The names of the Apostles?

sxt

Are the names of the Apostles their real names? and of the gospel writers Mark , Luke , Matthew , John

PDN

sxt wrote: »

Are the names of the Apostles their real names?

As far as we know, but there are some nicknames added.

and of the gospel writers Mark , Luke , Matthew , John

As far as I remember, none of the Gospels actually state the name of the authors. Tradition ascribes them to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

neuro-praxis

This reminds of that old song from primary school.

"There were Peter and Andrew,
James and John,
James the less
and his brother Jude;
There were Philip and Bartholomeeeew;
There were Simon and Matthew tooooooo;
There was Judas Iscariot;
There was Thomas,
And that's the lot!"

Sing it with me! :pac:

roger_pearse

PDN wrote: »

As far as I remember, none of the Gospels actually state the name of the authors. Tradition ascribes them to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Be a little wary of this argument. Of the 31 works by Tertullian, only two contain the name of the author in the text. Indeed how many books today do so?

The authorship of a text is usually worked out from what the headings on ancient and medieval hand-copied books containing it say, together with who quotations from it are attributed to in other ancient texts. These universally attribute the books to two apostles and two little known figures, stated to be associated with apostles.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Plowman

This post has been deleted.

:|

neuro-praxis wrote: »

This reminds of that old song from primary school.

"There were Peter and Andrew,
James and John,
James the less
and his brother Jude;
There were Philip and Bartholomeeeew;
There were Simon and Matthew tooooooo;
There was Judas Iscariot;
There was Thomas,
And that's the lot!"

Sing it with me! :pac:

People always forget philip and bartholomew

Pompey Magnus

roger_pearse wrote: »

These universally attribute the books to two apostles and two little known figures, stated to be associated with apostles.

The furthest back we can trace the tradition for Matthew and Mark writing a Gospel is to Papias writing c110-130AD, the often bizaare writings of the unreliable Papias show that by the early second century the accounts of the the very earliest years of the church were already becoming unreliabile.

That Papias mentions Mark and Matthew wrote a Gospel is one thing, that these can be identified with the Mark and Matthew found in our Gospels is another matter entirely. It appears that the Gospel he identifies as being written by Mark is the same as our Mark, however his claims do not speak highly of the accuracy of the Gospel. This tradition dates to half a century after Mark was written and came from an unknown eldery Christian who we have no method of deciding how reliable he was.

On the other hand it appears as if the Gospel he believed to have been written by Matthew is a different one to that found in the New Testament as the two things Papias says about Matthew's Gospel do not gel with our Matthew. His Gospel of Matthew was a sayings Gospel, ours is a full narrative. His Gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew where as our Matthew was almost certainly written in Greek.

Apart from Papias we have no mentioning of the authorship of the Gospels until the end of the 2nd Century, over 100 years after they were written.

The authorship of a text is usually worked out from what the headings on ancient and medieval hand-copied books containing it say, together with who quotations from it are attributed to in other ancient texts.

This is not the only methods (in fact not even the most important methods) used in trying to identify authors from antiquity. In fact this is quite unreliable and there are quite a few examples of where this method has failed including the Ambrosiaster which is pseudo-Ambrose, and the Oratory to the Greeks which is a pseudo-Justin work.

Historians also use internal evidence from the texts themselves and also common sense in the identification process.

Do the Gospels claim to be written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? No.

Does Matthew or John ever claim or imply that they were present at any of the events or write in first person? No.

What can be deduced about the authors of the Gospel? They were well educated, literate and Greek speaking.

What can be deduced about the original disciples of Jesus? They were uneducated, illiterate and Aramaic speaking.

Do the accounts of "Matthew" and "John" imply that both were present at the same events? No. The character of Jesus that Matthew describes is very different to that described by John. Although this is not necessarily proof that neither author was an eye witness it can be used to argue that it is unlikely two people could remember the same person so differently.

Did Christians have a vested interest in attributing the anonymous Gospels to figures of authority? Absolutely.

PDN

One conservative biblical scholar, Ben Witherington III, makes an interesting case for Lazarus being the author of John's Gospel.

Pompey Magnus

PDN wrote: »

One conservative biblical scholar, Ben Witherington III, makes an interesting case for Lazarus being the author of John's Gospel.

I'm after reading his arguments, it is certainly interesting linking the beloved disciple with Lazarus. I am not sure however why he claims a number of times that Papias identified the Forth Gospel as having some link to John the elder. As far as I am aware this claim is not found in any of Papias' extant writings so where Witherington got it from perplexes me.

Another quirky yet plausible theory is that a proto-Forth Gospel was written and used by the Cerinthean gnostics (or Cerinthus himself) in Ephesus but this was soon revised by proto-Orthodox Christians in the city with a strong anti gnostic message inserted. This would explain how the forth Gospel seems to have been a favorite of early gnostics and most evidence of its usage in the early to mid second century comes from gnostics including the Naassenes, Valentinians and Heracleon. Epiphanius claimed that there were Christians who believed Cerinthus wrote the forth Gospel whilst Iraenius claims it was written specifically to counter the claims of Cerinthus. It is possible that Epiphanius and Iraenius and referring to two different, but related Gospels. The earliest one used by the gnostics and the later one used by the proto-orthodox.

It is evident that the Gospel as we have it is made up of a number of different written sources, so it is not implausible to suggest that at the heart of the Gospel of John of actually a now lost gnostic Gospel. But at the end of the day it is just speculation and will probably never be proven.