Now to John in Waterloo, Iowa. John, you are on with Jimmy Akin, what is your
question? Well, I had a question about who wrote the book of Revelation attributed
to John. Okay. And I had called the public library here to get the answer,
and she told me that nobody knew who wrote any of the Gospels.
That they were all anonymous. They didn't know. And I said, "Well, what about
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?" And she said, "Well a pope in the year 101 determined
that they were the one that wrote the Gospels." And I thought, "That doesn't make
sense to me." So a friend of mine gave me your number to get the correct
answer that the Catholic Church teaches. Who wrote the Gospels, and how
did they know that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote them ? Okay. Well, this is an
illustration of not relying on the reference desk at your library for
religious knowledge. Do not trust the eternal fate of your soul to to a
reference librarian, as much as the good work they often do is. The Church doesn't
have a teaching about who wrote the Gospels or the book of Revelation. It
considers that a question of history rather than of faith. The important thing
is that these documents are the inspired Word of God and we can trust them. And so
that's the most important thing. The question of "Who did God use as His
instruments in writing them?" is a secondary question. Now, having said that,
that doesn't mean we can't know something about who wrote them. In the
case of the book of Revelation, it expressly identifies itself as being by
John. It doesn't give us much more information than that, but it does
indicate it was written by someone named John, and the majority opinion has, down
through history, has been that it's John the
of Zebedee, who is the brother of James, one of the original twelve Apostles.
That's been the majority opinion down through history, and that's the opinion
most people have today. There has been some dispute about that, though. In the
early centuries, and also today, there was some thought that it may have been a
different John. And that's something that Pope Benedict talked about actually, that
the author, since he chose not to further identify himself, apparently wanted to
leave this as a bit of a mystery. It was known to his original audience who he
was, but he didn't want to lock it down for everybody by making it fully
explicit. In terms of the Gospels, it's not really accurate to say they're
anonymous. Something's anonymous if the author deliberately hides himself so
that, you know, if I wrote a book and sent it to a publisher and told the publisher
"Don't put my name on it so no one will know who I am," well that would be an
anonymous book. But if I wrote you a note, Cy, and I put it on your desk, and
even if I didn't sign it you could see, okay, this is my penmanship so you know
it's by Jimmy, well, it's not really anonymous even though it doesn't have my
name on it. And that's the situation we have with the four Gospels. Because they
were written to specific people; like Luke was written to a guy he refers to
as Theophilus. Well, Theophilus obviously know knows who's writing to him. He
probably was Luke's patron, he probably paid for Luke to be able to write that
Gospel, to gather all the materials-- because back then, books were really
expensive--and so Theophilus certainly knew who Luke was, so Luke wasn't an
anonymous work. The same way with the other Gospels; the evangelists were not
rich men, so they needed sponsors just like we do here on Catholic Answers. Nice
tie-in. They needed supporters to make their work possible, and so the
people who were supporting them obviously knew who wrote these books--
they were the first audiences of the books. And this is I guess kind of
where the rubber hits the road in a certain respect; the names "Matthew," "Mark,"
"Luke," and "John" were attached to the Gospels from the 1st century onward. It
was necessary that as soon as you had more than
one Gospel in a congregation being read, you needed to have ways to refer to them;
and so right there from the first century onward, the names
"Matthew," "Mark," "Luke," and "John" were attached to these Gospels, and so that's who wrote
them. We have first century evidence that that's the case. It wasn't a later pope,
it was the practice of the Church from the first century onward to use these
names for them as their authors. And that's something that the German scholar
Martin Hengel has written very incisively about.