ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the attribution of names to the canonical New Testament gospels, and the assumption by contemporary scholars that naming the “author” of a gospel text served to authorize its contents. There is no historical precedent for treating kat’ andra (“X according to Y”) as ascribing authorship to a text. Rather, in antiquity the formula most often pointed to a corrector or editor of a pluriform and fluid textual tradition, usually with a mythical author figure or with no author at all. Larsen argues that the earliest uses of the formula applied to early gospel texts likewise do not fit neatly onto conventional ways of ascribing authorship, and that gospel traditions were initially regarded as authorless, or perhaps authored by the Lord or somehow personified and self-authorizing. This new framework pushes scholars to rethink the proliferation of gospel texts not through the lens of authority consolidated in author figures and originary moments of creative genius producing books called gospels, but rather through an interplay of diffuse moments of authorization and correction of a mutable, living, and mushrooming textualized tradition.
