August 26, 2021

No, the Gospel Writers Weren't Eyewitnesses

A recent comment from the resident Catholic troll commenter seemed to show incredulity at the idea that we might believe that the Gospel authors were not eyewitnesses of Jesus and his ministry. Now, obviously, literalists and conservative Christians maintain they are, but this is hardly surprising. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, on the Gospel of Matthew, say:

The questions of authorship, sources, and the time of composition of this gospel [Matthew] have received many answers, none of which can claim more than a greater or lesser degree of probability. The one now favored by the majority of scholars is the following.

The ancient tradition that the author was the disciple and apostle of Jesus named Matthew (see Mt 10:3) is untenable because the gospel is based, in large part, on the Gospel according to Mark (almost all the verses of that gospel have been utilized in this), and it is hardly likely that a companion of Jesus would have followed so extensively an account that came from one who admittedly never had such an association rather than rely on his own memories. The attribution of the gospel to the disciple Matthew may have been due to his having been responsible for some of the traditions found in it, but that is far from certain.

To keep it Catholic: Catholic blog, About Catholics, states (my emphases, following):

They [the Gospels] were anonymously written. In fact most scholars today do not believe that the evangelists were eyewitnesses for the simple reason that their chronology of events and theological interpretations are different. The titles of the gospels were added in the second century and very well could designate the authority behind the finished gospel or the one who wrote one of the main sources of the gospel. The [Roman Catholic] Church takes no official stance on their authorship. It is important to understand that the Church by its authority and the guidance of the Holy Spirit canonized these four gospels over many others that were circulated and read in the early centuries.

Catholic scholar Raymond Brown (who very much believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus):

That the author of the Greek Gospel was John Mark, a (presumably Aramaic-speaking) Jew of Jerusalem who had early become a Christian, is hard to reconcile with the impression that it does not seem to be a translation from Aramaic, that it seems to depend on oral traditions (and perhaps already shaped sources) received in Greek, and that it seems confused about Palestinian geography. (An Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 159-60)

Raymond Brown, also says:

No gospel identifies its author. The common designations placed before the Gospels, e.g., “The Gospel according to Matthew” stem from the late 2d cent. and represent an educated estimate of the authorship by church scholars of that period who were putting together traditions and guesses pertinent to attribution. To this a caution must be added: The ancient concept of authorship was often less rigorous than our own, at times amounting to identifying only the authority behind a work (however distant) rather than the writer. …Among the four, John manifests the most detailed knowledge of Palestine.

Jesus did not write an account of his passion; nor did anyone who had been present write an eyewitness account. Available to us are four different accounts written some thirty to seventy years later in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, all of which were dependent on tradition that had come down from an intervening generation or generations. That intervening preGospel tradition was not preserved even if at times we may be able to detect the broad lines of its content. When we seek to reconstruct it or, even more adventurously, the actual situation of Jesus himself, we are speculating. [The Death of the Messiah, pp. 4-5]

And:

I have already said that I do not think of the evangelists themselves as eyewitnesses of the passion; nor do I think that eyewitness memories of Jesus came down to the evangelists without considerable reshaping and development. [The Death of the Messiah, p. 14]

The Oxford Annotated Bible states (p. 1744, my emphasis):

Neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith (Lk. 1.4; Jn. 20.31). Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.

So, let's do a little synopsis.

Luke admits he was not an eyewitness (Luke 1:1-4), intending to preserve the story "handed down to us".
They weren't called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - these names were later ascribed to the texts.
None of the Gospel authors self-identify or give any real indication as to who they were.
They are written in the third person.
Tradition even has it that Mark was a companion of Peter, Luke a companion of Paul (i.e., not eyewitnesses, but friends of, or friends of early converts). Thus, tradition admits hearsay.
If they really were eyewitnesses, given the type of documents these were, you could bet your bottom dollar that they would have started their Gospels with this claim. They are listing the least probable explanation of events (miracles, the supernatural0 and so, to convince people, they need to be providing the most robust evidence if they can. They don't precisely because they evidently are not eyewitnesses.
These anonymous sources were ascribed names by early church fathers in the 2nd century.
Whereas other New Testament works include the authors' names. As Armin Baum ("The Anonymity of the New Testament History Books," p. 121) explains: "While most New Testament letters bear the names of their (purported) authors (James, Jude, Paul, Peter, or at least "the Elder") the authors of the historical books [the Gospels and Acts] do not reveal their names. The superscriptions that include personal names ("Gospel according to Matthew" etc.) are clearly secondary."
This tradition comes in large part from Papias and his reference to elders (presbyters). But this actually amounts to the following: "So, when it comes to establishing the validity of the testimony of the Gospel of Mark, all we have to rely on is the following: Certain Church Fathers say that they read writings (which we no longer have) of a person named Papias which said that Papias heard some otherwise unknown "elders" say that they heard unnamed disciples of the Lord say that a persona named Mark was an interpreter of Peter, and this Mark took it upon himself to write down what Peter said he heard Jesus say. Not only is this hearsay, but it is at least quintuple hearsay! And not only quintuple hearsay, but anonymous quintuple hearsay (since we don't know who the unnamed disciples were who shared this information with the unnamed Elders who shared it with Papias). Anyone familiar with modern news gathering knows how unreliable unnamed sources can be, and anyone familiar with the "telephone game" knows how things can be misinterpreted when repeated several times by different parties."
Papias, though, refers to Mark as a "sayings" document, which our gMark is not, so this is still problematic since it appears to be a completely different source he is referring to.
Papias has also been shown to be a very unreliable source himself anyway, so trusting him on this is a dubious calculation. Indeed, modern Christian theologians reject many claims of Papias precisely because they are problematic, so to even trust him on even this is to show double standards.
None of the Gospels identifies their sources.
As far as tradition for gMatt is concerned, Papias says even less. It seems again that the copies of gMatt at the time were "sayings" documents, not what we find now.
John writes much later, several generations after Jesus died, so there really isn't any chance he was an eyewitness.
Essentially, these are unknown authors writing in unknown places and unknown times for very theological and evangelical reasons. We can but make educated guesses.
Jesus followers were, at least by and large, illiterate (fishermen etc.). The Gospels were written by Hellenised writers trained to a very high level in Greek. We can see this in, say, Mark and his use of Greek texts in the formulation of his Gospel (see the work of Dennis MacDonald, using Homer etc.).
The texts were not written in the language of Aramaic, the lingua franca of Jesus and his followers. These were written in later, educated scenarios and communities.
The great multitude of discrepancies and contradictions indicate that these were not eyewitness accounts, as well as the developments and embellishment of theology and narrative.
The synoptic Gospels ("synoptic" = with the same eye), when read in parallel, show how substantially gMatt and gLuke rely on gMark. Some think gMatt has up to 90% reliance.
John is completely different because that greater time allowed the Christian community to develop a high Christological theology that then got written into the narratives and life of Jesus. This is called the Synoptic Problem - how the first three differ so much from the last.
Scholars generally think the location of the writing of the Gospels is as follows: gMark - Rome or Syria; gMatthew - Greek-speaking Jewish Christin community in Roman Syria (Antioch); gLuke - gentile Hellenistic community in Ephesus/Smyrna in Asia Minor or Antioch in Roman Syria; gJohn - Hellenistic audience in perhaps Ephesus in Asia Minor. Which is to say no one really thinks they were written in Galilee or, say, Jerusalem.
gMark makes errors on Jewish practices and with Jewish knowledge, thus he would hardly have been likely to have been a contemporary Jewish eyewitness to Jesus.

All the theories of modern biblical scholars point to co-dependency of the Gospel writers, such that they all rely, in some way, on Mark. See images - depends also on your belief in "Q".

A couple of good resources to peruse are Matthew Ferguson's "Why Scholars Doubt the Traditional Authors of the Gospels (2017)" and his piece "Ancient Historical Writing Compared to the Gospels of the New Testament (2016)". In the latter source, he states:

The authors of Matthew and Mark do not even use the first person singular, spoken by the narrator, within their gospels, making these texts even further anonymous. This anonymous style of narration, in which the author reveals few or no clues about his personal relation to events, stands in stark contrast with the authorial interjections seen in historical biographies. As I discuss in my essay "Eyewitness Recollections in Greco-Roman Biography versus the Anonymity of the Gospels," every single author who wrote a historical biography during the early Roman Empire, dealing with subjects dating to within a generation or two of his own lifetime—Cornelius Nepos, Tacitus, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Lucian—uses the first person singular to discuss his own personal relation to both his sources and the biographical subject. These authors also include discussion of events that they had personally witnessed. This kind of information greatly enhances the historical reliability of these texts, since we know that their authors either personally witnessed much of what they relate, or had access to eyewitnesses. In contrast, none of the Gospels include discussion of eyewitness material in this way, making their authors' relation to the events depicted far more ambiguous, and thus the texts themselves less historically reliable.

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