The dating does include the first mention of the texts. It provides an upper bound on the date of authorship. That’s why it’s not a serious consideration that the gospels were written after 150.
But who wrote them?
Why do you keep pressing this question? You must think something is at stake, or you wouldn’t be so insistent on getting an answer. What is at stake regarding the authorship of the Gospels? Can you provide a few sentences that give you reason for caring about this question?
I don’t know. Why are you asking me?
It’s a question anyone is free to answer.
As I said, curiosity. If you don’t know, it’s fine to say so. My impression so far is that nobody has any idea.
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Don’t they? Joseph Smith, Ron Hubbard, Guru Nanak, Muhammad, Mary Baker Eddy, Reverend Moon, ect. Why would it have been different before?
Not sure of your point. Yes history is littered with demagogues.
Mentioned by who, when and what did they say? Real people. Not the invented characters in the Catholic witness creation program like Ignatius or Polycarp.
That these founders are not made up.
Says the guy who vented his anger by typing in all caps. What information does an historian of religion have that could refute what Paine and other scholars have discovered about sun worship and the astrological basis of Christianity? Why is a department of religion even necessary? What could possibly be learned from the study of religion that could advance human knowledge even a little bit? What useful new findings has any department of religion come up with in the last 200 years?
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Why aren’t these legitimate questions?
OK. But it isn’t binary. We know little of Muhammad. In Islamic circles, inquiry into such details is on a scale from discouraged to grounds for execution.
Say it’s not so. Saint Polycarpe? There’s a monastery dedicated to him just down the road from me
Oh, it’s true! Polycarp and Ignatius are the Catholic Church’s star witnesses to the witnesses - the work of 2nd century Catholic Orthodoxy, seeding its own beliefs into an earlier era as “evidence” for a timeline back to the apostles and for a rebuttal to the challenge of Gnosticism.
Unitarianism, dualism, trinitarianism. Catharism is my local version of dualism suppressed very successfully by the Catholic Church* but now doing well as tourist destinations (Mont de Sègur).
*Yes, it’s a fallacy.
“Let me tell you something: for thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way- because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.”-CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
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Nobody “knows” who wrote the Gospels in the sense that we “know” that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World.
That is going too far. There are many reasonable ideas, and some of them may be correct. If you want to know some of the ideas about Gospel authorship, read the works of scholars who specialize in the Gospels – which, as far as I can tell, does not include anyone here. So don’t ask us! Use Google and the books section of Amazon.com, and try various combinations of keywords – you will come up with scores of good books on the subject of Gospel authorship and NT authorship generally. And as I said before, while it’s no guarantee, the imprint (Oxford, Chicago, etc.) will help you to find the books written by scholars who are generally considered competent in their area.
But the answer is that nobody knows anything about who or where, and when is somewhat vague. Sending me off on a google search is disingenuous.
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No anger, just trying to make sure I got your attention. And I did, but the effect was to produce not a substantive response to my post, but a rant.
Why? If I said, “Nobody seems to know anything about the composition of the rings of Saturn,” and you didn’t know yourself, but you knew that many scientists had written about that, though you couldn’t remember the titles of the books, why wouldn’t you tell me to do a Google or Amazon search? Nothing “disingenuous” about that at all. You use words weirdly.
I suspect you just can’t be bothered to go to a library or bookstore to get more information on the topic, and want people here to spoon-feed it to you, to save you time and effort.