Who wrote the Gospels?

No canonical Gospel contains a sentence in which its writer gives a name. Luke opens by addressing "most excellent Theophilus" and explaining a method, and says nothing about who is doing the explaining. John ends by saying that a disciple "testifies about these things, and wrote these things", and does not name him.

That need not be a concealment. The writers appear to have expected their readers to know where the book had come from.

Around 180, Irenaeus names all four and links each to a person: Matthew writing among Hebrews, Mark setting down what Peter preached, Luke recording the gospel Paul preached, John publishing at Ephesus. In the next century Origen, quoted by Eusebius, calls the four "the only indisputable ones in the Church of God under heaven" and gives their writers, in the order still used, as what he has "learned by tradition".

So the attributions are early enough to be interesting and late enough to be questioned. On the dates Hengel gave the first three, 69 to 100, they are in place within roughly a century of the books being written.

Papias, writing in the first half of the second century, is quoted by Eusebius passing on what "the presbyter" said: 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". Of Matthew he says only that he "wrote the oracles in the Hebrew language, and every one interpreted them as he was able".

Papias' own book is lost. The two notes survive in Eusebius, quoted two centuries later, in a chapter where Eusebius also makes clear what he thinks of Papias' intelligence.

The note about Mark is either the earliest good evidence for who wrote a Gospel or a second-century report whose sources cannot be traced, and scholars hold both views. It reaches us through Eusebius, from a book nobody has seen since antiquity, by a writer Eusebius found unimpressive, who was passing on what an elder had said.

The Matthew note is harder still. The Gospel of Matthew as it stands is Greek, and reads as Greek rather than as translation, and on the view most scholars hold it uses Mark, which is also Greek. Whatever Papias meant by oracles in Hebrew, it does not straightforwardly describe the book that now carries the name.

One line of argument, made at length by Hengel, holds that the titles are early rather than added, and that the attributions to Matthew, Mark and Luke are unlikely to be inventions anyway. If you were assigning authority to a Gospel you had no name for, Peter and Paul were available, and two of the four went instead to an interpreter and a travelling companion.

The other line is the majority view, at least for Matthew, where the modern consensus is that the disciple did not write the Gospel that carries his name. It notes that the titles survive only in manuscripts a good deal later than the books. One of the oldest, an inscription that probably headed Matthew, is dated to the late second or early third century, and in the copy of John that may carry the earliest Gospel title of all the title was added by a later hand, though, Allen judges, not much later. It notes too that Luke describes himself as working from what others handed down rather than from having been there, and that a community reading a book for decades will eventually need to say whose it is.

Neither argument settles it. Gregory, reviewing Hengel, found his reconstructions "always possible and often plausible" but rarely the only reading of the evidence, and Sim, arguing the other way, grants that none of this shows the tradition is wrong, only that its reliability "cannot be taken for granted". The names stay in use either way, on this page too, as labels for the texts.

Luke says outright that many had already undertaken accounts before he began. He names none of them. Several of the proposed solutions to how the first three Gospels relate make Mark or Matthew one of Luke’s sources, and Q, the sayings source others propose, is a hypothesis rather than a surviving text. Beyond that, one study of the problem judges it "highly unlikely that we can accurately reconstruct the actual compositional processes of the Gospels".

The Catholic Church teaches that the four Gospels are of apostolic origin: what the apostles preached, "they themselves and apostolic men" handed on in writing, under the inspiration of the Spirit. The Westminster Confession, a Reformed confession, rests the authority of scripture "not upon the testimony of any man, or church" but on God as its author.