Were the Gospels Originally Anonymous?

For almost nineteen centuries, virtually all Christians believed that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John penned the four canonical Gospels. Around the 1920s, however, the form critics suggested that the Gospels were actually the result of folklore traditions.

The form critics embraced four key points.¹ First, all four Gospels were originally published without any titles or mention of authorship. In other words, no “Gospel according to . . . ” for any other them. Second, not only were these Gospels published anonymously, they circulated anonymously for about a century before anyone thought to attribute titles to them. Third, only after the disciples had long died out did the early church add titles to the Gospel manuscripts to give them “much needed authority.”² And fourth, since the Gospels were anonymous, none of them were written by eyewitnesses.

Exasperated by this view, Richard Bauckham remarks, “It is a curious fact that nearly all the contentions of the early form critics have by now been convincingly refuted, but the general picture of the process of oral transmission that the form critics pioneered still governs the way most New Testament scholars think.”³ In other words, despite the fact that the anonymous Gospels theory has been thoroughly debunked, people continue to regurgitate the view. In the remainder of the post, I’d like to share three reasons why we should reject the anonymous Gospels position and put this theory to rest once and for all.

Reason 1: No Anonymous Gospel Manuscripts Exist

One gets the impression from many New Testament scholars that all the earliest Gospel manuscripts were anonymous. In fact, we’re led to believe that dozens of examples exist in our archives. Yet, this belief would be a false assumption. For not one single anonymous manuscript has been located. As far as we know, none exist.

Certainly we possess incomplete manuscripts that fail to mention a title, but that’s only because those manuscripts are missing the beginning portion of the Gospel where the title would normally be located. For example, P52–a second century manuscript–only contains a few short verses from John 18, and therefore, has no title. Yet, for all the manuscripts where we possess the beginning, the titles appear. And in every case, the titles are Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Consider the following list of the four earliest manuscripts for each Gospel:⁴

Matthew

• Papyrus 4, 2nd century, “Gospel according to Matthew”
• Papyrus 62, 2nd century, “Gospel according to Matthew”
• Codex Sinaiticus, 4th century, “According to Matthew”
• Codex Vaticanus, 4th century, “According to Matthew”

Mark

• Codex Sinaiticus, 4th century, “According to Mark”
• Codex Vaticanus, 4th century, “According to Mark”
• Codex Washingtonianus, 4th-5th century, “Gospel According to Mark”
• Codex Alexandrinus, 5th century, “[Gosp]el according to Mark”

Luke

• Papyrus 75, 2nd-3rd century, “Gospel according to Luke”
• Codex Sinaiticus, 4th century, “According to Luke”
• Codex Vaticanus, 4th century, “According to Luke”
• Codex Washingtonianus, 4th-5th century, “Gospel according to Luke”

John

• Papyrus 66, 2nd century, “Gospel according to [J]ohn”
• Papyrus 75, 2nd-3rd century, “Gospel according to John”
• Codex Sinaiticus, 4th century, “According to John”
• Codex Vaticanus, 4th century, “According to John”

Notice the complete absence of any “anonymous” Gospel.

Reason 2: It’s so Far-Fetched

According to the critics, the Gospels circulated the Roman Empire for a hundred years without any titles. Then suddenly, after hundreds of copies had circulated, someone decided to give them the four titles that we know them by today. Somehow, they were able to relay these titles to places like Syria, Africa, France, Rome, Greece, and Turkey and get everyone to change all the anonymous Gospels to the four approved names. They were so successful in this endeavor that they left no trace of disagreement in any of the hundreds of manuscripts which were already in circulation.

But how, exactly, did scribes know to attribute the same four titles to each Gospel without exception all around the Roman Empire? Was there a grand announcement? Did someone give a memo? Did one person or small group possess limitless authority to make such a declaration? The early church didn’t work this way.

Moreover, how did the early church distinguish these four Gospels for the first hundred years before titles were added to them? Did they title them anonymous Gospel #1 and so forth? Martin Hengel notes that “anonymous works were relatively rare and must have been given a title in the libraries.”⁵

Also, if the naming process took place like critics suggest, why don’t we find other competing titles in the manuscripts? Consider the letter to the Hebrews. Hebrews really was anonymous. And in some of the manuscripts, Hebrews gets attributed to people like Timothy or Paul. Yet the four Gospels remain unanimous in their titles throughout all manuscripts without one whiff of discrepancy.

Reason 3: No Motivation to Credit Mark and Luke

If titles were added to give them added authority, why attribute two of them to non-eyewitnesses? Mark, after all, did not witness Jesus’ ministry as far as we know. Nor was he an apostle. He was Barnabas’ cousin and companion of Peter and Paul. Likewise, Luke was a Gentile traveling companion of Paul, not an eyewitness to Jesus’ earthly ministry. If the church wanted to “add authority” to these texts, it makes no sense to attribute these two Gospels to Mark and Luke.

One would think the early church would have named the Gospels after Peter, James, Paul, or Andrew. In fact, all the later apocryphal Gospels do this very thing. Without exception, they all attribute their works to eyewitnesses (Thomas, Peter, Judas, Mary Magdalene, etc.). These names were an attempt to attribute more authority to their books. None of these later forgeries ever go by lesser known figures like Jason or Aristarchus or Mark or Luke.

In short, the early church had no motivation to name Gospels after Mark and Luke unless they were the ones who really stood behind those Gospels. As Hengel rightly questions, “What would have prevented the copyists or the communities in a secondary attribution in the second century from transferring the Gospel of Mark to Peter and the Gospel of Luke to Paul? In the second century they would certainly no longer have come up with the relatively remote names of Mark and Luke.”⁶

A Final Word

As far as I can tell, the main argument critics advance in support of their anonymous Gospels theory is that we don’t possess the earliest manuscripts which could provide evidence for their anonymity, and that the earliest church fathers rarely attributed Gospel quotations to the authors. While the first argument is worse than an argument from silence, the second one requires a brief response.

I think a simple explanation is that the earliest church fathers felt their points were strengthened by appealing to Jesus himself, rather than those who recorded Jesus’ words. For example, Clement–writing around AD 95– asks his readers to “Remember the words of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and then he quotes from the Gospels.⁷ He doesn’t say “remember the words of Matthew or Mark.” At this early stage when the New Testament canon had not yet been fully developed, the early church fathers strategically appealed to the highest authority they knew—the Lord Jesus himself.

This tactic, however, does not suggest that the early church blindly accepted anonymous Gospels. Think about it. Would you blindly accept an anonymous account of a famous figure, or would you rather know that it came from a reliable source? I think it’s safe to say that early Christians only received the Gospels because they recognized that they went back to reliable sources.

1. Grant Pitre, The Case for Jesus, 14-15.
2. Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 90.
3. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd ed. 242.
4. Grant Pitre, The Case for Jesus, 16.
5. Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ, 48.
6. Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ, 45.
7. 1 Clement, 46.