WHO IS MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR WRITING THE NEW TESTAMENT?

This may seem to some people as a rather simple thing to determine, while for others it is an unanswerable question. I tend to fall into the last category for a number of reasons. In the first place, we need to clarify whether one is taking into account human actors only. If not, then of course we have to say that without God in the first place, there would be no Bible at all. And without the Holy Spirit to inspire the writings, we would be also be without it. Of course, the Second Person of the Trinity cannot be forgotten either since the whole New Testament is one long tribute to Christ's works and words.

But even if we limit our discussion to human personages, it is still not an easy question to answer. Let us start by assuming that the traditional attributions of authorship are correct. Keeping that simple criteria in mind, you might want to stop at this point and take a guess as to who contributed the most words of text among the obvious three candidates: John, Luke, and Paul.

Let's see how well you did:

If you add up John's Gospel, his three short epistles, and the Book of Revelation, you arrive at a little over 18% of the NT. But that assumes that one discounts the opinion of J. M. Ford who thinks that John the Baptist wrote most of Revelation, as well as numerous critical scholars who feel that a later person named John is responsible for that book. If either school of thought is correct, the contribution of the apostle John drops to only 12% of the total.

Moving on to Luke, we can count his two-part history, Luke-Acts, which amounts to a whopping 26% of the NT. Almost all scholars are confident that Paul's companion Luke was the author of that history. But that may not be the whole story, as we shall see in a minute.

It would also seem to be easy to add up all the epistles of Paul to determine how much of the NT was written by him. According to the traditional attributions, Paul is responsible for almost one-quarter of the total text.

So by that criterion, it is a neck-and-neck race between Paul and Luke, with John coming in not far behind. Of course, that is not the end of the story. For example, the elephant in the room, even for evangelical scholars, is the rather large Epistle to the Hebrews which contains no obvious attribution of authorship. In our present traditional order of NT books, it appears at the end of the Pauline letters and before the General Epistles written to a wide audience. That could mean that the early church lists which included it could have considered it to be part of Paul's writings, to which it shows a number of similarities.

There are still fundamentalist believers today who are adamant that Paul himself wrote Hebrews, and if so then that would clearly make Paul the winner. But the vast majority of evangelical scholars and laymen admit that it is unlikely Paul wrote it. However, a number of other names have been proposed as candidates for the honor, most of whom would not help us break the two-way tie between Paul and Luke. But high on the list among those names is Luke himself. I won't go into all the details for that possible identification except to point to David L. Allen's 2010 book titled Lukan Authorship of Hebrews in which he spends over 400 pages defending his thesis by a discussion of the historical, linguistic, and theological similarities between Hebrews and the authentic writings of Luke. In addition, I have come to the same conclusion regarding Luke's authorship of the book based on structural arguments (see the post on “Hebrews: Introduction to Structural Analysis”). If Luke is indeed the author of that anonymous book, then that would bring his contribution to the NT up to 31%, putting him ahead of Paul.

However, since I worded by title question as “who was most responsible” rather than limiting it to actual authorship, there is another way to look at it. The second half of Acts may have been written by Luke, but it would not be there if it weren't for the actions and words of Paul who is the main protagonist there. So we could share credit between the two of them for those chapters, decreasing Luke's total to 22% without Hebrews and 27% with that anonymous book included. At the same time, Paul's contribution would increase to 29%, putting him slightly ahead of Luke. Or, if you want to attribute Hebrews to him as well, his lead increases to almost 37% of the total.

We are not done yet since according to the noted NT scholar R.E. Brown, “At the present moment [1997] about 60 percent of critical scholarship holds that Paul did not write the letter [of Colossians]. And similar negative comments have been expressed toward the authorship of Ephesians. The latter is of special interest since Brown, Puskas, and Kasemann are among the scholars who take seriously the possibility that Luke may have written it instead of Paul.

And then we come to the Pastoral Letters of I-II Timothy and Titus. There is even more doubt among liberal scholars concerning Paul's authorship of those. Donald Guthrie says, “Because of the close linguistic affinity of the Pastorals with Luke/Acts, it has been suggested that Luke may have been responsible for the stylistic peculiarities. But it is open to question whether Paul would have allowed such freedom [to a secretary such as Luke].” Holzman calls those similarities “remarkable.”

Hanson explains, “The argument in favor of Luke is largely built on similarities of vocabulary, particularly striking in the case of Ac. 20:18-35 in comparison with 2 Tim. 4:6-8. Compare also 2 Tim. 4:11.” It has been proposed that either Luke wrote down the Pastorals at Paul's direction or used some notes of Paul to compose it after his death.

And in all of the above reasoning, the apostle Peter has been ignored. It is true that we only have two short letters under his name, but remember that he is the major figure for most of the first half of Acts and figures heavily in the Gospel accounts as well. In addition, there is strong early church tradition that Mark relied heavily on Peter's reminiscences in composing his Gospel account.

In conclusion, I have no sure answer to give you, but personally I lean toward Luke as the most prolific writer in the New Testament. And if you think the situation is confusing for the NT, it is ten times worse for the Old Testament.