Demolishing Triablogue: Early interest in gospel authorship doesn't make skeptics unreasonable

Jason Engwer of Triablogue tries to make Matthew's authorship of the gospel now bearing his name more reasonable than the skeptical position that says the author is anonymous.  I respond to each of Engwers points.

There would have been early interest in who wrote the gospel.
It's common today to claim that the gospels initially circulated anonymously, even for as long as several decades.

And the fact that even conservative Christian apologists like Mike Licona aren't willing to make a case for Matthew's authorship (see here), nor consider his resurrection testimony "bedrock" (see here) is sufficient, standing alone, to render reasonable the skeptic who says apostle Matthew's connection to the gospel now bearing his name is tenuous at best, which is more than sufficient to justify asserting the author to be anonymous.

Here's something I recently wrote on the subject in the comments section of an old thread:

In that sort of atmosphere of concern for named authority figures, distinguishing among sources, and trying to discern who wrote documents like the gospels, it's far more likely that the gospels were circulating with authorial attributions than that they were circulating anonymously.

Except that the authors were allegedly Jews who lived in a religious climate that approved of anonymously and falsely authored scriptures.  See the OT Pseudepigrapha and Intertestamental literature.  They were quite capable of blindly trusting something merely because it was religious.

There would have been a high degree of interest in the gospels' authorship well before the second half of the second century.

Perhaps among Christians.  I don't see any non-Christians of that period would have cared.

And thank you for helping increase the probability that Matthew authored the heretical "Gospel to the Hebrews".

And early belief in their traditional authorship attributions provides a far better explanation for the prominence of the gospels and how little dispute there was about their authorship.

And thousands of early Christians could seriously believe false rumors about the apostles. See Acts 21:18-24.

In closing, I suggest that people think about the context of early Christianity and whether it was a setting in which the gospels are likely to have circulated anonymously for nearly a century.

Most historians that wrote in the 1st century named themselves, including most NT authors, so the Matthew-author's choice to leave his name out was deliberate, and under your own belief that this gospel is inspired by God, it is therefore God's intent to refuse to name Matthew.  For all you know, trying to prove Matthew's authorship would be against the divine will.  But if you discovered any such thing, no problems, just become a Calvinist.

Christianity wasn't a philosophical system of ideas that were being promoted independently of authority figures.

Then apparently you never heard of apostle Paul.  For all his talk about Jesus, he infamously shows so little interest in the historical Jesus' teachings and requirements that it is reasonable to conclude Paul was a heretic.

Rather, it was a system founded on the authority of named individuals, starting with Jesus and going on to the apostles and other individuals who were named (Matthew 10:1-3, Mark 3:13-19, Ephesians 2:20, etc.).

Except that from what's written, the authority consisted of a live person.  The whole notion that god intended for any of this crap to be written down, is missing from the bible. So for all you know, Christianity died out when the original apostles did.  If the Roman Catholic church can live strong fro 2,000 years while being heretical, so can any cult, including one started by Jesus.

Luke's gospel opens with a reference to the significance of eyewitnesses (1:2), a concept that requires distinguishing among sources (differentiating between those who were eyewitnesses and those who weren't), which would include distinguishing among the authors of written sources.

Except that he doesn't tell the reader that he also copied from Mark, a non-eyewitness.  Luke doesn't declare that he relied on anything other than eyewitnesses.

The fourth gospel expresses an interest in authorship, its own authorship with the implication of concern about authorship more widely (John 21:24).

Which justifies drawing conclusions about the fact that none of the synoptic authors express any such concern.  You cannot have your cake and eat it too.  You cannot simply say John's interest in authorship shows his objectivity, while the synoptic authors who do less can be equally objective.

Ferguson raises doubts about whether Papias was discussing the authorship of the canonical gospels or the authorship of other documents instead, but there was a concern about authorship of gospels or similar documents either way.

That's hardly relevant; the point is that there are good arguments for saying Papias wasn't testifying to the Matthean authorship of what we today call canonical Greek Matthew.

And Papias cited an earlier source (the elder, probably the apostle John), who likewise was interested in authorship issues.

Hearsay within hearsay, which is probably why most conservative Christian scholars refrain from pushing Matthew's authorship and allow liberality.

The same can be said about the authorship concerns expressed in the dispute between Marcionism and Christian orthodoxy. I've cited other sources in the same timeframe, prior to the late second century, with similar authorship interests.

Your general comments about authorship interest from the earliest period do a wonderful job of increasing the probability that other early gospels that didn't make it into the canon (GoH, Thomas) were authentically authored by apostles.  When you start in with your predictable trifling about how the non-canonical gospels are "different" and "worse", we yawn and wonder how much longer we'll have to wait for you to recognize that apostolic gospel authorship doesn't really mean anything if skepticism of Jesus' resurrection can shown reasonable.