How could the early Christian community honor the Gospels as authoritative unless they knew who had written them? Even granting such a late date as some critics surmise, it is doubtful that the Gospels could have gotten anywhere unless they were certainly attributable to someone who was recognized as knowing what they were writing about. On the other hand, I must say that some critics assume a high degree of gullibility in the first-century church.
To this end, Hengel [CarMoo.Int, 66] has argued that the Gospels must have received their titles immediately - not in the second century. For an anonymous author to have penned a Gospel, and have it accepted as from the hand of one of the Quartet or any authoritative person, would have required them to first produce the Gospel, then present it as the work of another; they would have to concoct some story as to how it came peculiarly to be in their possession; get around the problem of why a work by such a person disappeared or was previously unknown; then get the church at large, first in his area and then throughout the Roman Empire (and would not the claimed discovery of such a document cause a sensation, and controversy?), to accept this work as genuine.
Can any critic explain how these logistic difficulties were overcome? I have noted that they do well in offering generalities, but never get down to the specifics of how Joe Gentile could have managed to pull off such a hoax on the church as a whole. Is there any parallel to this in secular history, where an enormous group at large was bamboozled by (and continued to be bamboozled by) not just one forgery, but four, attributed in a couple of cases to members of an inner circle, in widely separated places and times?
I'll add that under the "Q/Marcan priority" hypothesis, how is it they suppose that "Matthew" and "Luke" would choose to use an anonymous document as a source? Mark could not be recognized as authoritative until it was known what source it came from; yet if the critics are right, "Mark" was considered authoritative enough to use not by just one, but by two others working independently of one another. (One way around this scenario is to hypothesize Christian "prophets" through whom these works might have been received and recognized; for a response to this, see below.)
At the beginning of the second century, there would have been first-generation Christians alive who recalled the apostles and their teaching, and many more second-generation Christians who would have had information passed directly to them.
We have early witnesses to the authorship of some of the Gospels. Papias wrote around 110-130, and he surely did not design the authorship of Matthew and Mark on the spur of the moment. That being so, how could anyone have dared to attribute the Gospels to anyone other than the genuine authors with these first- and second-generation witnesses still alive? Believers in the 70s-90s, when critics suppose that the Gospels were authored anonymously, would have known of no works of Matthew and the others; believers after the 90s who descended from this generation and lived into the lifetime of Papias would have had no tradition of such documents.
Interesting perspective. The all pervasive attempts by the RCC to keep the doubt out there in order to retain the control is insidious. The RCC needs to take credit away from the Holy Spirit to retain it’s earthly kingdom.
LOL, nearly unable to stop, actually.
So, we have here a protestant arguing the case that those who were closer to the life of Jesus would know better than those separated by many years.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
You have just made the case for the Church regarding the writings of the early fathers. The case for the fact that those fathers knew an Apostle and studied and because Christian with an Apostle.
And you have just made the case for Apostolic succession and why it is important to trace the lineage back through the generations.
You have also made my case that protestants do not read or consider what is written to them, it is all knew jerk reaction of readied pat responses.
Why do I say this?
I Never said anything about discounting the reliability and authority of the Bible. I said the Bible does not say within itself who those authors are and that by accepting who the early church claims they are, one is relying on Tradition.
That God exists and the Bible is His word, is a matter of faith and without that faith, one reading the Bible is lost.
So, my statement is true.
We accept the Bible on faith and tradition.