The New Testament: A Pseudo-Apostolic Collection

Let us start with the gospels. Tradition claims that all four gospels were apostolic because Matthew and John were written by the apostle. While Mark and Luke were written by the companions of the apostle Peter and Paul respectively. Modern critical analysis have shown all these claims to be false:

• Mark made quite a few glaring errors in Palestinian geography and customs that it is simply impossible that it could have been written by the one tradition claimed to have been a native of that place. Similarly these problems rule out Peter as his source.

• Matthew can be shown to have extensively used Mark as a source for his gospel. Given the errors in Mark we mentioned above, it is highly improbable than an apostle would have placed such heavy reliance on such a work.

• Luke (the author of the Gospel and Acts) made some major errors regarding some facts about Paul's career that could not have been made by a companion.

• The apostle John could not have written the fourth gospel for some very obvious reasons: the apostle John was unschooled and to assume that he wrote a highly spiritual work such as this would be highly speculative; and his treatment of "the Jews" as a separate race also argues against this. The attribution of the authorship of the fourth gospel to the apostle John can be traced to a mistake by Irenaeus.

Most of the other New Testament books share the same fate. All the other epistles attributed to the apostles (except Paul's) or to his family, the two epistles of Peter, the epistles of James and Jude are all pseudepigraphal, that is written by author(s)other than the ones who were explicitly credited with the writings. The three epistles of John were written by John the Elder not the apostle John. There is nothing in the book of Revelation that claims to have been written by the apostle John. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews is unknown and even fundamentalist Christians no longer claim Pauline authorship.

This leaves us with the epistles of Paul. As we have shown elsewhere there are strong reasons to accept seven of the thirteen epistles as genuine writings of Paul. Isn't this evidence of apostolic tradition in the New Testament? No, there are three reasons why Paul's writing should not be considered apostolic:

1. He was not appointed by the earthly Jesus:
   For Paul's he did not know the earthly Jesus and even asserted that knowledge of the earthly Jesus was irrelevant to his gospel (II Corinthians 5:16). Unlike the twelve (at least according to tradition), he was not appointed by the earthly Jesus.

2. He gave himself, the title of Apostle:
   His title of Apostle (to the Gentiles) was a self-proclaimed one (Romans 11:13, 15:16-18 Galatians 2:2). He admitted that he did not receive his gospel from any human being and claimed that it came direct from the risen Jesus (Galatians 1:16-19).

3. The apostles in Jerusalem did not consider him an apostle:
   Furthermore we have evidence that the apostles who did know Jesus, those who headed the Jerusalem church, starting with the incident at Antioch, never recognized his claim to apostleship. Indeed they actively combated his teachings and refused to be reconciled with him.

• The gospels, the book of Revelation, the epistles attributed to John, Peter, James and Jude were not written by an apostle or by anyone who was a close associate of an apostle. In other words they are pseudonymous writings; writings for which we do not know who the authors were.

• The seven authentic epistles of Paul, while actually written by him, was written by someone whose title of apostle was not given by the earthly Jesus nor was his claim of the appointment by the risen Jesus ever accepted by the people who knew the historical Jesus: namely the leadership of the Jerusalem Church. Thus while the seven epistles are genuine Pauline letters, Paul himself was a pseudo-apostle!

In short the whole corpus of the New Testament can be accurately described as a collection of pseudo-apostolic writings.

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