First off, Justin Martyr is not the only ancient testimony from the church fathers regarding authoritative texts—far from it. There is Papias who lived in the first century and wrote in the early second, the writings of Ignatius, Polycarp’s testimony through Irenaeus, and the Muratorian Fragment. All of these date from the lifetime of Justin or earlier (the Muratorian Fragment might be a bit later, 170s or so). Papias mentions Mark and Matthew; Irenaeus, drawing from Polycarp, and the Muratorian Fragment also clearly reflect four Gospels.

Justin does not refer to writings by apostles’ names because he is primarily writing for a non-Christian audience that would have no idea to whom he was referring. Apostolic names would hold no weight with his audience, so why mention them?

Were some communities reading different Gospel texts in the second century AD? Of course they were—mostly the four that are retrospectively viewed as canonical, but also some others.

The question isn’t whether other texts were being read but which ones were known to trace back to apostolic eyewitnesses.

You note that names weren’t added until later. That’s partially correct. The names don’t appear on manuscript pages until second century. But that’s not the whole story: In the first place, names were at first placed on tags that hung from the texts. It’s quite likely that the Gospels had names and that the tags were lost—but that is speculative and I would prefer not to appeal to evidence that we don’t actually possess.

Here’s the far more compelling line of reasoning for which there is actual evidence: The four Gospels had achieved wide circulation by the early second century. There’s a fragment of John in Egypt from 110 CE or so, and other Gospel fragments show up in equally widespread locations. Without any doubt, the Gospels were in empire-wide circulation in the late first and early second centuries. By this point, the four Gospels had been around for 20-40 years.

Around the beginning of the second century, scribes did indeed begin to write titles on manuscripts—and the patterns of these additions actually become one of the strongest evidences for a consistent pedigree behind each of the four Gospels.

Now, if Christian communities were fabricating and forging, one would expect, let’s say, a manuscript of Mark’s Gospel from Rome to have Peter’s name at the top, while the same Gospel somewhere else would be ascribed to someone else. In other words, if scribes and churches began making up titles and connections in the second century, the manuscript evidence would include multiplicity of ascribed authors. With manuscripts spread from one end to the other of the Roman Empire and no centralized authority or means of widespread communication, there is no way that all the communities could come up with the same ascriptions if the ascriptions were fabricated in the second century.

Yet that is not at all what one finds in the manuscripts. What you find in the manuscripts is that every copy of the four Gospels that bears an authorial inscription is ascribed to the same authors that they are ascribed to today. The precise wordings may differ but never the ascribed name.

Only two possibilities can really explain this: (1) there were tags that have been lost (less likely, but possible, and it’s too speculative to be taken seriously) or (2) each Gospel was passed on with a clear oral history that traced it back to one author; in other words, each time a Gospel was copied anew for another Christian community, it was passed on to them with the same history.

This latter possibility reflects the types of statements that are actually found in Papias and the Muratorian Fragment, among other places. This does not, of course, prove that the ascribed authors wrote the texts. But, since they began to circulate widely at a very early stage, it does demonstrate that a clear and consistent oral history must have followed them from the earliest stages of their circulation; the lineage of the Gospels was not invented later but followed them from the beginning.

It appears that your understanding of forgeries has been drawn from Bart Ehrman’s recent book Forged. I would encourage you to take a look at some of the reviews of Forged. Even viewed from a charitable perspective, Forged presents far less than the whole story.

http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2011/07/book-review-of-bart-d-ehrman%e2%80%99s-forged-writing-in-the-name-of-god%e2%80%94why-the-bible%e2%80%99s-authors-are-not-who-we-think-they-are/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2011/03/30/forged-bart-ehrmans-new-salvo-the-introduction-2/

Regarding the literacy of the early Christians: Understanding “agrammateus” in Acts 4:13 as “illiterate” misses the point of the term in its context. What’s being communicated is that these proclaimers of Jesus had never been trained as scribes, they were not scholars of the Jewish Torah. Now, the apostles may indeed have been illiterate for all we know, but “agrammateus” neither proves nor disproves that point.

What’s far more significant is that, even among poorer people, widespread documentary evidence points to the fact that professional scribes were readily available to turn spoken rhetoric into polished literary productions. It is entirely possible that the Gospels were orally communicated to a scribe, then turned into literary texts by that scribe. Paul tells us repeatedly that this is what he is doing in his letters, even mentioning his scribes by name (which was not customary). Why should anyone expect that the Gospel-writers would not have done this as well?

As for third- or first-person, first off, this only applies to John and some portions of Matthew. Mark’s eyewitness testimony is from Peter but Mark would naturally have spoken it in third person, and Luke’s Gospel is written by an individual who obtained eyewitness testimony but was not himself an eyewitness, by his own testimony.

But more to the point: Why did Xenophon write about Cyrus in the third person instead of the first, even though he was present in some portions? Why did Caesar write his commentaries in third person instead of first? Why didn’t Velleius Paterculus write every part of his history wherein he was alive in the first person? Simple: because use of third-person was one accepted way of relating a historical narrative in the Greco-Roman context. Mark’s Gospel begins a pattern that the other Gospels follow, writing in third person.

Hopefully, at least some of this is helpful to you!

Much of this is covered in far more detail here
http://www.timothypauljones.com/portfolio/conspiracies-and-the-cross/
and here
http://www.timothypauljones.com/portfolio/misquoting-truth/

Know of any other good resources that address the selection of the books of the Bible in depth?

Thanks for the information. I found your post via tweeter. I enjoyed reading your post and I will read your book.

I agree with you that the most important/popular christian gospels or letters found their way, around the second century, in the armarions of the christian communities (I said communities because it is not a given fact that, in those times, every christian had the money to get a copy of the manuscripts or to even have a proper house with an armarion).

The writings of the early church fathers, basically Justin Martyr, can give us some clues about what manuscripts were being read by the christian communities that Martyr knew of, that does not eliminate the possibility that other christian communities (not known by Marty) were reading other gospels.

I also agree with you that the christian criteria for deciding what books to read was their apostolic lineage, but the problem is that, as far as I understand, there is no compelling evidence that, for example, the four gospels were actually written by apostles or companions of the apostles. On the other side, we know that some of the letters of Paul were not written by Paul and does not help the case of the gospels.

The oldest reference to the four gospels are the writings of Justyn Martyr and he does not refer to these gospels by name, he talks about the memoirs of the apostles or just the memoirs. In Martyr writings we can find passages that match the canonical gospels but without names. I think the names of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John appeared later.
Also, some of the gospels were written in greek, how come the apostles, who according to acts were people without instruction/proper education, had a high level of greek language required to write a gospel in greek?

Not even that, a high level of greek was not enough, the apostles, in order to write the gospels, needed some understanding of the craft of literary composition and it is, again, not a given fact that they had that knowledge.

Lastly, how come the gospels are written in third person and not in first person? I know there is an explanation that says that they wrote in third person because the decide that the most important was Jesus and his message. I do not know what to think. On the other hand, If I would have been a witness I would have established myself as an eyewitness writing in first person.

So, I would like to know if there is any evidence of the apostolic lineage of the four canonical gospels.

Thanks

Alan Brain