Led Zeppelin and the Truth of the New Testament Gospels

Wherein I appeal to Led Zeppelin to respond to Bart Ehrman's claim that the titling of the Gospels suggests authorial ascriptions were fabricated

Open your Bible to the table of contents and take a look at the list of books in the New Testament. There, you’ll find the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John leading the list.

But were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John really the ones who wrote the Gospels? If so, how do we know?

Your first reply might be, Of course, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the Gospels; their names are right there on the books!—and you would be correct. These four names have appeared on the manuscripts of these four Gospels for well over a thousand years. And yet, these names may not have been present on the earliest manuscripts of the Gospels. In fact, when it comes to the question of who wrote the Gospels, some scholars are quite convinced that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John couldn’t possibly have been the authors of these four books. According to New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman,

[The New Testament Gospels] were written thirty-five to sixty-five years after Jesus’ death, … not by people who were eyewitnesses, but by people living later. … Where did these people get their information from? … After the days of Jesus, people started telling stories about him in order to convert others to the faith. … When … Christians recognized the need for apostolic authorities, they attributed these books to apostles (Matthew and John) and close companions of apostles (Mark, the secretary of Peter; and Luke the traveling companion of Paul). … Because our surviving Greek manuscripts provide such a wide variety of (different) titles for the Gospels, textual scholars have long realized that their familiar names (e.g., “The Gospel According to Matthew”) do not go back to a single “original” title, but were added later by scribes.

If Ehrman’s claims are correct, early Christians did not link the four New Testament Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because these individuals actually wrote the Gospels. The Gospels were, according to Ehrman and others, originally anonymous. According to his reconstruction, early Christians fabricated apostolic and eyewitness links in the second century in order to make these documents seem more authoritative.

Yet how believable is Ehrman’s reconstruction?

Take a look with me at the title of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album—or, more precisely, the lack thereof—to find out, in the video below: