Sorry, but no: historians regularly accept assignment of authorship that comes from three, four, even five centuries after the events or after the documents were originally written. But when it comes to the Gospels, without having any manuscripts of the start of any of the Gospels that lack a claim of authorship, they assume that the Gospels were originally completely anonymous. If the Gospels were treated like other ancient documents there would 't even be a disagreement over the ascribed authorship. They’re arguing that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and that’s blind.
LOL
In every single other case where authorship is ascribed a gap of merely forty years would be considered so short there’s no point in disputing the attribution! Scholars take the word of people a lot longer than that after the original writing was done as not bothering doubting.
Only when it comes to the Gospels. No one argues that Aesop’s fables were written by Aesop (which ones he wrote is sometimes argues about), but the first attribution of authorship comes two and a half centuries after the accepted time of composition – and that’s common with ancient Greek material.
Sorry, but I began learning Greek with texts far more ancient than the Gospels, and it’s standard that assignments of authorship from centuries after the composition of a work are accepted without question… until it comes to religious documents. When the Gospels are the topic, suddenly a gap of a century means the authorship was made up later on, but with secular literature three centuries is no barrier to accepting assigned authorship.
Authorship is only disputed when there is evidence against it – until it comes to religious literature, and then absence of evidence is treated as evidence of absence. When it’s secular, tradition is accepted as indisputable without evidence against it; when it’s religious, tradition is despised until there’s evidence for it.
That double standard has been going on for some two centuries now, so this statement is a joke:
They have two different sets of standards, but that’s a topic you don’t bring up if you want to get a master’s degree, let alone a doctorate. That’s a truth I ran into in graduate school – and got told to ignore if I was going to pursue a degree in the field.
No, it isn’t, because with the Gospels the material was written while eye witnesses were still around to protest. There are even examples of things written when eyewitnesses were still around and the writers got scorned for being dishonest.
I don’t give a fig for any “conservative narrative”. There’s nothing in the Gospels to suggest “community authorship”; that idea was a pure invention by critics who needed something to write about. This is confirmed by the fact that numerous topics important to early Christians well before the Gospels were written do not show up in the Gospels at all, they only show up in the epistles – and if they were written by “communities” those communities would hardly have missed the chance to insert paragraphs speaking to those concerns. The whole idea that the Gospels were the products of communities can only hold if the Gospels were completed before 50 A.D. when Paul was first writing.
Those are still argued; the debate has gone back and forth since Origen and Augustine and still hasn’t been settled, though it’s certain that neither Matthew not Luke “copied” Mark; they wrote their own material and for sections Mark had already written they often just borrowed that existing material – it was a fairly common practice among Roman historians including biographers.
None of those is earlier than the end of the second century, so they don’t even enter the picture – by the time they were written, the canon was mostly settled; roughly a dozen books were still argued about and seven were accepted. Thomas, Peter, Judas, etc. were never even on the radar – and that’s not guessing, it’s certain because people who would have mentioned them if they were even being considered don’t mention them even though they mention other works that got rejected.
No assumptions involved. Very few scholars any longer date the synoptics later than about 65, and I’m being generous by allowing for that late a date. Personally I hold that Matthew’s Aramaic version was complete by about 45, Mark wrote before 55, Matthew’s Greek version came shortly thereafter and lazily used Mark’s Greek whenever it covered a bit that was already in his account; Luke finished his work before Paul’s execution, around 58-60, and John weighed in about 65-68 (and is not the John of the Apostles but another John who lived in Jerusalem and didn’t travel with Jesus).
If I wanted to make assumptions I;d moved those all earlier by five to ten years.
No, I’m presuming that the Gospels were circulated a bit faster than we know that Paul’s epistles were and they were being swapped between churches almost as soon as he’d written more than a half dozen. From the evidence the church epistles now accepted as genuinely Paul’s were almost everywhere around the empire (and beyond) even before Paul’s death for the simple reason of travel back and forth between Palestine and Rome: traveling Christians stayed with the churches wherever they traveled, and the churches eagerly desired copies of anything of Paul’s a traveler might have, and the churches at both ends of this common circuit made a practice of sending along copies. So the moment any Gospel was available it would have joined the ongoing exchange, with the result that by the time John wrote it would have been a poor church indeed that didn’t have the other Gospels already.
There weren’t “dozens” until much later – if there had been they would have been mentioned in the early lists but they weren’t.
That may have been true thirty years ago but it isn’t any longer. The trend in scholarship has been to recognize that the traditional accounting is much closer to the truth than the old critics guessed – and “guessed” is an accurate description, because the first late dates assigned to the Gospels were made up out of thin air.