To be clear, I didn’t mean they picked Matthew as a witness; I mean later legends arose that Matthew was a witness (“a name legend then spun referred to a witness”).

The Gospel never says the character named Matthew wrote it. The name was assigned later, and we don’t actually know whether that was the reason. The legend arose even later than that—unless it did arise at the same time, as part of the naming propaganda for the fourfold Gospel edition, but that is speculative. Matthew is the only Gospel whose later-assigned name is that of a character in the same book. This is not the case for Mark, Luke, or John. But we are only speculating as to whether that was why that name was chosen for it—since that wasn’t the procedure used to name Mark, Luke, or John, and these names are believed to have all been assigned at the same time by the same person, whoever assembled the anti-Marcionite edition of the fourfold Gospels. See Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts.

What distinguishes John is that our final redaction of that (scholars agree that is the third redaction; we do not have the original edition, or the middle-edition preceding ours) does actually claim to have had a written eyewitness source (but it does not name them; at all, least of all “John,” and the original edition appears to have meant this to be not a John, but in fact the resurrected Lazarus, who is a fictional character: see Ch. 10.7 in OHJ). GJohn does not say how much came from this supposed written source; and that written source is probably fictional anyway (and even if real, was itself fiction; possibly even the original edition of GJohn).

Luke also says he used written sources, but in that case, we know them: Mark and Matthew. Luke does not name them, but since a huge amount of Luke is verbatim from Mark and Matthew, it’s obvious who was meant (they aren’t named in Luke, and Luke never names or identifies himself, because those names were all added to them after Luke wrote). Some have speculated a third source for Luke (some Kings-based Gospel, sometimes called Proto-Luke) but it’s just as likely that material is simply invented by “Luke.” And of course there is a speculated Q source but the evidence really does not support that (see Why Do We Still Believe in Q? and The Backwards and Unempirical Logic of Q Apologetics).

P.S. Thank you for all the typo correction comments in other threads. I don’t keep them. But I do act on them. I love getting to correct typos!

Noted. Thanks a lot.

Thank you!

My goodness, being not well-versed in the Christian tradition (including the NT) and apologetics made this paragraph indecipherable to me until you explained it in detail here.

P.S. The comments here will accept some basic HTML coding. The most common are:

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The paragraph is describing an inconsistency in Christian apologetics. As often happens, Christians who maintain one thing, create a problem; so to avoid that problem, they switch to the opposite tack, but then that creates a new problem. They are thus trapped in the horns of their own dilemma.

Here, apologists either have to deny Jesus predicted his resurrection on the third day (despite the Gospels repeatedly having him do so), in order to eliminate the consequences of that theory (that this establishes grounds to fake or expectantly mistake his resurrection); or else, if they accept that Jesus did predict this (in order to keep the Gospels free of lying), they have to then insist that, somehow (?), no one understood him to be predicting that (until after the fact, when they are all like, “Ooooohhh! THAT’s what he meant. Crazy I missed that the first time.”). Both options are implausible.

In reality, the Gospels almost certainly made this up. Precisely because it’s implausible that Jesus would say this repeatedly and literally no one understand him. Especially since, if this is real, then the disciples had access to literally hundreds of hours of conversations with Jesus where they’d surely ask him to clarify and he’d certainly endeavor to be clear, as there is no real need to say something and then intend it not to be understood—that only happens as a device in fiction, not in the real world.

Evidence for this is how Matthew changed Mark’s story from the Messianic Secret (where, implausibly, no one ever understands Jesus, not even his right-hand men) to the Messianic Advertisement (where even the Jewish elite fully understand him to have predicted his resurrection on the third day). Matthew accomplishes this not just by saying this, but by having the elite then even assign a guard to the tomb specifically to prevent the prediction being faked. (Which means even ancient readers could figure out the causal sequence, prediction –> fake it / mistake it.)

So we have three options here.

(1) Mine, which is that this is all obviously fake (fiction after the fact), and the real inspiration for visions of a risen Jesus were crank interpretations of scripture (as I explain now in OHJ). In that case, Williams is completely outside reality.

(2) Williams’, which is that everything Matthew says happened (even though Mark, Matthew’s own source, had never heard of it and portrays exactly the opposite), in order to preserve the Gospels from being unreliable (making things up) and Jesus from being a false prophet (predicting something that didn’t actually happen). In that case, Williams’ own theory comes with a self-destructive liability: his own theory has now created a cause for the resurrection to have been faked or mistaken (thus increasing rather than decreasing the probability it didn’t really happen, the contrary of Williams’ goal).

(3) What happens to be William Lane Craig’s position (sometimes; Craig changes position on this by context as rhetorically needed, because he’s a practiced liar), which is that the Gospels retrodict predictions onto Jesus that never happened. Craig says this explicitly to eliminate the argument against Williams (that Jesus predicting it increases the likelihood of it being faked or mistaken), and thus make the opposite argument (that the disciples were not expecting it, therefore it can’t be explained other than as having actually happened, to their surprise).

What I am doing is pointing out that (2) suffers the very problem noticed by (3) (which has been pointed out by Williams’ own people). I myself don’t believe (2) or (3). I’m just noting they both are self-defeating, because they entail things that undermine the Christian wielding them (by either creating a cause for fakery/mistake, per (2), or admitting the Gospels make stuff up, per (3)).

I found the last comment about the naming very valuable but didn’t understand the argument regarding John.
You mentioned that Matthew is the only exception where they picked the name of an eyewitness but isn’t this also the case for John?

Williams wants to defend the expectations that Jesus would rise from the dead, arguing Jesus likely told his followers to expect it and even hostile Jews would be concerned about a claim of it (pp. 239-40), evidently not realizing this increases the probability of hallucinating or dreaming a confirmation of it…or even indeed of stealing a body to inspire it; after all, Jesus repeatedly telling them the plan, sounds an awful lot like a plan; which is why William Lane Craig likes to deny Jesus predicted his resurrection (see my discussion of the plausibility of theft in Ch. 9 of The Empty Tomb). This does not help his case. But his argument suffers from a number of unjustifiable assumptions anyway, such as that Matthew’s addition to Mark of a wild tale of monster-paralyzed guards has anything to do with reality. In the original version, there is no knowledge or expectation Jesus’s followers would claim he rose from the dead; nor any plausibility to tales of Jesus telling them he would—which portray his Jewish followers as not even knowing what a resurrection was, nor ever understanding or believing him, which is odd behavior for fanatical cultists.

I have a vague feeling that I can’t precisely articulate that your argument in the first part of the paragraph contradicts the last part of the paragraph, that is Jesus explicitly telling them acts a plan but that they also didn’t understand him. Could you please help me resolve this? I am sure it’s a misunderstanding on my side but I couldn’t reconcile it on my own.

I also didn’t understand the sentence about Matthew’s addition to Mark’s story and how does it affect Williams argument here. Could you please elaborate more on that?

I know I have failed to quote block in all my comments so far and you have always generously edited my comments for that. I would be thankful if you instruct me on how do it myself if my attempt here fails.

We don’t know why any Gospels received any names. Much less particular ones. But the legends around them are inconsistent legends not connected to any specific texts (or even our texts, e.g. Papias knows a “Matthew” Gospel written in Hebrew, which cannot be our Gospel, which was copied from Mark’s Greek and uses Greek scriptures as a base text and thus can’t ever have had a Hebrew origin) and some details evolved later rather than at assigning of the name and so can’t help us in explaining the assignment.

The most we can guess is that it appears names were chosen from the letters of Paul (Trobisch proposes a logic of it in his book on the first edition of the NT) when they were assembled together as a four-Gospel canon to combat Marcion’s.

There actually were Gospels assigned to purported eyewitnesses (e.g. the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas). They just weren’t chosen for this canon. The first canon doesn’t survive, and it included only one Gospel, a different version of Luke-Acts. Which purports not to be written by a witness but by some later historian (possibly then named by Marcion; or indeed possibly not, and it only later assumed he was using the same Gospel), and hence could not be assigned to a witness, and any name would have suited, particularly one you could claim associated with Paul; the legend that Luke was a doctor comes from someone picking the most educated companion Paul ever mentions and perhaps assuming they would be a likely skilled writer, but Luke is only in Colossians identified as a physician, and as that letter is a forgery, that that Luke was a doctor is a fiction, so we know their authorship of Luke-Acts is a fiction as well.

Meanwhile, the other Gospels were also circulating unnamed and none identified themselves as written by a witness nor were written as such. Those legends were invented later owing to convenience and confusion. But when names were assigned, authenticity would be undermined by associating them “suddenly” with witnesses, as surely such would have been mentioned and known before then, and surely the texts themselves would say this, not just the titles (whereas Luke and John both explicitly say they were not written by witnesses, so none could be assigned to those texts). That is why the authenticity of the Gospels in the current canon required picking obscure names and inventing legends about them.

The only exception is Matthew, a name legend then spun referred to a witness. But we know that’s false, as Matthew is a rewrite of Mark and thus cannot be a personal memoir (and again, it does not say it is one, either, yet would be expected to). Possibly it was picked because a Mark and a Matthew are mentioned by Papias as authors of Gospels, yet neither of which we can confirm are our Gospels of those names. That may simply have inspired someone to so-name two Gospels and thus attach them to the legends spun by Papias.

In any event, none of the Gospels say they were or were previously known to be written by witnesses, so witnesses could not have been assigned to them credibly (and the one attempt to do so, Matthew, is demonstrably not a credible assignment). And two could never have been so assigned (Luke and John) as they both explicitly say they were not themselves the witnesses (John mentions a lost written text from a purported witness as a source, but IMO, that was originally meant to be Lazarus, a fictional character, and thus likely a fictional source; see OHJ, index, “Lazarus”).

Thanks so much again Dr Carrier. Definitely helped to clarify things a bit.

My one remaining question though is how were the names chosen for the Gospels? Why would they attribute two of them to authors or sources who were not claimed eyewitnesses or apostles (in fact had never even met Jesus) such as Mark or Luke? And do we not know Luke was a real person, a companion of Paul, mentioned in his epistles? And that a John Mark was a companion of Peter mentioned in his epistle? Why not simply attribute Mark to Peter if we are trying to lend credibility and stature to a Gospel, as I would think the person or group organizing the “canon” would want to do?

Thanks again, Steve Glover

Indeed, I have addressed that stuff in various places.

There is of course no such thing as “begging the question against the supernatural” because we have abundant evidence claims of the supernatural are evidence a story is false, so it isn’t begging any question to say usually such stories are false (see Proving History, index, “miracles”), i.e. usually prophecies are retrofits and not genuine; and even Christian apologists, when honest, will admit this—as they will of literally every other religion or sect they are sure is false (see my discussion of Newman on Prophecy).

On the naming of the Gospels see my discussion in Three Things to Know.

On dating the Gospels we have much more than what you list, including evidence Mark used the Wars of Josephus (or knew sources Josephus used on the War) and that Luke used the Antiquities. Mark’s knowledge of the war also extends beyond the retrofitted prophecy of Mark 13, to include the fig tree allegory, demonic pig slaughter, and beyond. I cover these details in Ch. 10.4 of On the Historicity of Jesus.

But more important than all of that is that these Christians are starting with a fallacy in the first place: assuming that anything possible is therefore probable; rather than admitting ignorance when ignorant. If we do not know the Gospels were written before 70-120, we do not know the Gospels were written before 70-120. No amount of “but they could have been” gets you any other result. All historians admit this about all other sources…it’s only Christian apologists who deviate from standard, non-fallacious historical reasoning about the dating of texts (see Ignatian Vexation for example).