Excerpt #46 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
In the last forty years of the first century A.D., in the approximate years 60 to 100 (no one knows for sure), long after the supposed recorded events occurred, the New Testament gospels Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were created.
It’s thought they may have been written in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, roughly ten years apart and long after the events they were writing about occurred.
In fact, the stories were written 30, 40, 50, and 60 years after the events supposedly occurred that they wrote about.
Who wrote these stories?
No one knows.
They were written by anonymous people.
It’s thought that in the second century, to bestow legitimacy, the authorship was assigned to the Christian Evangelists, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
“We do not know who wrote the Gospels,” contends E.P. Sanders, of Duke University, who is the author of The Historical Figure of Jesus, and one of the preeminent scholars in the field.
Sanders holds what is the consensus view, that the Gospels were written anonymously by early Church teachers, and were later assigned to the four evangelist saints, perhaps to bestow legitimacy. (The New Yorker)
“We know virtually nothing about the persons who wrote the gospels we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” – Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, (The Gnostic Gospels)
All four gospels are anonymous texts.
“The familiar attributions of the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from the mid-second century and later and we have no good historical reason to accept these attributions.” – Steve Mason, professor of classics, history and religious studies at York University in Toronto (Bible Review)
Yet today, there are few Biblical scholars — from liberal skeptics to conservative evangelicals — who believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually wrote the Gospels. Nowhere do the writers of the texts identify themselves by name or claim unambiguously to have known or traveled with Jesus. – Jeffery L. Sheler, “The Four Gospels,” (U.S. News & World Report)
“The bottom line is we really don’t know for sure who wrote the Gospels.” – Jerome Neyrey, of the Weston School of Theology, Cambridge, Mass. in “The Four Gospels,” (U.S. News & World Report)