Help me debunk this.
>Blomberg starts in on the question of gospel authorship: It's important to acknowledge that strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous. But the uniform testimony of the early church was that Matthew, also known as Levi, the tax-collector and one of the twelve disciples, was the author of the first gospel in the New Testament; that John Mark, a companion of Peter, was the author of the gospel we call Mark; and that Luke, known as Paul's 'beloved physician,' wrote both the gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles . . . There are no known competitors for [authorship of] these three gospels ... Apparently, it was just not in dispute.7
>Blomberg imagines that the whole delegation was polled, and that no one had any other guesses as to who wrote these gospels. But we don't have everyone's opinions. We are lucky to have what fragments we do that survived the efforts of Orthodox censors and heresiologists to stamp out all 'heretical' opinions. However, we do know of a few differing opinions because Tertullian, Justin Martyr, and others had to take the trouble to (try to) refute them. Marcion knew our Gospel of Luke in a shorter form, which he considered to be the original, and he did not identify it as the work of Luke. He may have imagined that Paul wrote that version. Also, though Blomberg does not see fit to mention it, Papias sought to account for apparent Marcionite elements in the Gospel of John by suggesting Marcion had worked as John's secretary and scribe and added his own ideas to the text, which it was somehow too late for John to root out.8 Similarly, some understood the gospel to be Gnostic (rightly, I think) and credited it to Cerinthus. Blomberg reasons that, had the gospel authorship ascriptions been artificial, better names would have been chosen.
>[T]hese were unlikely characters ... Mark and Luke weren't even among the twelve disciples. Matthew was, but as a former hated tax collector, he would have been among the most infamous character next to Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus! Contrast this with what happened when the fanciful apocryphal gospels were written much later. People chose the names of well-known and exemplary figures to be their fictitious authors - Philip, Peter, Mary, James. Those names carried a lot more weight than the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. So to answer your question, there would not have been any reason to attribute authorship to these three less respected people if it weren't true.9
In fact, apocryphal (which only means 'not on the official list' for whatever reason) gospels are attributed to such luminaries as Bartholomew, Judas Iscariot, the prostitute Mary Magdalene, doubting Thomas, the heretical Basilides, the even more heretical Valentinus, Nicodemus, and the replacement Matthias. They didn't always go for the star names.
> As for the names to whom the canonical gospels were ascribed, it is quite easy to provide an alternate and more natural explanation as to why we have two apostolic names and two sub-apostolic names, though we can bet neither Blomberg nor Strobel will like it very much. First, the initially anonymous gospel we call Matthew was clearly the early church's favorite, and sometimes it circulated without any individual's name, as in its redacted Hebrew and Aramaic versions known to the Church Fathers as the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Gospel according to the Nazoreans, and the Gospel according to the Ebionites. There are more copies of Matthew that survive in manuscript than any of the other gospels, which means it was used more, much more. The reason for its popularity was its utility: it is framed as a new Christian Pentateuch, organizing Jesus' teaching into five great blocks of teaching, more or less topically. It had been written for the Jewish Christian missionaries of Antioch (in view under the characters of the eleven in Matthew 28, receiving the Great Commission) to use as a church manual. And it served that purpose very well. If your goal was to "disciple the nations," this was the book to use. My guess is that some editor tagged the gospel ' Matthew' based on a pun on the Greek word for 'disciple,' especially prominent in this gospel (e.g., 13:51-52; 28: 19): mathetes. Mark. and Luke are not organized so conveniently. If you have chosen Matthew as your standard, then Luke and Mark are going to suffer by comparison (though no one could deny their great value). And in the early days, before they were considered inspired scriptures, people felt they could make value judgments and rank the gospels. Matthew was the first tier, all by itself. Mark and Luke were placed on the second tier - 'deuterocanonical gospels' so to speak. And that is why these sub apostolic names were chosen for them (likely by Poly carp ).10 It is a way of damning them with only faint praise, but not damning them too severely at that. Insofar as they vary from Matthew, they are not quite apostolic. What about the very different John? (Blomberg admits it is quite different; it just doesn't mean anything to him.
>They're all eyewitness reporting anyway!)11 It is so different from the others, one would expect it to be named for someone even farther from the apostles. And so it was. The opponents of the Gospel of John, who recognized its largely Gnostic character, claimed it was the work of the heretic Cerinthus. As Bultmann showed, the text has undergone quite a bit of refitting in order to build in some sacramental theology as well as traditionally futuristic eschatology.12 Gnostics rejected both, and so did 'John' originally, though such passages are now diluted by added material. Polycarp (or someone like him) dubbed the newly sanitized gospel John, intending the apostolic name as a counterblast against the charge that the book was heretical and thus should remain outside the canon. This is exactly the same sort of overcompensation we see in the same time period among Jews who debated the canonicity of the racy Song of Solomon (Song of Songs, Canticles, etc.). The book does not mention God. It seems to embody old liturgies of Tammuz and Ishtar, and it is sexually explicit. Thus some pious rabbis thought it had no business being considered scripture. The response was to declare it an allegory of the divine love for Israel and to make it especially sacred: "The whole Torah is Holy, but The Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies" (Rabbi Akiba). So you think it is profane, do you? Well, in that case: it's especially holy! In the same way a gospel suspected to be Cerinthian becomes a second fully apostolic gospel. Blomberg is as captive to the scribal traditions of his community as the ancient rabbis were when they named Moses as the author of the Pentateuch and the Book of Job: And interestingly, John is the only gospel about which there is some question about authorship . . . The name of the author isn't in doubt- it's certainly John . . . The question is whether it was John the apostle or a different John.13 It's certainly John? Blomberg's exegesis is narrowly sectarian and insular, almost as if we were reading Mormon or Jehovah's Witness scholarship. To anyone even vaguely familiar with modem New Testament scholarship Blomberg's claims are startlingly off-base. If you take a poll of Sunday School teachers and fundamentalist Bible Institute faculty, you will no doubt come up with such a conclusion. But among real scholars, conservative and liberal, the authorship question, as with the closely-related question ofthe identity ofthis gospel's 'Beloved Disciple' character, is wide open. And as for this business about John the son of Zebedee versus another John, this is all derived from Eusebius' remarks on the famous Papias passage, just below, in which Eusebius imagined he saw mention of two different Johns, the apostle John and the Elder John.
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