A Short Note on Arguments From Silence and the Authorship of the Gospels

You can't just say the words "argument from silence" and expect anything to happen

Pictured: John, Paul, George, and Ringo

The general consensus among New Testament scholars is that the four Gospels were originally written anonymously, and only gained their traditional association with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John sometime near the end of the second century. There are a lot of reasons to believe this is true, but one of the most persuasive arguments for it is that we have multiple instances of early church fathers seemingly quoting from these Gospels without making any reference to the traditional authors at all. For example, Justin Martyr (writing around 150 or so CE) mentions events from all three synoptic gospels in his Dialogue with Trypho, but never once distinguishes between them with the titles we use today. Instead, he just refers to the whole collection as the “memoirs of the apostles,” period. The Didache, an early Christian text from the end of the first century, similarly quotes the Lord’s Prayer as it’s given in (what we now call) Matthew, but sources it only as coming from “the Lord’s gospel.”

From what I’ve read, even scholars who advocate for the traditional authorship view will generally concede this is some solid evidence in favor of anonymity, even if they think it’s ultimately outweighed by other considerations. But a minority of scholars, as well as plenty of Christian apologists, will sometimes dismiss this sort of reasoning as an “argument from silence.” For example, the Substack user Petrus recently wrote a very interesting defense of traditional authorship for the book of Luke, which has a long section laying out this criticism:

[The argument from an early lack of attribution] is extremely popular with New Testament scholars, but it’s generally very weak. There are many, many examples of incontrovertible historical facts that would be “disproven” by this line of reasoning. Ulysses S. Grant never mentions the Emancipation Proclamation in his memoirs. Likewise, Marco Polo never mentions the Great Wall of China in his book about his journeys. The Jewish writers Josephus and Philo both fail to mention the expulsion of the Jews from Rome in the year 41 AD. Yet Marco Polo still visited China, Josephus and Philo are still both valuable sources of Jewish history, and Grant still was an eyewitness to the key events of the Civil War.

The truth of the matter (as has been argued by epistemologists like Tim Mcgrew) is that humans consistently overestimate our ability to form accurate predictions about who would and would not report on any given event. People often have motivations for mentioning or not mentioning a particular fact that we have no access to. This is particularly the case when dealing with documents written thousands of years ago by people in an early Church that already accepted the authority of the four Gospels.

Unfortunately, I think this response really misses the point. (I don’t mean this as a criticism of Petrus in particular, but just the general argument he’s referring to, which is made in a similar form by a bunch of different people.) It’s true that, in general, we shouldn’t assume something didn’t happen just because a historical source from the time doesn’t mention it. But in this case, the lack of sources referencing traditional authorship is only half the data in question. We also need to deal with the fact that, starting near the end of the second century, attribution that matches the traditional authorship becomes very common. It’s these two facts together - the fact that our earliest sources don’t identify their quotations by naming the traditional authors, and the fact that our later sources do - that combine to help make the anonymity view our most plausible theory.

You might think how church fathers from the third and fourth centuries reference quotations from the Gospel would be irrelevant, since the debate is about how those gospels were understood in the first hundred or so years after being written. But it’s actually very important to look at these later periods, because they give us a functional baseline for how we should generally expect people to write about the Gospels if they did, in fact, assume them to be written by by the traditional authors. And what we see is that, in the later pre-Nicene period where the four Gospels were uncontroversially assumed to be the work of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, church fathers who quote or reference them mention those authors by name all the time. In fact, you basically never see anyone in the early church talking about “memoirs of the apostles” or “the Lord’s gospel” after about 200 CE; with a few exceptions, you pretty much always get the classic citations from the four traditional authors like you would today.

This seriously weakens the “argument from silence” objection that says we can’t be sure the earliest church fathers would have mentioned these authors, since it gives independent evidence that people who believe in the traditional attributions do tend to report that in their writings. In other words, people who defend the anonymity view by pointing out the lack of early attribution to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John aren’t just saying, “Well, it sure seems like Justin Martyr would have mentioned their names if he thought that’s who wrote the Gospels he was quoting.” What we’re saying is that, when we look at the people we’re absolutely sure did attribute the Gospels to their traditional authors, they all behave in ways that Justin Martyr (and the authors of the Didache, and others) didn’t. So if you want to believe our earliest sources just had a habit of leaving off the Gospel authors’ names, you’ll also have to believe that around 200 CE, pretty much everyone suddenly decided to start doing things differently. The alternate explanation - that a change in citation practices was the natural result of a change in beliefs about the authors involved - is much more reasonable.

To think about things another way, we can imagine some possible world where we never see church fathers attributing Gospel references to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John at all, even after the point where other manuscript evidence conclusively shows traditional authorship was widely accepted. This would be a serious problem for the anonymity view, since it would give us direct evidence that we shouldn’t expect these sorts of references in the first place. Proponents of the traditional view would be able to say, “See? Even when we know they believed the traditional authors wrote these texts, they don’t mention those authors in the text itself, so the fact that we don’t see those sorts of mentions in the first hundred or so years isn’t a problem.” But in reality, the situation is the exact opposite: Whenever we’re sure the church fathers did believe Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the Gospels, we tend to see them mention that fact repeatedly. So there’s nothing at all improper about reversing the direction of the argument and seeing a lack of similar references before the late second century as evidence for the absence of those beliefs.

I’ll close with a final analogy: Let’s say I’m writing a new biography that covers the life of a famous novelist, and I want to know whether she worked a day job before her first big novel came out. I reach out to her estate and get a copy of her diary from that time, and start reading through entries from the year where I know she was writing the first draft. From January to December, I don’t see any mention whatsoever of her working any job at all. Should I feel confident putting it in my biography that she was definitely writing full-time that year? No! That would be a legitimately bad argument from silence, since just because she never mentions waiting tables (or whatever) in her diary doesn’t mean she was unemployed. Maybe she just didn’t like writing about something so boring. Who could blame her?

On the other hand, let’s say I look through the diary and see no reference to any kind of day job for January, February, or March, but then start to see her regularly mention working at a grocery store from April to December. In this case, I do have good reason to think she found a day job sometime in the spring - and, therefore, that she was unemployed up until that point. What makes a difference between the two examples is this: In the first, we couldn’t be certain she would mention a day job even if she had one, but once we see it showing up as a topic fairly regularly from May to December, we get solid evidence that it is the sort of thing she would write about. Therefore, pointing to the conspicuous absence of diary entries about her job before April to justify the belief that she got a job in May would not be an argument from silence, or at least not a problematic one. It’s just the most obvious explanation for the totality of the data in front of us.

Of course, you could still insist she had a job the whole time, and blame the fact that she never mentioned it during the first few months on some obscure dynamic we just aren’t aware of. But in the absence of any plausible candidate for an outside influence like that, the most straightforward and reasonable conclusion is just that she got the job around the time she starts mentioning it. And the same is true in the case of the Gospels: While there’s always a chance the early Christian community went through some unsubstantiated cultural or theological shift that pushed them to suddenly start giving credit to authors explicitly, the much simpler explanation is just that people in the early church started attributing these texts to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John around the time they came to believe that’s who the authors were. An assumption like that is hardly an argument from silence - if anything, it’s an argument from when and where the silence stops.