ABSTRACT
Modern readers tend to associate the authority of a written text with that of its author. In the case of biblical texts, many of them have their authority precisely because of their authors. To take a few examples, those who believe that God is the ‘real author’ of the Bible will obviously see the text as having authority. Those who insist that Moses wrote the Pentateuch or that Paul wrote the Pastorals might be driven by a fear that if that were not the case, then in some way the authority of those texts would be diminished. I will discuss shortly how important it was for some second-century Christian writers to attach a Gospel to an author who had apostolic authority. The Gospels are anonymous texts – to say it again – but later authority issues among Christians forced them to identify Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as authors of the Gospels, and, in turn, to associate these names with apostolic authority. The author gave the text authority, and so it was important for the author to have a name and to be apostolic.
