Heretics and Pagans on Who Wrote the Gospels

In the first three centuries after Christ, even those identified as heretics and enemies of the Church seem to have accepted that the four Gospels were actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

For example, in the second century AD, Irenaeus points out that early Christian heretics appealed to the Gospels in order to make the case for their various teachings:

Irenaeus, Against Heresies , 3.11.7

So firm is the ground upon which these Gospels rest, that the very heretics themselves bear witness to them , and, starting from these [documents], each one of them endeavors to establish his own peculiar doctrine…. Since, then, our opponents do bear testimony to us, and make use of these [documents], our proof derived from them is firm and true.¹

---

Remarkably, this is even true of the pagan writer Celsus, who lived in the late second century AD. Celsus was one of the fiercest enemies and critics of Christianity in the early Church, and he devoted a substantial portion of his time to attacking it. This is what he has to say about the authorship of the Gospels:

Celsus, Against the Christians

The disciples of Jesus, having no undoubted fact on which to rely, devised the fiction that he foreknew everything before it happened…. The disciples of Jesus wrote such accounts regarding him , by way of extenuating the charges that told against him.²

Notice here that Celsus definitely thinks that the Gospels are fiction. However, he never questions that they were actually written by “disciples of Jesus.” This is extremely significant, since Celsus could have easily strengthened his case against Christianity by arguing that none of the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses and apostles. But he makes no such claim. Instead, this pagan critic takes the apostolic authorship of the Gospels for granted and argues against them on other grounds. Origen points out that pagan critics like Celsus will not go so far as to deny the fact that “Jesus’s own pupils and hearers” left behind “their reminiscences of Jesus in writing” (Origen, Against Celsus , 2.13).³

Footnotes

1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies , 3.11.7, trans. ANF, 1.428. ↩︎

2. Cited in Origen, Contra Celsus , 2.15, 16, trans. ANF, 4.437, 438. See also Celsus, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians , trans. R. Joseph Hoffman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). ↩︎

3. See Henry Chadwick, Contra Celsum (repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 80. ↩︎