as four, are believed to have written in the order which follows: First, Matthew; then Mark; thirdly, Luke; lastly, John."

Lastly, I want to consider the testimony of Justin Martyr, who is very early. He makes reference to the gospels as "Memoirs," which "I say were drawn up by Jesus's apostles and those who followed them." Although he does not name the authors of the gospels, he does seem to acknowledge that there were a minimum of four. Moreover, at least two would have had to be Apostles, and at least two would have had to be followers of the Apostles. This fits perfectly with the idea that the gospels were written by Matthew and John, who were Apostles, and Mark and Luke, who were followers of the Apostles. As C.E. Hill says, "Justin's use of the plurals here would seem to mean that he acknowledged at least four gospels, at least two written by Apostles and at least two by followers of the Apostles."

This external testimony is, in my estimation, the most compelling evidence both against the anonymity thesis as well as in favor of the traditional authorship of the gospels. These witnesses were spread over a wide geographical space, making it unlikely that they were all pulling from one another. Their independence is further seen in the fact that there are some apparent contradictions between them with respect to when the gospels were written and possibly the order in which they were written. As Timothy and Lydia McGrew observe, "The widespread agreement of early sources on a number of points is remarkable and cannot be brushed aside, particularly since discrepancies among these sources regarding other points strongly suggests that they are not, for the most part, simply copying one another." Some explanation is needed for the unanimous voice with which the ancient Church names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the authors of their gospels, and I propose that the best explanation is that they were telling the truth.

Proponents of the anonymity hypothesis accept that there is wide agreement on the authorship of the gospels from the time of Irenaeus onwards, but they maintain that there is a serious problem: all of these witnesses are writing much later than the authors of the gospels were writing. This makes them too late to really be in a position to know what they were talking about. They want to claim that the names were attached to the gospels, probably sometime between 170 and 200 A.D. Irenaeus thus becomes the source of our four-fold gospel tradition, and those who are later than Irenaeus have simply copied what Irenaeus has said. Urban explains, "The first certain reference to the four gospels is in the writings of the Church Father Irenaeus. By the time of Irenaeus, it is not surprising that the church fathers would want to know who wrote these anonymous books. But the gospels that were widely accepted as authoritative in Irenaeus's circles were originally anonymous. The solution to the problem of validating these texts was obvious: yes, they needed to be attributed to real, established authorities."

I will discuss Irenaeus and the evidential importance of his testimony presently. However, let us first turn to our earliest witness, Papias of Hierapolis, whose testimony is significantly earlier than that of Irenaeus, possibly as early as 90 A.D. Papias less controversially bears witness to Mark and Matthew as the authors of their respective gospels, and even here, as we shall see momentarily, there is still some disagreement. Yet, even limiting ourselves to the less controversial evidence, Papias's words challenge the anonymity of at least Matthew and Mark.

But this, of course, raises the question: what about Luke and John? Bart Ehrman sees this as a potential problem, saying, "It is somewhat curious, and certainly interesting, that Eusebius chose not to include any quotations from Papias about Luke or John. Why would that be? Were Papias's views about these two books not significant? Were they unusual? Were they contrary to Eusebius's own views? We'll never know." Nevertheless, I take a somewhat radical position: I maintain that there are good reasons for thinking that Papias bears witness to the authorship of both Luke and John as well. The evidence is stronger in the case of John, but it is also weighty in the case of Luke.

Consider this often-neglected fragment of Papias from the anti-Marcionite prologue to John: "The Gospel of John was made known and given to the church by John while he yet remained in the body, as one Papias by name of Hierapolis, a beloved disciple of John, has related in his exoteric, that is, in his last five books." The prologue cites Papias as saying that John the Apostle authored the fourth gospel. Skeptics will be swift to point out that the prologue contains some dubious historical information. In particular, most historians doubt the truth of the claim that John the Apostle had ever had physical conflict with the heretic Marcion. Importantly, however, the prologue is not the source of this information about John's authorship, for the prologue is merely passing on information obtained from Papias. Therefore, Papias, rather than the prologue, is the source of the testimony to John's gospel.

Monte Shanks reminds us, "There is some question regarding the credibility of the author of this fragment. When handling historical material, it should be noted, however, that he was not inaccurate with respect to everything he wrote concerning Papias. He correctly noted, for example, that Papias was from Hierapolis and that he had written a five-volume work. While certain material contained in this fragment requires critical analysis, this fragment should not be unnecessarily marginalized as having no historical value." I suppose the die-hard skeptic could maintain that the author of the prologue was claiming that Papias said things which he never in fact wrote. After all, since Papias's writings have been lost, we have no way to definitively confirm the accuracy of this citation. But it seems unlikely that the author would have put these words in Papias's mouth in light of the fact that the author of the prologue gives a fairly specific reference to the exact book where Papias allegedly says this. Presumably, the book was still around in his day, and so the reference could have been checked, which would almost certainly deter the author of the prologue from making bogus references to it. Consequently, we have strong reasons to think that Papias told us not just that Matthew and Mark wrote their respective gospels, but also that John wrote his.

But the evidence gets even better. In *Ecclesiastical History* 3.24.5-12, Eusebius mentions a record which recounts the history of the writing of the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The record preserves that "they took to writing out of necessity. Matthew having first preached to Hebrews, and when he was on the point of going to others, supplied to those from whom he was sent, through his writing, the lack of his presence by handing down the Gospel according to himself, written in his native tongue. And after Mark and Luke had already made the publication of the Gospels according to them, John, it is said, used all the time a proclamation which was not written down, and at last came to writing for the following cause: after the three Gospels which had been previously written had already been distributed to all, and even to himself, they say that he welcomed them and testified to their truth, but that there was therefore only lacking to the scripture the account concerning things which had been done by Christ at first and at the beginning of the proclamation."

The record is certainly true. Eusebius does not name the source of this record, but a literary analysis by Charles Hill demonstrates close parallels between what Eusebius's source says about Matthew and Mark and what Papias says about Matthew and Mark. Hill shows that both Eusebius's source here, as well as Papias, share several words and ideas. The comments Eusebius preserves about the origin of the Gospel of John in 3.24.11 have the same formula as the comments he preserves about the origin of the Gospel of Mark in 2.15.2, where Eusebius explicitly quotes Papias as his source. The similarity in formula suggests a common source for both traditions, and since Papias is known to be the source in Book 2, it is most likely that he is also the source in Book 3.

There is also a common concern in both Eusebius's quotations of Papias in 3.39.15-16, as well as in Eusebius's record here in 3.24.5-13. As Hill argues, an emphasis on the supplemental nature of John's gospel in our fragment fits with the concern for the proper order of the events in Mark's gospel felt in the report of Papias's Elder in 3.39.15: "Mark wrote accurately all that he remembered, not indeed in order of the things said or done by the Lord." John, on the other hand, it is implied in our fragment, gave the proper order, even naming the first of the Lord's signs. In addition to these common themes and concerns, there are also common words. As Hill points out in his very detailed article on the subject, "three times in the short space of 3.39.15 Papias's account of Mark there occurs a distinctive feature of the Elder's paraphrastic use of pollo in the middle voice with an accompanying noun. The same feature turns up here in 3.24.7 where Eusebius is paraphrasing his source." The Elder quoted by Papias in 3.39.15 also has a distinctive way of speaking about the contents of the gospels. A great deal of attention has been given to his mention of the Lord's logia, which he says Matthew and Mark contain. This has sometimes obscured the fact that this presbyter also speaks of Mark as recording "the things said or done by the Lord," using here the earliest passive participle. The source used by Valerius Eusebius in 3.34 uses the same notation: the passive participle earliest or imperfect of preso for the deeds of Jesus in the gospels occurs no less than four times in Eusebius's paraphrase and summary of his source. All of this is very suggestive that Eusebius is here relying upon Papias.

In *Ecclesiastical History* 2.15.1, Eusebius explains the origin of Mark's gospel, which he refers to as a recollection of Peter's teaching. He cites both Papias and Clement of Alexandria as sources. So our two most promising candidates for Eusebius's source when he revisits the topic in Book 3 are Papias and Clement. Moreover, we know from Clement's own writings that he had read Papias, so Papias emerges as being the true source of this information, and therefore it is more likely that Eusebius is paraphrasing Papias in this passage in Book 3. Hill says, "It is hard for me to believe that an independent source on the origins of the four gospels, which share all of these characteristics with the account of the origins of Matthew and Mark explicitly attributed to Papias." Michael objects to Hill's thesis, maintaining that Clement of Alexandria is just as likely to be Eusebius's source here as Papias. He argues, "Papias's agreement with Clement may be restricted to the notice that Mark was Peter's interpreter. If Hill were to be right on a single source, the source may be Clement." But Cox's treatment of Hill's argument utterly fails to do justice to the many literary characteristics noted earlier which are shared between Papias and this unnamed source in Eusebius and which are not shared between this source and Clement. This source very clearly mentions that Matthew was written in the Hebrew tongue, similar to what Papias says about Matthew being written in a Hebrew dialect. Clement, by contrast, says nothing about the language or dialect of Matthew. Eusebius's source shows concern over the order in John's gospel, just like Papias does with the order of Matthew and Mark, but Clement does not share this concern. And the distinct Greek verbiage shared between Papias and Eusebius's source is likewise absent from Clement. In contrast to Cox's proposal, Papias is just clearly the better candidate source than Clement.

Richard Bauckham also objects to Hill's hypothesis on the grounds that what Eusebius's source says about Matthew is incongruent with what Papias says about Matthew. He argues, "In 3.39.16, Papias is concerned with the issue of order in the gospels, while 3.24.6 is explaining how it was that Matthew was obligated to write his gospel. The two statements cannot be combined into a single account from the same context." Unfortunately, Bauckham offers no reasons for thinking that these two statements could not occur within the same context. As Hill says in response to Bauckham, "On the contrary, I think that they would fit together quite well. There is no reason why these two concerns might not have been combined in the same account." In 3.24.5-7, Eusebius is only repeating enough of the source's information on Matthew, Mark, and Luke to as will provide the necessary background for relaying its tradition on John, which is clearly the subject at hand. It is quite reasonable to suppose that his source in 3.24.5-13, whose aim clearly was to give information about the origins of each of these gospels, did so in order and that the information Eusebius quotes about Matthew and Mark in 3.39.15-16 would fit well after the information he so briefly summarizes in 3.24.6.

Bauckham further objects that although both sources share a common concern over the order within the gospels, they have radically different solutions to this concern. He writes, "The solution to the difference in order between the Gospels that Papias must be inferred to have offered is that John's gospel does follow a correct chronological order, while the other gospels, at least Mark and Matthew, do not. In 3.24.5-15, the solution is quite different: the four gospels are reconciled without an admission that any of them is not in order." However, this objection depends upon a particular interpretation of Papias's words. Bauckham assumes that Mark's order is being compared to John's, but as Hill points out, "This may be so, but we may only think this from inference or speculation, for nowhere in the account which Eusebius relates in 3.39.15-16 is John mentioned. In fact, this section does say that one gospel writer did make an ordered arrangement, and that writer is Matthew, not John." It is, I believe, quite true that in the tradition from the Elder, repeated by Papias, all the gospels are being considered with respect to the question of literary arrangement. The unnamed source Eusebius uses in 3.24.5-13 definitely focuses on John's preservation of the beginnings of Jesus's ministry, omitted from the other gospel accounts, and not on the chronological order of events in the rest of the gospel story. The issue of an author's order, or the lack of it, cannot be restricted to matters of chronology.

Hill argues that no known source upon which Eusebius might have depended shares all of these parallels other than Papias, and since we know that Eusebius had access to Papias, it is most reasonable to infer that Eusebius's source here just is Papias. As Hill concludes, "Both accounts also stress the respective Apostles' work of preaching before they wrote. What is more, after introducing the accounts of both gospels, Eusebius follows the first excerpt about John with the words, 'and the record is surely true,' the record here naturally referring to the preceding one. Eusebius is definitely presenting this account of the origins of Matthew and John as from a single written source, and though he does not name that source, there is no credible alternative to regarding it as Papias of Hierapolis." These common elements and concerns point to a common source. From a comparison with the other Papias fragments on the gospels in Eusebius, then, there is fairly conclusive support for regarding Eusebius's source in 3.24.5-13 as being Papias's tradition about the fourth gospel.

If Hill's hypothesis is correct, then Papias names all four gospel authors. The question might be raised as to why Eusebius does not name Papias, but the answer to this is pretty straightforward: Eusebius did not like Papias, and elsewhere in his writings, he took great pains to distance Papias from John the Apostle. So we know that Eusebius would have had ample motivation not to cite Papias in this particular passage.

I also want to draw our attention to the witness of Irenaeus. While his witness to the four traditional authors of the gospels and *Against Heresies* is commonly dated between 174 and 189 A.D., it may well be somewhat earlier. The 174 to 189 date is based upon Irenaeus's claim that Eleutherius was the Bishop of Rome while he was writing. According to certain sources, Eleutherius was Bishop of Rome between 174 and 189. However, the sources do not all agree here. Eleutherius succeeded Soter as Bishop of Rome, and according to some sources, Soter's tenure ended as early as 168 A.D., allowing for the possibility that *Against Heresies* was written just before 170 A.D.

Regardless of when we date *Against Heresies*, it is unlikely that Irenaeus is the first person to have attributed all four gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He attributes these gospels to these individuals in a very matter-of-fact kind of way, almost as if he takes it for granted that these names are widely accepted as being the names of the authors of the gospels. Furthermore, in the same section where Irenaeus tells us by name who wrote the gospels, he mentions that his gospel tradition had been transmitted to him right down from the apostles themselves and from those who had publicly preached it. This means that he takes himself to be reporting information which is earlier than himself. Where exactly he got this information is not said in the passage, but throughout *Against Heresies*, Irenaeus frequently cites Polycarp and a mysterious presbyter as sources.

Charles Hill argues quite convincingly that this presbyter just is Polycarp. If Hill is right, then Irenaeus's tradition concerning the authors of the gospels most likely comes directly from Polycarp, and this becomes even more plausible when we read Irenaeus's letter to Florinus, where he describes going to Polycarp's house as a young man and hearing him recount Jesus's words and teachings as they were reported to him by eyewitnesses. As Hill contends, "Irenaeus claims not only to be passing on something which the presbyter taught, but also that the presbyter himself had attributed this information to an even earlier source: certain unnamed Apostles and their disciples." Regardless of how the merits of this claim are judged, the chain of events reported in *Against Heresies* certainly matches Irenaeus's testimony in the letter to Floridians about Polycarp. And he concludes, "Simply stated, in *Against Heresies*, Irenaeus recounts from memory the anti-Marcionite oral teaching of a respected presbyter, a disciple of the Apostles, and in the letter to Florinius, a letter devoted to the very same aspects of Marcion's teaching, Irenaeus claims he could remember much of the oral teaching of Polycarp of Smyrna, who he calls 'that blessed and Apostolic presbyter.' I submit that it would be too great of a coincidence if these two Apostolic presbyters were not the same individual, namely Polycarp of Smyrna."

Furthermore, there is an interesting parallel in the wording of *Against Heresies* 3.1.1, where Irenaeus mentions the gospel authors by name, and what he says of Polycarp in the letter to Florinius. In the letter, Irenaeus speaks of how Polycarp used to proclaim the gospel in public and passed it on from the eyewitnesses themselves. This looks shockingly close to how he describes his own reception of the gospel and, by extension, the gospel tradition in *Against Heresies* 3.1.1. Surely, there can be no more plausible source for this tradition which Irenaeus reports than Polycarp. And if the parallels which I have noted between these two passages do indeed indicate that Polycarp is Irenaeus's source, then Polycarp also tells us his own source, namely the eyewitnesses. We thus have a chain of custody from the authors of the gospels themselves right up through Irenaeus. This ensures beyond all reasonable doubt that our gospels were attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from the very beginning.

Besides showing that the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John predate Irenaeus, this analysis showing that Polycarp was very plausibly Irenaeus's source yields a further interesting conclusion: it shows that Irenaeus's testimony is independent of Papias's testimony. This considerably strengthens the case for the traditional authorship, since it is utterly absurd to think that both Papias and Polycarp should have independently attached the exact same four names to the four gospels if those names were not there from the start.

The early church speaks with one voice on the authorship of the gospels. Our earliest witnesses unanimously attribute them to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. While some of the sources may have depended upon one another, there is a good case for thinking that Papias and Irenaeus, our two earliest sources, are independent of one another. Yet these witnesses have been subject to an unceasing barrage of objections. It is to answering these objections that we now turn.

Papias is our earliest witness to the authorship of the gospels, and consequently, it is not surprising that skeptics have lobbed the most objections to his testimony. One common objection says that Papias is not referring to the books that we know by Matthew and Mark at all. Bart Ehrman explains, "When Papias talks about a gospel written by Mark and another by Matthew, is he actually talking about the gospels that we know about by these names? In fact, what Papias says about the two books, Matthew and Mark, suggests he is referring to books different from the ones we have. That is easy to show with Matthew: Papias says only two things about the Matthew he is familiar with: it consists only of sayings of Jesus and it was composed in Hebrew. Neither is true of our Matthew. Elsewhere, Ehrman contends, 'It is worth noting that the two pieces of solid information that Papias gives us about Matthew are not true of our Matthew. Our Matthew is not just a collection of Jesus's sayings, and the gospel is certainly written in Greek, not Hebrew.' So, has Papias simply gotten his information wrong, or is he talking about some other book written by Matthew, for example, a collection of Jesus's sayings that we no longer possess?"

In a similar vein, Randall Helms objects, "But the Gospel of Matthew is written in Greek, nor is Matthew just logia [sayings]. Whatever Papias means, it is not the Gospel of Matthew." Finally, Richard Carrier objects, "Papias then says that Matthew composed his gospel in Hebrew and then translated various times into Greek. But that also can't be true because Matthew copies extensively from Mark's Greek, frequently verbatim, and thus can't possibly have been composed in Hebrew. It's clear that Papias had no idea what he was talking about and had no reliable sources of information about the first century of Christianity." We have then two straightforward objections to the idea that Papias is referring to the canonical.

The Gospel of Matthew, in the first place, he says that it was written in Hebrew rather than Greek. And he also refers to it by using the term *logia*, or sayings, which implies that there is no narrative. But since canonical Matthew is both written in Greek and clearly contains narrative, it follows that Papias must be talking about some other text, or must simply be wrong.

We may begin our response to the claim that Papias says that Matthew is written in Hebrew by reviewing something which I brought up in my third video on the synoptic problem. There, I pointed out that this term from Papias, commonly translated as "Hebrew language," can just as easily mean "Hebrew dialect." Notably, Papias does not include a definite article before the term. And as scholars such as Robert Gundry and Bernard Orchard have argued, the context plausibly favors this alternative translation.

This is all just to point out that things are not as clear-cut as Ehrman and Helms make them out to be. Papias may not, in fact, be saying that Matthew was written in Hebrew after all. Helms, at least, shows knowledge of Gundry's argument but makes no attempt to engage with it. With all that being said, it has to be admitted that this is merely a possible translation of Papias.

But what if Papias is saying that Matthew was composed in the Hebrew language? If he was, then clearly he is not referencing the canonical Gospel of Matthew. However, it does not follow from this that Papias's statement is evidentially worthless. For Papias also states that "everyone interpreted or translated Matthew as best they could." Plausibly, our canonical Gospel of Matthew would have been one such translation. And some explanation will still need to be given for how our canonical Matthew came to be attributed to Matthew the tax collector.

The answer seems all too obvious: the canonical Gospel of Matthew was attributed to Matthew because he himself was the one who translated it, or at the very least, was responsible for the translation. As Martin Moss contends, "the assumption that it was Matthew who revised his own work follows simply from the observation that the early church knew of no other author. Most naturally, and in default of information to the contrary, we would expect a man to revise his own work and to introduce an unknown redactor without evidence and for no good reason when a simpler solution is at hand is to breach Occam's razor."

And what about Papias's use of the term *logia*, or oracles? Does this indicate that he thought that Matthew was nothing more than a collection of sayings, absent any narrative? The idea that *logia* can only refer to sayings is certainly wrong. For Papias likewise uses the term in reference to Mark's gospel in the very same passage, claiming that "Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord's *logia*."

Notice how in this quotation, *logia* is used as a synonym not only for what Jesus had said but also for what Jesus had done. So, Papias uses the term *logia* to mean more than just sayings. As Richard Balcom argues, "the context in these statements about Mark strongly suggests that *logia* means not sayings of the Lord, but something like short reports of what the Lord said and did. This is because the *logia* of the Lord must be parallel to the earlier phrase 'the things either said or done by the Lord.'" In addition to this, both Irenaeus and Origen refer to the gospels as oracles in their writings, which makes clear that the term was used as a synonym for gospels by early Christians.

In a final point worth noting is that Eusebius himself, who preserves these quotations from Papias for us and had access to the full context of Papias's statements, clearly interpreted Papias as talking about the gospels of Matthew and Mark when he used the term *logia*. All in all, there are just no good reasons for thinking that Papias is not referring to the Gospel of Matthew just because he uses the term *logia*.

But Ehrman isn't prepared to stop at the Gospel of Matthew. He thinks that Papias is not referencing the canonical Gospel of Mark either. He says, "One of the points that Papias emphatically makes is certainly wrong. He claims that one of Mark's two primary goals was to tell everything that he had heard from Peter about Jesus. There is simply no way that can be true. The Gospel of Mark takes about two hours to read out loud. After Peter had spent all those months or years with Jesus and Mark listened to Peter preach about Jesus day and night, are we really to imagine that all Mark heard was two hours' worth of information?"

Irma is probably misunderstanding Papias here. It is more likely that Papias is saying that Mark wrote down everything that Peter remembered, as opposed to saying that Mark wrote down everything that he himself remembered. As Richard Bockham argues, "I have also suggested that the subject of both of these verbs of remembering (recalled from memory and related from memory) may be Peter, but this is debatable. Many scholars have thought that the person remembering is Mark. Grammatically, either reading is possible. If the subject is not Peter, then this sentence fails actually to convey what Papias clearly intended: that it was Peter's teaching that Mark wrote down. This is much better conveyed by saying that Mark wrote what Peter remembered, rather than that Mark wrote what he remembered Peter saying."

Now, Ehrman can still reply that this reading just pushes his objection back a step. "Are we really to believe that Peter remembered nothing more than is contained in the Gospel of Mark?" Here, it will be helpful to remind Ehrman that we do not possess the full context of Papias's quotation. Is Papias intending to say that Mark contains everything that Peter ever remembered about Jesus, or is he saying that Mark wrote down everything that Peter remembered on a particular occasion? The section from Papias preserved by Eusebius cannot tell us one way or another.

However, Eusebius also records a statement from Clement of Alexandria, which reports more details about the origin of the Gospel of Mark. Clement tells us that Mark was a written version of one of Peter's sermons in Rome. Moreover, many scholars believe that Clement is dependent upon Papias here. If that is right, then this sheds considerable light on what Papias means when he says that Mark wrote down "everything that Peter remembered." He means that Mark wrote down everything that Peter remembered in this particular sermon. Thus, by taking into account what both Papias and Clement report about the origin of Mark, we can see that Ehrman's objection is based upon a misunderstanding of Papias.

Richard Carrier makes a different sort of objection to the idea that Mark was writing for Peter, saying, "Papias says that Mark became Peter's secretary and faithfully recorded his teachings, but that can't be true because Peter was a Torah-observant Christian and Mark's gospel advocates against that and in favor of Pauline Christianity. That Peter and Paul were at odds on this point is clear throughout Galatians 2."

Even if Carrier is right that Peter had been a Torah-observant Christian at the time that Paul wrote Galatians (sometime in the late 40s or early 50s A.D.), this leaves open the possibility that Peter changed his perspective at a later point in time and came around to see things from Paul's perspective by the time Mark wrote his gospel (sometime in the 60s or 70s A.D.). But more fundamentally, Carrier seems to have misunderstood the actual conflict between Peter and Paul described in Galatians 2. Paul does not suggest that Peter was observing the Torah; rather, he says that he had confronted Peter over his inconsistent behavior regarding when he would eat with Gentiles and when he would not. Indeed, in verse 14, Paul pretty much states that Peter was not actually observing the Torah in his own life, but only hypocritically made himself appear to be for fear of the Jews. He writes, "I said to Cephas [or Peter] in the presence of all, 'If you, being a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?'" So, Carrier is not accurately representing the dispute between Peter and Paul. Once it is properly understood, it is clear that it presents no difficulty to the idea that Peter was Mark's source. Consequently, there is no objection to Papias's reliability.

The skeptics are not finished lobbing objections at Papias, however, for they also maintain that Papias's sources are questionable and too far removed to be trusted. For example, Carrier objects that "Papias also said he rejected what books said and instead relied only on hearsay because he considered that to be more reliable. He was thus clearly the least reliable sort of source we could possibly want."

The statement to which Carrier is referring is from *Ecclesiastical History* 3.39.4, where Eusebius quotes from the introduction of Papias's writings. There, Papias is recorded as saying, "For I did not think that information from the books would profit me as much as information from a living and surviving voice." So, we can pretty clearly see that Carrier has mischaracterized what Papias actually said. Papias did not say that he rejected written sources. Indeed, we know from other fragments of Papias that he did use written sources, since he periodically quotes them. All that Papias claims here is that he has a preference for living voices. Nor does Papias state that he exclusively depended upon hearsay, as Carrier claims.

Papias goes on to explain what he means by a "living and surviving voice" in the very same passage, saying, "If then anyone came who had been a follower of the elders, I questioned him in regard to the words of the elders: what Andrew, or what Peter said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the disciples of the Lord; and what things Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say." This is not mere hearsay, which Papias describes. It is testimony from those who had heard the words of Jesus's immediate followers.

But what about Papias's source with regard to the authorship of the gospels? How trustworthy is this Elder John from whom he claims to have obtained this information? Bart Ehrman is more than a little pessimistic, claiming, "Papias is not himself an eyewitness to Jesus's life and does not know eyewitnesses." Randall Helms agrees, saying, "Note the third-hand nature of this information: a presbyter believed that Mark wrote down Peter's memories, a notion that Papias recorded in Eusebius, copied in his writings."

Is this really third-hand information? Though true, it comes to us through Eusebius. But we know that Eusebius, despite his biases, still copies his sources accurately. We can independently verify his citations in the case of Irenaeus, for example, and they are accurate. Moreover, as we shall see shortly, Eusebius creates difficulties for himself by preserving these words from Papias when he tries to distance Papias from John the Apostle. If Eusebius felt free to play fast and loose with his citations, he could have easily modified Papias's words here to make his job much less difficult, but he doesn't. As for Papias, his citations of scripture are accurate whenever we can check them. So, both Papias and Eusebius seem to have a good track record. When they relay information, they do so accurately. Thus, even if the information is strictly speaking third-hand information, this need not worry us, because we can independently verify that the latter two links are reliable transmitters of information.

And what of this Elder John? Do we have any reason to suppose that he knew what he was talking about? Until the time of Eusebius, everyone believed that this elder was in fact John the Apostle. This is clear, for example, in Irenaeus, who says of Papias that "he was a hearer of John and a friend of Polycarp." Eusebius was well aware of this statement by Irenaeus. However, Eusebius disagreed with Irenaeus on this point, and his reason for doing so is pretty blatant: Papias believed in a literal millennium, whereas Eusebius did not. If Papias had been a hearer and disciple of John, this would lend considerable apostolic credibility to Papias's views on the millennium, and Eusebius was highly motivated to remove that sort of credibility from Papias.

Monte Shanks explains, "12 different fragments from 10 different authors claimed that Papias had to some degree personally known the Apostle John. It is recognized that some of these authors depended upon others for their knowledge of Papias's connection to the Apostle. Nevertheless, some of the more credible witnesses of the Apostle John's mentoring of Papias are Irenaeus, Eusebius, Jerome, and Anastasius of Sinai. The only person that questioned Papias's association with the Apostle was Eusebius, who later in his life unashamedly and unjustifiably displayed gross prejudice towards Papias."

Eusebius sets himself to debunking the idea that Papias had any connection to John the Apostle. In *Ecclesiastical History* 3.39.4, he does this by attempting to draw a distinction between John the Apostle and John the Elder. His first argument comes from Papias's own words. Eusebius claims that Papias denies having ever heard the apostles himself. He cites the following passage from Papias as proof: "But I shall not hesitate also to put down for you along with my interpretations whatsoever things I have at any time learned carefully from the elders and carefully remembered, guaranteeing their truth. For I did not, like the multitude, take pleasure in those that speak much, but in those that teach the truth; not in those that relate strange commandments, but in those that deliver the commandments given by the Lord to faith, and springing from the truth itself. If then anyone came who had been a follower of the elders, I questioned him in regard to the words of the elders: Andrew, or what Peter said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the disciples of the Lord; and what things Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say. For I did not think that what was to be gotten from the books would profit me as much as what came from the living and abiding voice."

Unfortunately for Eusebius, nothing which Papias says here precludes him from having been a hearer of the Apostles themselves. In this passage, he does indeed state that he had heard from those who had heard the apostles, but this is compatible with Papias also having heard the apostles. Stuart Petry rightly concludes, "Papias says neither that he was a hear and eyewitness of the Apostles nor that he was not. He simply does not in the passage quoted mention the matter. Consequently, there is nothing to justify the careless confidence with which Eusebius contradicts Irenaeus." It is fair to assume that if Eusebius had been able to produce a more positive declaration from Papias, he certainly would have done so.

More interestingly still, the quotation which Eusebius cites plausibly works against his intended point. In this quotation, Papias uses the word *presbyter* or "elder" to refer to Andrew, Peter, Philip, James, John, and Matthew, and in the same sentence, he identifies them all as disciples. Immediately afterwards, in the very next sentence, he uses the same word again, *presbyter* or "elder," to refer to John, who he then also calls a disciple. So, it seems clear that Papias uses the terms interchangeably. Far from proving Eusebius's point, this quotation from Papias supplies strong evidence that Papias doesn't intend to call John an apostle when he calls him an elder.

Bernard Orchard sums this up rather well: "Eusebius finds it very significant that Papias lists John in the second instance outside the number of Apostles, putting Aristion, who is not one of the twelve, before him and clearly calling this John a presbyter. But there is no force in this argument, since he has already referred to the other Apostles as presbyters. Furthermore, he has just called the other Apostles the disciples of the Lord. This second John is therefore doubly identified as both presbyter and disciple of the Lord; that is to say, he is identified by two terms that equally apply to Saint John the Apostle."

Eusebius finds it very significant that John is mentioned twice: once with the other Apostles, and then again next to Aristion. This, he thinks, implies that there must have been two Johns. But Papias uses the past tense when referring to the other disciples, indicating that they had passed away. He uses the present tense when referring to John and Aristion, indicating that John was still alive in his day. Papias almost certainly mentions John again in the second clause because he wants to emphasize that he was still alive. This makes perfect sense of Papias's statements and it avoids the gratuitous assumption that there were two Johns.

Eusebius's only other argument is that there are two tombs in Ephesus where someone named John is said to be buried, which, in his opinion, means that there must have been two people named John: John the Apostle and John the Elder. But this pretty clearly does nothing to indicate that Papias was intending to distinguish between an Apostle John and an Elder John. At best, it would establish that there was some confusion over where John the Apostle was buried. Orchard concludes, "There were two tombs of John in Ephesus. All commentators agree that even if there was any archaeological evidence for two tombs (which there is not), their existence would be no proper argument for there being two Johns."

In conclusion, there is good reason to suppose that the Elder John mentioned by Papias is none other than John the Apostle, and no good reason to think otherwise. Eusebius's skepticism on this point is contrary to all of the earlier evidence and was just clearly ideologically motivated by theological disagreements with Papias. Martin Moss sums the matter up very well, saying, "The presbyter John is called the disciple because he was a disciple. His knowledge of Jesus was so intimate because he was the one whom Jesus loved. The writings were attributed to him because he wrote them. The second John is merely an entity multiplied beyond what is necessary." I conclude that the early church's near-unanimous belief that there was one and not two eminent Johns in the period in question is vindicated. It is to the Apostle John, therefore, that we must attribute Papias's dictum about Matthew and the parallel one about Mark reported in Eusebius three sentences before it.

On a related note, skeptics have made much out of Eusebius's own comments about Papias's reliability. Ehrman objects, "Later church fathers who talk about Papias and his book are not overly enthusiastic. The father of church history, the 4th-century Eusebius of Caesarea, indicates that in his opinion Papias was a man of exceedingly small intelligence." Similarly, Carrier says, "From the quotations we have, we can tell that Papias was a very gullible fellow, much so that even Eusebius called him a man of very little intelligence."

But as we have already seen, Eusebius's low estimation of Papias's intelligence had very little to do with the quality of Papias's writing and everything to do with theological disagreements between Papias and himself. As such, the fact that Eusebius regarded Papias as a man of low intelligence tells us more about the bias of Eusebius than it does the credibility of Papias. It is noteworthy that despite his low estimation of Papias's intelligence, Eusebius nevertheless regarded him as credible enough to be a reliable source when it came to the origins of the gospels, since by his own admission, Papias was one of his primary sources for this information. Shanks correctly points out, "Eusebius's statement that Papias influenced many others is a tacit admission concerning Papias's intelligence and literary capacity. Eusebius's admission argues that Papias was not so incompetent that he was incapable of significantly influencing future leaders of the church in the generations that followed."

Perhaps the most serious objection to Papias's witness to the authorship of the gospels is that "he is just known to be incredibly unreliable elsewhere." Bart Ehrman explains, "There is, though, still a further and even more compelling reason for doubting that we can trust Papias on the authorship of the Gospels: it is that we really cannot trust him on much of anything." Ehrman goes on to cite the following passage, preserved in Apollinaris of Laodicea and allegedly from Papias, as evidence for his unreliability: "Judas walked about in this world as a weighty example of impiety. He was so inflamed in the flesh that he could not pass where a wagon could easily pass. In fact, not even the bulk of his head alone could pass, for they say that the lids of his eyes were so swollen that neither could he see any light at all, nor could a doctor, aided by instruments, see his eyes, such was their depth from the outer surface of his body. His genitals appeared to be more nauseating and enlarged than any other genitalia, and he passed through them pus and even worms that converged from throughout his body, causing an outrage on account of a simple necessity of life. After many tortures and punishments, they say he died in his own land. His land remains until now desolate and uninhabited on account of the stench, even to this day no one can travel through that place without holding their nose, so great was the judgment that spread through his flesh upon the earth."

Ehrman goes on to drive his point home, saying, "Does anyone think that Judas really bloated up larger than a house, emitting worms from his genitals, and then burst on his own land, creating a stench that lasted a century? No, not really. But it's one of the two gospel traditions that Papias narrates." Ehrman goes on to cite another example from Papias, preserved through Irenaeus, to demonstrate Papias's unreliability: "The Lord taught in regard to those times and said, 'The days will come in which a vine shall grow, having each ten thousand branches, and in each branch ten thousand twigs, and in each twig ten thousand shoots, and in every one of the shoots ten thousand clusters, and on every one of the Clusters ten thousand grapes, and every grape when pressed will give five and twenty measures of wine. And when any one of the Saints shall lay hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, "I am a better cluster; take me, bless the Lord through me." In like manner, he said that a grain of wheat should produce ten thousand ears, and that every ear would have ten thousand grains, and every grain would yield ten pounds of clear, pure, fine flour, and that apples and seeds and grass would produce in similar proportions, and that all animals feeding then only on the productions of the earth would become peaceable and harmonious and be in perfect subjection to man.'"

From this passage, Ehrman argues, "Really, Jesus taught that? Does anyone really think so? No one I know. But does Papias think that Jesus said this? Yes, he absolutely does. The only traditions about Jesus we have from his pen are clearly not accurate. Why should we think that what he says about Matthew and Mark are accurate?" Richard Carrier makes similar points, saying, "As expected, the things which Papias tells us are ridiculous. For instance, one excerpt we have tells us this absurd story about Judas. Papias also said that Jesus promised us vast clusters of gigantic grapes and other nonsense. Clearly, the legends and fabricated sayings had gotten out of hand by the time Papias wrote, and he just believed whatever he chanced to hear. Does Papias come anywhere near to telling us anything useful? Not really."

Given that this is probably the most popular as well as the most serious objection to Papias's testimony to the authorship of the gospels, I will devote a significant amount of space to answering it. I will begin by assessing the remarks about Judas before moving on to assess the teaching about grapes and vines which is attributed to Jesus.

Regarding Judas, the defender of Papias can make several points by way of response. In the first place, this record of the death of Judas attributed to Papias is quoted twice by Apollinaris of Laodicea, but what Ehrman and Carrier fail to mention is that it reads significantly differently in those two places. Skeptics, of course, prefer the lengthier, more exaggerated version because it allows them to more easily discredit Papias. But in another place, Apollinaris quotes the same passage from Papias, but it only reads as saying, "Judas lived his career in this world as an enormous example of impiety. He was so swollen in the flesh that he could not pass where a wagon could easily pass. Having been crushed by a wagon, his entrails poured out." While the similarities between both quotations are unmistakable, there is a pretty clear discrepancy in the longer quotation, Judas is only compared to a wagon and seemingly killed by worms, but in the shorter quotation, he is killed by a wagon. So the question arises, which version is more true to Papias? It is, after all, much easier to see Apollinaris as substantially exaggerating what Papias said in a longer quotation than it is to see him deliberately toning down what Papias said in the shorter quotation. In short, it's unclear how much of this tradition actually goes back to Papias himself. Things are not quite as neat and clean as skeptics like Ehrman and Carrier make them out to be.

As Monte Shanks observes, "The fact that this fragment was assimilated from a collection of quotes from Theophilus as he interacted with Apollinaris's quotes of Papias makes it difficult to regard either of the above conjectures as accurate reflections of what Papias actually wrote."

The second point to raise is that we, as modern readers, do not have the context of this quotation from Papias. Papias might have been trying to harmonize a local urban legend with the record of Judas's death in the New Testament. For all we know, we do not really know that he is reporting this as a historical fact in the way that Ehrman and Carrier assume that he is. Perhaps he is, but then again, perhaps he is not.

As a third point, we must not overlook the possibility that Papias may be engaging in a type of ancient rhetorical exaggeration known as *ekphrasis*, which would have instantly been recognized as such by his original readers. As Christopher B. Zeikman argues, Athenaeus's lessons on the topic confirm that Papias's death of Judas is an *ekphrasis*. Though writing after Papias, his handbook offers the most comprehensive delineation of the perfect *ekphrasis*. He declares that "when making an *ekphrasis* of persons, one should go from first things to last, that is, from head to feet, and in describing things, say what preceded them, what is in them, and what is want to result." Papias does precisely this. His description of Judas's body begins at the head and works its way down, while simultaneously writing with linear chronology. Papias's central concern in this passage was the description of Judas immediately before his death, but he also narrated events before his disease struck and after his death. To sum that up, we don't really know what Papias was trying to say in this fragment, nor do we know how much of it is genuine to him. But in any case, it is far from clear that this is a straightforward case of Papias being unreliable. As such, it is very tenuous for skeptics to make this passage the cornerstone of their objection to the reliability of Papias. Shanks reminds us, "There is little agreement on the exact content and meaning of this fragment, let alone its original context. Without further Papias material, certitude is not possible. Consequently, while data found in this fragment is interesting, it is one of the least credible Papias fragments."

Turning now to the words ascribed to Jesus by Papias, it is critical to observe from the outset that Papias is by no means the only person to have attributed this to Jesus. Irenaeus has multiple other sources besides Papias. As Richard Balcom points out, "we must begin by investigating the sources from which Irenaeus drew this material because, as we shall see, Papias was not the only source. Irenaeus introduces his quotation of Jesus's saying by attributing it to the elders." Some scholars have argued that Irenaeus is here identifying Papias as the source from which he has taken the tradition of the elders, but several considerations rule this out. In the first place, Irenaeus says quite clearly that Papias is an additional witness to the saying he has just quoted from the elders. "Papias bore witness in writing, whereas the elders reported orally what John had said." The distinction need not mean that Irenaeus knew the tradition of the elders only as an oral tradition, though this is possible. He could have known it in a written source, but the contrast with Papias would be that the elders themselves did not write the tradition down, whereas Papias did so. So, Irenaeus first quotes from the elders, then introduces Papias as an additional witness to the same saying of Jesus.

Balcom goes on to point out that these words are also attributed to Jesus in the writings of Hippolytus, so the idea that Jesus said this seems to have been quite widespread among early Christians. I am of the somewhat controversial opinion that because this saying seems to be independently attested by so many early witnesses, it may indeed be an authentic saying of Jesus. While Jesus is obviously speaking in metaphors here, there is absolutely nothing theologically objectionable in his words from an Orthodox Christian perspective. And if the gospels are giving us anything like an accurate picture of Jesus, it would not be at all out of character for Jesus to speak using these kinds of metaphors. There are no real problems which arise for the Christian in accepting that Jesus really said this. Note that I am not saying that Christians necessarily ought to adopt this as an authentic teaching of Jesus; I'm simply pointing out that there is much more evidence for this teaching than Papias's testimony alone, and that there are no real theological difficulties involved in doing so. Once we recognize that Jesus is not speaking literally, then everything that I have said about these two problematic passages and Papias aside for a moment.

Let us suppose that Ehrman and Carrier are right, that Papias is just transmitting outright falsehoods as matters of fact in these passages. Does this undercut the credibility of what he tells us about the authorship of the gospels? I think that it does not. Whatever else we may make of these problematic passages, it is clear that, as is the case with his testimony bearing on the gospels, Papias is merely passing on an earlier tradition. Papias is the conduit which conveys these pieces of information to us, but he is not the source of any of them. Thus, even if the source of the story about Judas is completely unreliable, this does not automatically make John the Elder, who is Papias's source of information about the authors of the gospels, unreliable as well. The trustworthiness of the information from a source is not and cannot be determined by the conduit which brings that information to us. As Charles Hill rightly concludes, "There is no reason to doubt that Papias is a faithful reporter of what he heard and memorized, though there may be very good reason to doubt the historical factuality of much of what he reported. His report should not be treated as automatically true, but neither is it automatically legendary. They are early testimonies to what was known or believed at that time, no matter how much actual truth they contained."

Moving now from objections to Papias in particular into objections to the reliability of the patristic tradition as a whole, there is an often-repeated objection to the reliability of the patristics based upon the generally accepted priority of Mark's gospel. There are actually two objections here. The first objects that the witnesses to the traditional authorship of the gospels are unreliable because they all claim that Matthew was written first, even though most scholars now accept that Mark was first. The defender of the traditional authorship of the gospels may, of course, challenge the assumption that Mark really was written first. As Martin Moss points out, "supposition is not evidence. The presupposition of a certain solution to the synoptic problem cannot be used as evidence for it without circularity." In my four-part series on the synoptic problem, I argued in detail that the arguments for Markan priority are poor and that there is indeed compelling evidence that Matthew was the first gospel to have been written. I thus refer the viewer to that series to see my extended answer to this argument.

The second objection concerns why Matthew should have used Mark, as the theory of Markan priority demands that he did, since Matthew was an eyewitness and Mark was not. "Why would a first-hand account need to depend upon a secondhand account?" Michael contends that "the theory that Matthew was the Evangelist is hard to square with the standard solution to the synoptic problem, namely Mark and priority. It seems incredible that Matthew, an apostle and eyewitness of Jesus, would have relied so heavily on a biography of his teacher penned by a non-apostle and non-eyewitness." Dale Allison likewise asks, "Would an apostle who accompanied Jesus have used so little of his own reminiscence, but rather have followed Mark so closely?"

Again, I reiterate that there are no sound reasons for thinking that Matthew's gospel is dependent upon Mark's gospel. But let's put this aside, and for the sake of argument, and for the sake of making the thesis of traditional authorship acceptable to a wider group of people, let's assume that Markan priority is true. Let's assume that Matthew really did use Mark's gospel as a source. If church tradition is right about Peter being the ultimate source behind Mark's gospel, there is immediately a clear reason for Matthew to have used Mark. Mark was the authoritative account of one of Jesus's closest followers. Peter was privy to information which Matthew was not. So, it is not inconceivable that Matthew should have used Mark. As John Wenham says, "It is conceivable that Matthew the Apostle could have taken Mark as his starting point, adding fresh material and weaving into it his special emphases. This is the more credible if Matthew had recognized that Mark's gospel had the authority of Peter behind it."

Moss makes the same point as Wenham, but with a little more flair, saying, "Matthew's close adherence to the narrative of Mark presents no mystery. Knowing as he did that Mark had been essentially reporting the teaching of Peter, he made it his business to pay homage to the recorded words of the senior Apostle whenever he had no good reason to do otherwise. What else would we expect from a man whose whole career had meant deferring to a higher authority? The problem of Matthew copying Mark only arises when we reject the evidence of the early Fathers as to the source of Mark."

This video has critiqued the idea that the gospels were originally anonymous. We have surveyed three distinct lines of evidence which challenge the anonymity thesis. First, we have seen that the surviving manuscripts of the gospels always have the same titles, which suggests that they always had had these titles. We have seen that the internal evidence is consonant with the traditional attributions of authorship, and we have seen that there is early and weighty external testimony which unanimously attributes the four gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Furthermore, we have taken on the challenges to the reliability of this historical testimony from leading skeptics and found them to be wanting. The evidence is clear: the gospels were attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because these individuals actually wrote them. And I will close with the eloquent words of Martin Moss: "Discrediting the early fathers simply raises the unanswered, and indeed usually unasked, question: How did they all come to be so wrong? In an age when martyrdom was an abiding risk, one would surely have expected the fathers to have made very certain of the historical traditions to whose origins they had readier access than we do, and for belief in which they were prepared to offer their own lives, expecting their families and descendants to do the same. There will have been the strongest possible motivation to verify the facts and traditions of their faith from the earliest and most reliable witnesses, much rather so indeed than that which rests upon us from our detached viewpoint today. Hence the arbitrary dismissal of the patristic witness raises considerable problems of human psychology and behavior, not to mention historical method, which if ignored leave the problem seriously open-ended."

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