"Basically, what modern scholars believe is that all four of these gospels were anonymously published. They don't tell us who their author is. Notice, they're not pseudonymous. There's a difference between pseudonymous writings — easy for me to say — and anonymous. Anonymous means we don't know who wrote it. It's published without an author's name being listed. Pseudonymous means it's published with a false name, a false author attributed. The four gospels are not pseudonymous because the earliest manuscripts of these gospels, we believe, did not contain the titles, "Gospel of Matthew, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Luke, Gospel of John." They just published the text as it was. If it ever did have an author's name attached to it, we don't have any evidence in the manuscript history. Nor do we have any evidence in any other historical place. What happened was, these names got attached to these documents. And that's, eventually, how they got included into the canon. People thought that these documents eventually were written by the people whose names that they possess. And therefore, they thought they had some kind of connection to the apostles.
(...)
The problem was we can tell historically that these texts were not written by apostles. Nor do we believe they were written even by the close disciples of apostles. They're anonymous texts. So if that was the reason they were included in the ancient world, it's not the reason they're still in now, because modern scholars don't believe the apostles actually wrote all of these texts in the New Testament.
(...)
People tended to want to include the documents that matched their own theology. In other words, you believed something was apostolic if it taught stuff you believed. So, of course, documents that did teach that the creator God was an evil demonic god and not the father of Jesus Christ — and there are early Christian documents that teach this — they were excluded. Why were they excluded? Well, some of them claimed to be by apostles. Nobody exactly knew how old they were. They were excluded because they taught a doctrine that other Christians thought was heretical and not accurate.
(...)
Yeah, most of the stuff that we'll say has a wrong name attached in the New Testament is not anonymous, although there are some. It's pseudonymous. But there are some that are anonymous, too. The gospels we say are anonymous, because they didn't come attached with a name, as far as we know. How did those names get attached? By different people — partly it was because they wanted this text to be authoritative in some way, and so they tended to attach the name of a particular apostle to them or a particular disciple. Or in some ways, for example, the Gospel of Luke may have gotten its name Luke, because in the Acts of the Apostles, which is also written by the same author, Luke is an actual character who follows Paul around. So it may have been that the name Luke and the Acts of the Apostles got connected with the acts of the apostles, and the Gospel of Luke as its author. So sometimes, it's something in the text itself that may have prompted someone to think that. Often, we just don't know how it got it, and it just happened because somebody just said, "It's authoritative. It must've been written by an apostle."."
© Dale B. Martin
Yale Lectures on Introduction to the New Testament History and Literature
[link]
(...)
The problem was we can tell historically that these texts were not written by apostles. Nor do we believe they were written even by the close disciples of apostles. They're anonymous texts. So if that was the reason they were included in the ancient world, it's not the reason they're still in now, because modern scholars don't believe the apostles actually wrote all of these texts in the New Testament.
(...)
People tended to want to include the documents that matched their own theology. In other words, you believed something was apostolic if it taught stuff you believed. So, of course, documents that did teach that the creator God was an evil demonic god and not the father of Jesus Christ — and there are early Christian documents that teach this — they were excluded. Why were they excluded? Well, some of them claimed to be by apostles. Nobody exactly knew how old they were. They were excluded because they taught a doctrine that other Christians thought was heretical and not accurate.
(...)
Yeah, most of the stuff that we'll say has a wrong name attached in the New Testament is not anonymous, although there are some. It's pseudonymous. But there are some that are anonymous, too. The gospels we say are anonymous, because they didn't come attached with a name, as far as we know. How did those names get attached? By different people — partly it was because they wanted this text to be authoritative in some way, and so they tended to attach the name of a particular apostle to them or a particular disciple. Or in some ways, for example, the Gospel of Luke may have gotten its name Luke, because in the Acts of the Apostles, which is also written by the same author, Luke is an actual character who follows Paul around. So it may have been that the name Luke and the Acts of the Apostles got connected with the acts of the apostles, and the Gospel of Luke as its author. So sometimes, it's something in the text itself that may have prompted someone to think that. Often, we just don't know how it got it, and it just happened because somebody just said, "It's authoritative. It must've been written by an apostle."."
© Dale B. Martin
Yale Lectures on Introduction to the New Testament History and Literature
[link]
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