I would like to know the religions of the Gospel authors, i.e., Mark, Matthews, Luke and John.
Well, they were Christian, for one thing. I think the writers of Matthew and Mark were Jews originally, and that Luke and (maybe) John were ethnically Greek, which doesn’t say much about their religion before Christianity. (Unless John should be identified with John the Apostile, which is traditional, in which case, he was Jewish. However, if you believe, as some people do, that the writer of John was someone other than John the Apostle, he wasn’t neccesarily Jewish.)
Thank you for your very quick reply. The reason I’m asking this question that I am studying Christian antisemitism and as you can imagine the Gospels are quoted quite often. Hence, I was curious what was the religion of the Gospel authors.When I ask my Catholic friends they seemed to be stumped. Some of them think that Jesus was Catholic/christian.
Jesus was a Jew, along with all of his disciples. Anything resembling “Christianity” would have had to happen AFTER the Resurrection.
People who believe that Jesus was the Son of God, or the “Christ”, are “Christian”. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all believed that Jesus was the “Christ”, therefore they were Christian. So did others. That was why they were following Him–they believed he was the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One.
From Matthew 16:
It’s an interesting theological fine point to wonder whether Jesus Himself would have counted as a Christian. Did He believe in Himself? 
Otherwise, it’s perfectly safe, and true, to say that He was Jewish, because He was. I don’t know how anybody could think He was Catholic, since the Catholic Church as such didn’t begin to come into existence until, what, at least a hundred years after He died (depending on how you want to look at it). And even just the “Christian” church as such didn’t get started until after He died.
And rose again. 
Gloria: Daddy! Jesus himself was a Jew!
Archie: Only on his mother’s side!
(All in the Family, ca. 1975)
On his last night as a free man, Jesus and his Apostles shared the Seder, which is enough almost in and of itself to vouch for his and their Jewishness. Later, Peter and Paul of course got into major debates over whether one had to become Jewish before s/he could become Christian, with Peter saying yes and Paul saying no.
Also on his last night as a free man, Jesus washed his apostle’s feet. This was almost identical to an Essene ritual, as are several verses of the Lord’s Prayer and portions of the Beatitudes. Many believe that Jesus had been an Essene during the “missing years” and perhaps was the “Great Teacher of Righteousness” mentioned in some of their writings (though it’s generally believed that the Teacher lived before Christ). Certainly he had no use for the other two Jewish religious factions (Pharisees and Sadducees).
Luke is identified as a Greek physician, so presumably, before he encountered Paul and became a Christian, Luke had worshipped Zeus and the rest of the standard Greek pagan gods.
Mark and Matthew were written for Jewish audiences, probably in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, around 70 AD. Many Christians assumed that the destruction of the Temple presaged the Second Coming and the end of the world. The ending of Mark’s Gospel seems to imply that.
Matthew’s gospel was probably written a few years after Mark’s, and it’s very Jewish in its orientation. Much of it is concerned with showing Jewish readers how Jesus fulfilled prophecy and completed God’s covenant with the Jews.
When people talk about anti-semitism in the Gospels, John is usually the Gospel they hang their hats on. If you believe the author was the Apostle John himself or a close follower of his, the author was surely Jewish. But as Captain Amazing notes, there’s a palpable hostility to Jews in many parts of John, which makes some people wonder if the author was indeed a Jew, or if John’s followers were largely Gentile toward the end of his life.
This is perplexing. On the one hand, the Disciples apparently considered Jesus to be Jewish, because the called him “Rabbi”; on the other, they distuinguished between themselves and the Jews, whom they considered a threat to Jesus:
So, does this mean the Disciples considered themselves (and Jesus) Jewish or not?
This reminds me of a line from All in the Family. George Jefferson and Archie were arguing about Jesus’ race. George said “they’ve already proven Jeus was an Ethiopian.” Archie came back with, “you say he’s Ethiopian, Presbeterian says Presbeterian…”
Few Christians are aware of the path from Jesus’ resurrection to the Christian faith as we know it today. It’s a complex topic that can’t be answewed succinctly. My own church has been using the PBS Frontline series From Jesus to Christ in adult bible study and it’s been quite illuminating. This might be worth a look for you. It wold certainly be useful to your friends who probably don’t know what the term catholic means.
It appears my question has stimulated quite a bit of discussion. So it make it easier let me rephrase my question to make it clearer.
ORGINAL Question:
I would like to know the religions of the Gospel authors, i.e., Mark, Matthews, Luke and John.
REVISED QUESTION:
What were the religions of the Gospel authors, i.e., Mark, Matthews, Luke and John before they wrote the Gospels?
Modern theological thought does not credit the book of Mark to the disciple Mark, Luke to Luke, etc.:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbible4.html
So your question would have to be modified accordingly.
Also, the relatively-rigid categories we use today, Jew, Catholic, Protestant, etc., were not in existance then. So what they “were” according to personal faith at the time might not match how we would pigeonhole them by today’s philosophy. In other words, your question might not be answerable without a lot of fudging.
It appears my questions is in need of another revision.
ORGINAL Question:
I would like to know the religions of the Gospel authors, i.e., Mark, Matthews, Luke and John.
REVISED QUESTION:
What were the religions of the Gospel authors, i.e., Mark, Matthews, Luke and John before they wrote the Gospels?
REVISED QUESTION- A:
Weref the Gospel authors, i.e., Mark, Matthews, Luke and John Jewish before they wrote the Gospels?
Luke was a gentile.
Matthew, Mark, and John were all Jewish.
I guess you could say they were Messianic Jews … Jews that believed that Jesus is/was the Messiah.
The Catholic Church traces its origin to those very verses in Matthew quoted above. Jesus renamed Simon to Peter (which means “rock”), and then stated He would build His church upon this rock.
The lineage of Popes traces an unbroken line from Peter to the present day John Paul II.
(and let’s not get tangled up in the quibbling about the Greek word for “rock” in this thread!)
~VOW
Um … VOW …
How can your denomination be THE Church?
Well, Catholic belief is that the Roman Catholic Church is the original church started by Jesus, and that all other Christian churches are later splits from it (or splits from splits from it).
Anyway, I’d stick with my prior answer…Matthew and Mark were former Jews, Luke and maybe John, Greeks, and who knows what their beliefs were before they became Christian.
There is actually some debate on whether Jesus may have been more a Pharisee. By the time the Gospels were written, there was increased animosity between established Jews and the upstart Christians, and increased incentive for Christians to distinguish themselves from the Jewish leaders in the face of Roman persecution of Jews. This may have played a part in demonizing the Pharisees in the Gospels, even if differences between the two groups may have been smaller during the time of Jesus.
There a few threads which discuss some of this, here are a couple.
First we can’t be rationally certain the scriptures labeled Matthew, Mark , Luke and John were written by the persons identified by these names in said scriptures. These authoritative Gospels where selected from a much larger mass of writings which also claimed to be the work of one or other associate of the person we call Jesus. The wheat was selected from the chaff at the council of Nicea by methods somewhat less than completely scientific and the extraneous material was declared apocryphal and rigorously suppressed. Then there is a huge body of non-scriptural tradition which fills in most of the biographical detail about Jesus’ associates. The authors usually went to whatever pains they could devise to antedate this material.
So for a further revision of your question you have to ask yourself what standard of proof or what authority you want to accept. If you’re scientifically minded the answer is, there is no way to be sure. If you believe everything written by any religious person before modern times the answer is a conflict. If you fall somewhere in between, you get to decide what you believe.
Remember, to an existentialist there are two kinds of people, people who know they’re existentialists and people who think they’re not, but are.
This is getting to be an interesting thread but now the thread is off my question:
Were the Gospel authors, i.e., Mark, Matthews, Luke and John Jewish before they wrote the Gospels?
Either they were Jewish, not Jewish, not sure or don’t know. The answer can be from Christian scripture or from critical analysis of the Christian scriptures.
Mortman: read Musicat’s link. It is a matter of some disagreement of just exactly who Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were.
If you accept that tradtional Biblical scholarship had their ID’s right then the post by WVWOMAN answers your question (Tho astorian and Captian Amazing raise good points about John.) Others too.