Who Really Wrote the Gospels?

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not just code words for anonymous and unreliable authors.​

Most of us take for granted that the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were in fact written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, respectively. In times past, this would have been the obvious assumption, and questioning this assumption would have been seen as an absurd waste of time.

However, no assumption is safe today, and the identity of the authors of the Gospels is now hotly debated by some scholars.

So let’s take a look at this question. Who did write the Gospels? And why does it matter?

Briefly, we should begin by setting the parameters of the question. When talking about who wrote the Gospels, we should clarify whichgospels we are talking about. There are only four canonical Gospels, those purported to be written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which are considered authentically part of the New Testament by all Christians the world over. There are a great number of so-called “gospels.” Among others, there are the “Gospel of Judas,” the “Gospel of Mary,” the “Gospel of Thomas,” the “Gospel of Philip,” the Protoevangelium of James, and many more.

These are all recognized as having been written a century or more after the death of Jesus, sometimes several centuries later, and not attributable to those closest disciples of Our Lord, or even to their disciples. While these facts in and of themselves do not mean that they are unreliable historical records, we know that the authors were not divinely inspired, as the Church has discerned and declared the canon of Sacred Scripture, and the canon is closed. Scripture is public revelation from God, and such public revelation ceased with the death of the last apostle (see Dei Verbum 4, CCC 66-67, 73). So these so-called “gospels,” though they may be historically interesting documents, are not part of that canon. The authorship of those documents is not at issue here.

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