Thoughts ans Opinions on Elaine Pagels

[Adam]

What does the evidence actually say? We have not covered what evidence we have that these were NOT the authors.
Even so, being written in the age of eyewitnesses fulfills a condition which would be necessary for accepting it as authoritative. Gnostic gospels do not fulfill this necessary condition, being so late.
Even so, there were not apostles, and probably not eyewitnesses themselves (Luke even said he interviewed eyewitnesses) they would not be likely names if just choosing a name was the case. The Gnostic gospels chose more prominent names to add to the authority of their books. Mark and Luke add to the credibility of their authorship since they are not prominent, they are not even mentioned in the gospels. Besides, all you have to doubt their authorship is...what again? Because an ECF who references the gospels got some other stuff mixed up? Why select out his attribution of these authors as what is wrong? You still have the fact that there are no adverse witnesses to these four authors but rather consensus. Are you saying that nobody would have been dilligent to pass on the authors of the scrolls when they passed on the scrolls to the point that by the time the ECF's wrote and referenced them nobody knew who wrote them anymore and would accept any name at that point? Don't you think the scrolls probably meant a little bit more to them than that? Don't you think someone would have remembered, the scrolls had not be circulating for that long before they were referenced. Someone, somewhere would have said something contrary if the names were different, don't you think? Why not?
So if he got this thing wrong everything must be wrong? There are reasons to doubt Matthew was originally written in Hebrew, fine. But what are the reasons to doubt that Matthew was not the author of Matthew, Mark the author of Mark, Luke the author of Luke and John the author of John?

I won't address the Gnostic Gospels, the subject of this thread, just where Charleen touches upon the canonical gospels.
First, Charleen is more than just correct that Elaine Pagels pushes the date of the Gospel of John to the far fringes. Ever since 1964 I have been convinced that it was written before 70 A. D., some portions as early as 44 A. D. Bishop John A. T. Robinson proved the point quite well a decade later in two books. That the pre-70 date is still not accepted consensus is due to the unholy alliance between the atheists insisting on as late a date as possible and Traditionalists unwilling to part with their tradition that John was the sole author in the 90's.
Sorry, Charleen, there is evidence of conflicting attributions of authorship. The Muratorian Canon, about 170 A. D., credits Andrew with getting the apostles (plural) around to writing John. My own researches establish that Andrew himself was one of the authors, though John joined in at a later stage.
That Matthew has always been assigned a gospel does not mean that we must identify it as the Gospel of Matthew. That gospel is so obviously a secondary work that someone so intimately involved as Matthew would show clearly as such. Instead Matthew wrote Q, the source gospel underlying Matthew and Luke (and by my analysis, the Twelve-Source in Mark as well). As for Mark, the tradition itself associates it not just with Mark, but with Peter as his authority. But that the edition of Mark we have today is entirely from Mark's hand is unlikely, particularly the section not found in Luke.
That leaves only Luke as the canonical gospel about which no reasonable doubt exists as to authorship, and we all agree he was not an eye-witness. But my research shows that all the gospels (though not in their final editions) are soundly based on eye-witness testimony of Peter, Matthew, Andrew, John, and (my idiosyncracy) Nicodemus.
My research has been presented here in TWeb at some length in Apologetics 301, mostly in the last half of 2005.
Adam