사복음서의 제목은 어떻게 정해졌을까?

Abstract

According to the majority viewpoint all four Gospels were written anonymously. Recently, however, some scholars have argued that the Gospels were written by the individuals named in their titles and hence the identities of their authors were clear with certainty. This paper examines the different perspectives on the authorship of the four Gospels. Bart Ehrman, who represents the majority view, argued that the titles were not made up by their authors but by someone in the late second century. It was only after ‘heresies’ began to thrive that Christians claimed for the first time that the Gospels had been written by the supposed authors. If the supposed authors had written the four Gospels, the titles might have been “The Gospel of Jesus Christ” or “The Life and Death of Our Savior” rather than “The Gospel According to Matthew.” Martin Hengel agreed that the four Gospels did not have the authority of canon in the late second century. According to him, the four Gospels were distributed widely and quickly during that time. Various Christian communities had different predilections toward the order of the four Gospels. Nevertheless, the four Gospels used by the Christian communities over the Mediterranean world in the late second century had the same titles, contents, and texts. We can explain this consistency of the titles only by premising that the four Gospels had their names from the first time. The authors who wrote the four Gospels named their books themselves. Since there were no Old Testament writings without titles, it was unlikely that the four Gospels were circulated anonymously for such a long time. Timothy Paul Jones argued that the Gospels were really written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John who dictated the books that bore their names. His main idea was expressed in this question, “How is it possible that the names of the authors are so consistent in the ancient manuscripts of the New Testament Gospels?”. If there it had not been for any information about the Gospels when they were distributed at first, the titles of four Gospels must have been different. Only because all the churches received and passed on the same oral traditions about the four Gospels, could the titles of the four Gospels have been so consistent. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that some believers who had the oral traditions in the late second century gave the names to the four Gospels.