In considering the historical value of any four documents, proof when
they were written and who wrote them is, no doubt, highly important.
For if proof exists, that A B C and D wrote them, and that they were
intelligent persons, writing independently and without prejudice,
about facts within their own knowledge--their statements must needs be
worthy of the most attentive consideration.[4] But, even
ecclesiastical tradition does not assert that either "Mark" or "Luke"
wrote from his own knowledge--indeed "Luke" expressly asserts he did
not. I cannot discover that any competent authority now maintains that
the apostle Matthew wrote the Gospel which passes under his name. And
whether the apostle John had, or had not, anything to do with the
fourth Gospel; and if he had, what his share amounted to; are, as
everybody who has attended to these matters knows, questions still
hotly disputed, and with regard to which the extant evidence can
hardly carry an impartial judge beyond the admission of a possibility
this way or that.
Thus, nothing but a balancing of very dubious probabilities is to be
attained by approaching the question from this side. It is otherwise
if we make the documents tell their own story: if we study them, as we
study fossils, to discover internal evidence, of when they arose, and
how they have come to be. That really fruitful line of inquiry has led
to the statement and the discussion of what is known as the _Synoptic
Problem_.
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