Bart Ehrman says they are never quoted by those names until after Irenaeus assigned those names to them c. 180 CE. They are all quoted by Patristics before then but never by those names, or any names, except the vague "memoirs of the Apostles." Irenaeus based his identification of Mark based solely on his own interpretation of Papias' description of a Petrine memoir supposedly collected by Mark, but as I'm sure you're aware, Papias' described a work that does not match Canonical Mark in virtually any detail given. It's the same with Matthew, also unattested by that name before Irenaeus. . Irenaeus is the source of all four authorship traditions. There is no instance of any of those Gospels being called by those names before 180 CE.neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Mon Dec 19, 2022 12:21 am
On the other hand, re the name of the Gospel -- someone (was it Markus Vinzent?) pointed out that the gospels have always been known by the names we assign to them so it seems reasonable to think that they were assigned those titles/names from their beginning. But I'm not going to bet my house on it.
It's true there aren't any competing traditions, but that's because they were anonymous. Scholars are being a little bit slippery when they say things like that. There are no competing traditions for Mother Goose either. A lack of competing traditions is not evidence that the tradition is true.
One thing in favor of the Papian identification is that the first couple of chapters of Mark do sort of look like an un-chronical collection of unconnected anecdotes (mostly healing and exorcism stories in Galilee), which is what Papias describes. I'm willing to consider a hypothesis that possibly some genuine collection of anecdotes got expanded into Canonical Mark but even then the author is using the material in a highly literary manner, not so much transmitting it as tearing it apart and rearranging it for his narrative, like a rapper using samples.
If the book described by Papias ever existed, it's not Canonical Mark, but it might possibly be embedded in Canonical Mark.
Papias is a pretty shaky source, though.