How do we know that Mathew Mark Luke and John were actually written by the people whose names they were accredited to? I will grant that it was probably at least written by a member of the church because it was widely accepted as the holy word of God by the early church who staked their lives on.  However, it but it might not have been written by the original apostles therefore it may not actually be credible eyewitness testimony, especially given that there were a lot of miracle claims during the middle ages around about this time so a member of the church could have written it but have made parts of it up, since they were not eye witnesses.

I have answered this question a few times at the web site.   The answer is that we cannot absolutely prove this, but we do not need to.  The only really important thing is that all four gospels are inspired by God and they definitely are inspired by God, which means that they are an accurate account of what Jesus did and said.  God is powerful enough to determine in some way what ended up in the Bible.  He would not let bogus lies end up in the gospels.  Besides, the evidence is rather strong that it was in fact the traditional authors, although the evidence varies somewhat as to how overwhelmingly sure we can be.  With Luke and John we can be rather sure that they were the authors.  With Mark and Matthew it is very likely that they were the authors. All the early church leaders agree with this.

But we cannot prove who wrote them, and this does not really matter all that much.  What matters is that they are inspired by God.  The church had literally thousands of eye-witnesses to the ministry of Jesus, to his miracles and to his death.  It had hundreds of eye-witnesses to the resurrection.  Therefore, anything that happened to enter into one of the gospels that was not accurate would have been discovered immediately.  There was a self-correcting community of eye-witnesses in Palestine when and where Matthew and Mark were written.  This would have kept the reliability to a very high level.  People like to imply that the gospels were written way later, but Mark was written within 30 years, and Matthew and Luke were written within 35 years of the death of Jesus.  People’s memories do not fade all that much after 30 years. Besides, do not forget that the writers were inspired by God.   Bogus miracle claims in the Middle Ages have no impact whatsoever. That was eight hundred or one thousand years later!  These New Testament books were all written down in the first century, when there were literally thousands of eye-witnesses around.  This would have no effect.

I did a search at the web site using the words gospel reliability and several articles on this came up.  Please do that search.  I am copying and pasting one of the articles below.

John Oakes

Do critics have a case for the allegation that since Jesus’ life and events were recorded way after his actual death that they cannot truly reflect his image and deeds during his life? Are there any other examples of historical texts that were recorded 20 to 40 years after the fact? Is the reason behind why the gospels were written in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s because of persecution and state of poverty, thus taking it longer to obtain materials to record such things, when other wealthy nations had these materials readily available?  I often see this complaint against the New Testament as a reason to dismiss it along with Tacitus, Josephus, Seutonius and other historians that refer to Jesus. Thanks.

Answer:

It just so happens that I am teaching a class on exactly this topic right now.  You can get access to the audio, notes and power point at the web site right now for free.  Just go and find the articles on Evidence for Jesus.    Here is the simple answer.  No!  This is not a legitimate criticism of the reliability of the New Testament for several reasons.

First of all, these events were NOT recorded way after his death.  The Gospel of Mark was written somewhere in the 50s, or perhaps the very early 60s at the latest.  This is only twenty-five years after the events.  This not a long time.  Human memories are still quite vivid after 25 years.  A majority of the eye-witnesses to the actual events were still alive when Mark, Matthew and Luke wrote their accounts.  Matthew’s account is of an eye-witness, while Mark got his account directly from Peter and Luke was an extremely careful historian.   The idea that the eye-witnesses would wholesale invent incidents in the life of Jesus when a fair number of their hearers were eye-witnesses to the same events is difficult to believe unless we can show evidence that there was some sort of conspiracy.  Given how controversial the Church was and the fact that many of the witnesses died for their faith, there is good reason to believe that they would not make up events which never happened.  Are the gospel accounts actual transcripts of actual conversations?  Possibly not.  However, can we accept that Jesus was indeed crucified, that he was in fact betrayed by Judas for 30 pieces of silver, that he did claim to be the Way, the Truth and the Life and can we accept that he did in fact raise Lazarus, that he actually had 12 apostles and did indeed deliver a sermon such as the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7?  Absolutely yes.   Given the large community of eye-witnesses to the ministry of Jesus–one which was at least in the many hundreds, but probably more like in the several thousands, there is no way that Mark could have made up events out of his imagination only 25 years after the events.  The hundreds who had seen these events for themselves would have corrected any significant errors.   If I were to claim now that the San Deigo Chargers won the Superbowl 25 years ago, everything I said would be completely discounted by my peers.   Knowledge as basic as how Jesus died and what he taught would NOT change in such a short time, especially in a movement as large and public as the Jesus movement was in the first century.

We have many examples of historians writing a generation or so after the events.  For example, Josephus wrote his Jewish Wars and Tacitus wrote his Annals and Suetonius wrote his Lives of the Caesars, all three about 20-50 years after the events.  No one doubts the accuracy of the big picture of what they said, although they might question some of the smaller details.   Generally, histories are not written until a generation or so after the events.  The time frame when the gospels were written fit the normal period when histories are written.  The way the New Testament is criticized and doubted is very different from these other documents because of a hyper-bias against the reliability of the New Testament by the skeptics.  This hyper skepticism is not warranted by the facts.

As for why the first gospel was not written until the 50s–about twenty to twenty-five years after the event, first of all we do not know that this was the first written account.   In fact, most scholars speculate that other accounts were collected before Mark.  It is more like this was the first officially accepted account, not the first written account.  We know that there was a large oral tradition passed around in the early church.  It is a mistake to assume that the events were not written earlier.  The precise reason God chose to have the first permanent gospel written almost a generation after Jesus was killed is something I cannot give a definite answer to, but I do know that earlier on, the church relied on eye-witnesses, but as the church spread outside Palestine and into the Greek and Roman world, it became more important to have more “official” documents.  It was at this time that we begin to see the gospels composed and passed among the churches.  I doubt very much that it had anything to do with poverty because, although the majority in the church were poor, there were prominent men and women in the church, such as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea from the very beginning.

John Oakes