Why are there only four gospels in the bible when there were twelve apostles? Were Matthew, Mark, Luke and John the only ones who passed Hebrew Composition?
If I’m not mistaken, none of the Gospel writers were the authors of the Gospels.
Fraid I don’t really know, raisinbread. Perhaps there are only 4 gospels because that was what God wanted in there. That’s the way I see it anyway.
D’oh! I mean, none of the Apostles were the authors of the Gospels!
Sorry! :smack: :o
…the gospels were written in Koine Greek, not Hebrew…
Writing a gospel doesn’t really have anything to do with being an apostle. Matthew and John were apostles, Luke worked with Paul (the guy who wrote most of the rest of the New Testament), and Mark is traditionally said to have been a student of the apostle Peter. AFAIK, none of the gospels themselves actually name an author in the text.
So, why would anyone expect every last apostle to be the author of a Gospel? Why would anyone expect ANY of them?
As mentioned, the traditionalist interpretation has only two of the Gospels associated to Apostles – or at least to the churches founded by them: Matthew and John. The other two are attributed to 1st-generation disciples of the Apostles: Mark (John Marcus) and Luke. They may all have been rather written at various early churches who just placed themselves under the symbolic advocation of these “founding fathers”.
The largest number of books of the NT are by Paul, who wasn’t even one of the Twelve, and these predate the canonical Gospels as-we-know-them. By the time the first of the Gospels started taking shape, several of the Twelve were already dead and by the time John’s was disseminated they were all gone.
This also means a primitive Christian church existed and had a certain structure of doctrinal leadership before all the texts of the NT were even written as-we-know-them, much less gathered in the order we know.
Numerous Apocryphal, Pseudoepigraphic, and Gnostic writings referred as “Gospels” exist, attributed ( VERY allegedly) to the rest of the Apostles plus other major supporting players like Magdalene. Some are just fragments or collections of sayings with nothing new to add. Some are… odd. But in the end what happened was they just did not make the editorial cut with the Early Church Fathers.
Staff Report:
Who wrote the Bible? (Part 4) 10-Jan-2002
Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various New Testament Books?