Note you are operating perhaps on a couple of confusions—which are not in dispute by Gathercole: he well knows these things, and he is trying to develop an apologetics around them, not to deny them, so my article is starting at the same position he admits he is in, but in case you weren’t aware of them:

(1) Mainstream texts (like Tacitus) have title lines (and we know they existed then because they are mentioned, e.g. Tertullian knows Tacitus called his history the Annals and that he wrote it—so Tertullian was looking at a title line mere decades later, the same one we have or its textual ancestor). The Gospels do not.

Let me repeat that in case you missed it: the Gospels do not have titles. They just start their narratives cold, with no preceding title. This is important because authors were identified in their title lines. The Gospels, having no title lines, clearly had no authors listed in them either. The evidence indicates all ancient texts had title lines—except fiction. Which makes sense. How else would anyone know who or what they were quoting? And how would an author gain fame or reputation (or their works even be dated or their merits assessed) if no one knew who wrote what?

(2) Mainstream texts assign authorship in the genitive case (e.g. [the name of the work] of [the name of the author], so, for example, Tacitus’s Annals or The Annals of Tacitus). The Gospels have no names attached to them that way (not even now). They have name lines (an oddity nowhere else found) and those name lines use the Greek grammatical structure for source, not author (kata + name in the accusative case, som for example, “According to Mark”). In Greek that does not indicate an author, but the author’s source. So these strange “name titles” are saying “Someone (we aren’t telling you who) wrote this using Mark (whoever that is, we aren’t going to tell you) as a source (and whether that means the anonymous author, whoever they are, spoke to that named person or read something else they wrote or are just making this up—or we, the also nameless editors, are just making this up, decades after publication—we won’t say).”

(3) That method of headlining a book is so odd it is unique: it never happened before these Gospels. This suggests the same person added all these names (and Gathercole agrees, that’s what he means by these names being secondary additions to the text, not put there by their authors). That is, when someone collected these four disparate Gospels and published them together, then they attached these name-titles (making up the names), all at once (probably, as scholars have shown, by using names mentioned in these or the other books collected in that same edition: on this all being the same edition, see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts and now Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century? as a lot of scholars are writing on this now).

Gathercole grants all of these facts. So he is not trying to argue these were the author lines put there by the authors. He is trying to argue that they didn’t have to, because everyone “just knew” (as if by magic) who wrote what, and as evidence of this, he claims mainstream books also lacked title and author lines, which is what I am pointing out is false (so he has no evidence for this absurd theory).

Note there is more evidence that corroborates all this (as Gathercole also knows and some of which I pointed out in this article). Those are just the highlights.

But, for example, Luke does not know the names of Mark and Matthew, despite extensively using them as sources, so those texts were probably anonymous when he used them, and those names were assigned them when Luke also received the same strange kata attribution line (so, all four Gospels were named together, and thus after they published). (Our edition of) John also does not know the name of its supposed source (as admitted in John 21), which originally was (in an earlier redaction) Lazarus, not John—a fictional person (see my discussion of the Gospel of John in §10.7 of OHJ).

The same is seen in Ignatius, Justin, etc. (Ehrman has an article on this). The first anyone seems to know our Gospels have these weir name-title lines is Irenaeus, writing c. 180-200 A.D. This suggests they acquired their names in between (so, sometime between 140 and 180 A.D.).

The only other source before that who links any Gospels to named authors is Papias, but Papias is notoriously difficult to date (and his text is confusing and conflicts with the evidence we have). Most place him around 130, but he could be later (some argue earlier but not on strong evidence). And we don’t have his texts. We have quotes and paraphrases. And those don’t clearly indicate that the Gospels had author-lines assigned to them by then; his quotes merely make claims as to who authored them (and that may have simply been the source of rumor/legend used by the editor of the fourfold edition to officially put those names into the texts later).

In other words, Papias may have been looking at nameless texts, and then spreading rumors about who wrote them (his information is either all incorrect, or refers to other Gospels than ours, so we know he had no reliable data about this to spread). Or Papias may have been writing later, after the fourfold edition, and thus looking at name-lines but only as began in that edition. There is no way to prove one option or the other with what we have.

The rest of the evidence shows a trend: no one knew they had names until the later second century. Yet they were written decades before that.

The Gospel narrative began as an oral tradition in the same manner the Torah was an oral tradition for the first 1500 years or so before being committed to the written word.

There is no evidence of either fact. In fact, the evidence indicates the opposite. On the Gospels, see my article on Walsh and the example of Mark’s dependence on Paul. On the Torah, see the works cited here on that already, as well as mainstream studies of its late invention (which they also cite).

Jews are noted for their excellent memories.

This is not true. Jews are fellow members of the species Homo sapiens. They have no better memories than anyone else. And there is no evidence of their cultural use of memory to any special effect. The Mishnah, for example, known as the Oral Torah, was only memorized by intensive schooling beginning at age seven, in which students were drilled on its memorization for at least seven more years. And what was transmitted didn’t go back to Moses anyway (that was a myth).

There were no such schools to permit any similar transmission for the Torah or the Gospels. So no such memorization can be credited for them. All studies of oral lore transmission across cultures demonstrate that it is highly elastic and readily altered over time and circumstance and does not even have the objective of preservation but of contemporary salience. We see this in the way urban legends get transmitted today: readily altered to make them contemporary or change their moral message or societal relevance, and highly variable in details.

Everything else you go on to say is also false. You do not clearly know the language or history of any of this well.

For example, mikveh is not a ritual. It is a physical object (it literally is simply the word for bath, as in “collection [of water]”). Baptism is the Greek ford for “immersion [in water],” and thus refers to literally the same thing as the ritual purification rituals performed in mikvehs.

Baptism is attested all the way back to Plato, and was probably ancient even then, and probably was assumed within Judaism by diffusion from Greek culture after the invasion of Alexander the Great (since the ritual in Judaism had almost identical functions, and diffusion from Judaism to Classical Greece is vastly less likely). The Christian model of Baptism was a syncretism of Jewish and contemporary Mystery Cult baptism rituals, but is extensively discussed by Paul as standard in Christianity, and thus is not likely something he introduced. Likewise, Josephus attests John was already known widely as “a baptist,” even before Christianity.

In similar fashion, every other claim you make falls apart when facts are consulted.

This argument is viewed from the wrong perspective. The question is not who wrote the gospels, but where and why did they originate?

The Gospel narrative began as an oral tradition in the same manner the Torah was an oral tradition for the first 1500 years or so before being committed to the written word. Jews are noted for their excellent memories. This is why Jews have catch phrases like “never forget.” Jewish boys are given gold stars in the Yeshiva for their ability to remember and argue the long tortuous tracts of their Torah and the Talmud. This is why they make excellent lawyers. The story of Jesus is all about the law; an utterly corrupt Temple’s sacrificial law.

Gospel authors rewrote the story to the point the original version is hidden and almost unrecognizable. Yet details in the account make it quite clear what the story is really about and why the legend of Jesus was passed down by word of mouth for decades after his death. It was a legend that made Jesus larger than life among Temple Jews just like Paul Bunyan was a larger than life legend in the American west.

The original story, passed on by word of mouth, was about a legendary, renegade, Temple priest who took on a corrupt religious structure and successfully bought it down. In written form the story became one of a god who came to visit Judea, making outrageous promises to all mankind.

Jesus had nothing to do with Saul/Paul’s Christianity. He was not a Christian, nor were any of his followers, as Christianity did not exist at the time. The same holds true for various descriptions in the Gospels, like John’s baptism.

There was no known religious ceremony called “baptism” during the life of John and Jesus, both of whom were renegade Temple priests, as illustrated by the detailed description of their familial blood line that shows they qualified for the priesthood. What was taking place was a religious purification ritual known as the “Mikveh”, one that Jews still practice to this day.

Christians ponder the question of why Jesus needed to have his sins forgiven when he had never sinned. The Mikveh however had more than one function. One function was the ritual purification of sin. The Mikveh was a relatively expensive ceremony, yet John provided this service free of charge.

Another detail tells how John did this at the “Jordan beyond the Jordan” at bet anya, a small village just outside of Jerusalem. This location had several free flowing springs that fed the Jordan river. These springs met the legal requirements for a Mikveh. The Jordan river was quite a distance from bet anya, making it a difficult journey for the hungry poor and infirm. The name “bet anya” meas “house of alms”, a name that meant house of the poor. John was administering the Mikveh for free as the poor could ill afford the costly services of the Temple priests.

However, another function of the Mikveh was its use in the initiation of a priest. John was not providing ritual purification for Jesus’ sins, he was initiating Jesus into the Temple priesthood. Details in the story point to the law being fulfilled for the initiation of a priest. For instance, at least three priests had to be present to witness the ritual for it to be valid. “Christ” means “anointed”. Jesus was anointed, not as a god, but in recognition of his priestly status. This detail becomes apparent when the woman anoints Jesus with oil in recognition of his priestly authority. This allowed Jesus to argue and rescind sacrificial law.

Another intriguing, but unstated detail is, that by the time of Jesus’ initiation, the Temple had stopped the anointing ritual due to the expense of the oil. This issue of expense is made clear when Judas takes issue with Jesus for the expensive oil being used in this manner when the money from its sale could have been put to better use. This is significant as it relates to how Jesus is a priestly authority of the old school, before the Temple priesthood became utterly corrupt.

There is so much more to this story that remains hidden due to the heavy Judaeo-Christian redaction that maintains a heavily vested interest in keeping Jesus as the god figure for their religion. The true irony is that Jesus was totally against organized religion like that of the second Temple he attacked and destroyed. He would have never started any “church”, in fact he never knew that word.

Ultimately Judaeo-Christians structured their new Church on the foundation of the old Temple system that Jesus brought down with his knowledge and authority of the law. Thus, Christianity is nothing more than old Jewish wine decanted in a gentile new bottle.

Jesus said he came to “fulfill the law”. To fulfill contractual law means to end the contract. That is exactly what Jesus did when he offered himself up as the final blood sacrifice of the Paschal lamb. Jesus’ blood sacrifice fulfilled the law ending Moses’ blood covenant with YHVH. Ultimately this terminated the Temple’s blood sacrifice that served as the main source of income for the Temple’s ostentatiously wealthy priests.

The second Temple was the Jews first central bank and Jesus destroyed it along with its power and wealth. That is the reason Jews maintain such vehement hatred for the man more than two millennia after the fact. As Jews say, “never forget”.

I would be happy to discuss this matter further, as there is so much more to this story than can be related here.

Oh good catch. I really am starting to need new glasses (and that isn’t a joke; I’ve been putting it off too long and am falling into more typos because of it).

I should render it “ways” (mores, customs).

Exactly. And this ties in with the ambiguity intolerance inherent to a lot of faith belief.

Is it possible that the writers of the Gospels actually did have access to good documentary and eyewitness sources, or intellectual traditions from the start of the faith? Sure, though that too isn’t all that useful. One of the big problems with all of these reliability arguments for anything besides the Epistles is that cults are the worst at honestly keeping their own records due to a combination of incompetence, fanaticism, and institutional incentives. Having firsthand experiences of cults, their own internal mythology about their own history trumps reality even when everyone knows it’s bullshit and there’s even publicly available evidence to the contrary . Hell, the Epistles themselves are good examples of this: Paul’s writings in an at-least semi-official capacity preserve a ton of catty internal politics bullshit, irrelevant whining, and weird digressions, and Paul is actually pretty competent by the standard of cultic early adopters. The kind of people who join cults don’t tend to be the most organized or settled in their lives and cults often evolve a lot in the early stages as the leader starts to transition from being a grifter (as even the most sincere cult leaders have to be in part because they don’t believe all of their own bullshit) to being a megalomaniac (or whatever other final form they’ll have) and the traditions of the cult are being made up on the spot based on bizarre rapid cultural diffusion. So even if the Gospels reconstruct faith traditions that evolved, those faith traditions would actually have no necessary relationship to what happened in the early cult, and even if we could teleport a believer from the 40s or 50s to now and overcome language and cultural barriers they would still not be wholly reliable as eyewitnesses .

But all of that aside, it doesn’t matter, because whether or not that’s true, we can never know that . Anonymity is fatal precisely here because we actually would need to be able to assess who the writers of the Gospels were because we would need to assess privileged access. That’s why traditions like Luke being Paul’s scribe make a ton of sense: it actually matters for how we assess Luke-Acts that the writer has privileged access to Paul, rather than just being an ordinary follower.

Even in modern professional journalism, if a truly anonymous source never has their information independently corroborated (with only that corroboration used for reporting) or if a source off the record is never disclosed, in two centuries we won’t know who that was or how reliable it was. Journalists do everything they can to maximize the reliability of their reporting despite the needs to protect sources and other practical realities, and good journalists make calls that end up being verifiably true, but if we never had access to that later information, we wouldn’t be at all sure about the quality of the information.

And that’s all especially true if, say, we have a modern Lucien doing reporting on a cult. Because cults are so dishonest and so motivated that they evolve in real time even to reporting on them.

I wouldn’t trust to any high degree of certainty anything reported about a cult in its early stages, even from a qualified outside observer, without really good documentation or at least a really clear throughline of information and data. The subject matter is just too murky.

Christians clearly know all this: They would never trust even quite banal claims about a cult that they weren’t motivated to believe for other weird ideological alliance reasons. So they’re cherry-picking, as always.

And obviously this isn’t just a problem for Christians, it’s a problem for historians. I find the arrogance of so many New Testament scholars about the epistemic quality of what we know about Jesus and the early Christians so shocking. Like you identified on GE”s show about Davis and McGrath,, the field seems willing to say “Oh yeah, this evidence sucks super hard” and then make really confident assertions of high probability from really bad incomplete evidence subject to known ideological retention filters. That scholarly failing is actually a lot less forgivable: Scholars are supposed to get over the fact that it sucks and is frustrating to admit “Yeah, the evidence for this sucks, we don’t know” and just do that.

That’s a good point.

And to expand on the journalism analogy: quality journalistic standards regulate the use of anonymous sources. For example, the two-source rule: you still must have two confirmed independent sources before relying on any; and this rule is not to be abrogated in the case of anonymous sources (but can be in the case of named sources, where the fact that they are the only source is usually still required to be indicated).

Also, the journalist must know who the anonymous source is (so really, they are a single-blinded source, not strictly anonymous) and explain their position and biases when cited (e.g., you have to say you are using an anonymous source, why you are keeping them anonymous, and why, nevertheless, they are worth citing at all, e.g. some way of identifying their relationship to the information they are providing must be stated, so their possible biases or even access to that information can be weighed by the reader).

And all that still has to come from an independent journalist. No one trusts a fanatic to maintain objectivity or even honesty in this process, so even if such a person did provide all that information for us, we still would have no reason to believe them, because such persons lying or distorting information even unconsciously is too common (and cannot be ruled out).

And even in the best case, where we have some independent observer (like Lucian with respect to Glycon cult) doing this sort of thing (e.g. reporting on what unnamed persons they met said about someone they are objectively writing up), we know ancient standards and capabilities were woefully inadequate (e.g. we cannot trust Lucian even could have confirmed his source wasn’t lying about being a witness and to thus seeing or hearing what they told him, vs. today when someone’s identity and relationship to the information can be verified by a journalist in several reliable ways).

Say it were true that anonymous sources were actually more common in the past than today.

So what?

The Gospels would still be a specific kind of anonymous text: texts with overt myths (including clear etiological myths) that are not just anonymous, but prominently so, with a BS way of trying to disguise the anonymity (“according to”). The Gospels are stories and literary constructions in ways that Suetonius and Caesar aren’t.

If you’re a journalist today and you get an anonymous tip from someone whose message seems cogent with specific actionable knowledge, you take it seriously. If you get an anonymous tip whose message seems like crank nonsense, you don’t.

I suspect this argument is used as so many arguments are in Christian apologetics, as an incomplete part of a cumulative case that is then just implicitly filled in. People in receptive audiences will hear “Anonymous sources aren’t necessarily unreliable” and not realize that the word “necessarily” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

The fact remains that whatever authority the Gospels might have if they were actually eyewitness accounts evaporates because they’re anonymous. We, at least, cannot know if the authors were eyewitnesses to anything or even had access to eyewitnesses. That’d be fine in history (though obviously more of a problem than in reality): If all of our ancient histories were unsigned, we’d just assign them lower epistemic value and move on. Christians hinge their faith on these books. Flaws that would be fine in a text used to establish tentative certainty for a measured historical argument are fatal for a supernatural bellef.

But if that is the case then why would he be reavealing his plan (scheme) to insiders in the exact same Gospel that contains the very parables that are intended to be seen by and confuse (trick) all of the outsiders?

Mark is signaling to his readers how to read his entire Gospel. Mark imagines outsiders won’t understand this for the same reason outsiders depicted in the story didn’t understand the Lord’s parables. Only insiders will “clue in” (or even be told) that this story refers to the Gospel (and not just the parables the fictional character spoke).

Indeed, reciprocally, Mark’s point is that anyone who on their own figures this out, by that act becomes an insider. I don’t think Mark had the sophisticated imagination to anticipate someone getting his hidden point and at the same time not buying it. Or at best, he did but is ignoring that complex edge case to keep his story easy to write.

-:-

You can see this all over Mark. The men and demons told not to tell, who tell anyway. The fig tree that Jesus curses for not bearing figs even when Mark goes out of his way to tell us that he knew they were naturally not supposed to be bearing figs. Mark flagging the claim in his trial that Jesus said he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days (which in the story is taken as literal and thus a reason to put him on trial, but Mark obviously intends the reader to not take it that way: it refers to the temple of the body and the temple atonement cult as an institution). And so on.

Mark is not even trying to create a coherent, believable story. Literally no scene anywhere in it in any chapter of it is realistic or believable; many are literally incoherent (like the fig story, and the messianic secret theme). Mark isn’t even trying. All of this only makes sense when you drop the pretense that Mark meant any of it literally; you are meant to figure out the real meaning of everything; and doing that will make you “one of his peeps” and thus ready for the kingdom. But that then is meant to convince you that you had better get baptized and join the club (since Mark’s Gospel will not have been meant to be read alone, but in the context of Christian evangelization, or indeed even read aloud to illiterate audiences by the missionary using it as a conversion tool).

-:-

Which ties back into the anthropology of religion:

That discovering the deeper meaning leads to a eureka feeling is part of the mission tool (this has been used by cults all over the world ever since and long before). The evangelist will aim to talk you into thinking that your elation at seeing or discovering something others missed, something cleverly hidden yet cleverly conveyed, is itself the holy spirit telling you this is from God.

We see this logic already in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where it’s implied feelings of “inspiration” convinced a pesherist that the hidden patterns they found across disparate Scriptural passages are signals from God that they are right, and those patterns are real and meant by God to have been found, and finding them makes the finder special, an elect of God and therefore an authority to propound the hidden meanings of Scripture. When all the while it was just a generic aesthetic emotion as anyone feels who catches patterns in things, whether they are intentional patterns or not.

Imagine how many a conspiracy theorist today relies on this same emotion as evidence they are right and the pattern they found therefore “real.” It’s the same thing. Yet it’s actually no more supernatural or special a feeling than winning at Solitaire.