mattrose wrote: 2nd century, Papyrus 4, and Papyrus 62
4-5th century codex sinaiticus, codex vaticanus et al
Papyrus 4 is Luke, not Matthew.
Papyrus 62 is fragmentary. It only contains Matthew 11:25; 11:25; 11:25-26; 11:27; 11:27; 11:27-28; 11:28-29; 11:29-30; 11:30.
I did a visual scan of the fragments. Ματθαίος is not in any of them.
Also, wikipedia dates Papyrus 62 as 4th century. Not 2nd. "The manuscript palaeographically has been assigned to the 4th century." I don't have the resources to fact-check that.
The later codex' that you list are only evidence for the church's tradition. They tell us what the church believed about those books by the 4th century. It doesn't tell us those traditions were correct.
There's simply no good reason to suggest that the original gospels were anonymous in any meaningful sense.
To clarify the phrase, anonymous means that the document itself doesn't identify its author. In Paul's letters, he said "I'm paul. I'm writing this letter to the church at corinth." None of the gospels do that. If Mark was connected to Peter, he could have said "I'm Mark, I knew Peter. These are the things he said about Jesus." Or John: "My name is John. I was Jesus's most beloved disciple. I was with him for 3 years. This is my story." The author never says "I'm Luke, I knew Paul."
What they haven't found is a single anonymous manuscript.
This is moot. We have no complete manuscripts prior to the 4th century. Either in support of Matthew's authorship, or its absence. Neither of us can prove that Matthew did or didn't write the gospel based on documents we don't have.
In the absence of internal evidence that the books were written by a specific author, the burden of proof is on someone who wants to claim a specific author. And all that can be said about authorship is based on Eusebius quoting Papias, and church tradition. If that evidence isn't conclusive, then we are left with the documents themselves. And their authors chose to not identify themselves.
If the original manuscripts were actually anonymous (in both the sense that they didn't have an author-title and people genuinely didn't know who wrote them... then it is frankly AMAZING that people from all across the Roman world ended up agreeing to call it the Gospel according to Matthew.
It's not amazing at all. It simply tells us what popular opinion was about the author of something written 300+ years prior. It doesn't denigrate the integrity of those who believed the tradition. But it also isn't authoritative.
Richard Bauckham: It was propogated by the form critics as a corollary to their use of the model of folklore, which is passed down anonymously by communities. The Gospels, they thought, were folk literature, similarly anonymous. This use of the model of folklore has been discredited... partly because there is a great difference between folk traditions passed down over centuries and the short span of time-- less than a lifetime-- that elapsed before Gospels were written. But it is remarkable how tenacious has been the idea that not only the traditions but the Gospels themselves were originally anonymous."
The motivations of the early form critics doesn't discredit evidence. Evidence is evidence. Either the author of Matthew said: "I'm Matthew, this is my book," or he didn't. He didn't.
The bigger question, though, is why does this matter to you? I'm not pushing an agenda. It doesn't matter to me one way or the other. Except that I want to let the Bible be what it is, and not what traditional views about it have said it is. And that seems to be a common theme for people on the board. Why is the traditional authorship of the four gospels so important to you?