Why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?

The gospels in the New Testament of the Bible were not originally titled. It is believed that the titles of the gospels were added later, during the 2nd century, as a way to identify each gospel and distinguish it from others. The titles of the four gospels in the New Testament are “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John.” It is not clear who added these titles, or why they chose the specific titles that were used. However, these titles have been widely accepted and used for many centuries and are now an integral part of the New Testament canon.

Why these four names were chosen?

There is no record why, who and where these four names were chosen. Then again, there is an evidence that in 185 CE manuscripts were already named, most likely all of them. Two sources are closely connected with the church in Rome. Some thirty years earlier they were quoted without titles, as anonymous manuscripts.

The Gospel According Matthew

Matthew was named after the tax collector who became Jesus’s follower in the first Gospel (Matt. 9:9–13).
- Matthew was an obvious choice. The gospel was focused on Matthew, and it has always been seen as the most “Jewish” of the Gospels.
- If Matthew wrote a Gospel in Hebrew, it was for Jews or for Jewish followers of Jesus. Although the existing Gospel of Matthew was written in Greek instead.

The Gospel According Mark

Mark is named after a person popularly connected with Peter (1 Pet. 5:13).
- It was thought that Peter’s version of Jesus’s life had been written by one of his companions named Mark.

The Gospel According Luke

Luke is named after a traveling companion of Paul (Colossians 4:14).
- The author of the third Gospel, Luke, also wrote the book of Acts.
- Acts is about the spread of Christianity in the years after Jesus’s ascension.
- The main character for most of Acts is the Apostle Paul.
- Acts is told in the third person, except in four passages dealing with Paul’s travels, where the author moves into a first-person narrative, indicating what “we” were doing (Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–15; 21:1–18; and 27:1–28:16). That was taken to suggest that the author of Acts—and therefore of the third Gospel—must have been a traveling companion of Paul.
- Moreover, this author’s ultimate concern is with the spread of the Christian message among gentiles. That must mean, it was reasoned, that he too was a gentile. So the only question is whether we know of a gentile traveling companion of Paul. Yes we do: Luke, the “beloved physician” named in Colossians 4:14. Thus Luke was the author of the third Gospel.

The Gospel According John

John was named after Jesus’s disciple the son of Zebedee, assumed to be the “beloved disciple” mentioned in the fourth Gospel (John 21:20, 24).
- The reasons for naming the fourth Gospel John are less straightforward. In many ways the disciple who is closest to Jesus in this Gospel is not Peter but the mysterious “disciple whom Jesus loved” (e.g., John 13:23; 20:2). Some readers (wrongly) read the reference to him in John 19:35.
- John, the son of Zebedee, who is not called by name in the Gospel.
- He is elsewhere said to be illiterate (Acts 4:13).

Source: Jesus Before Gospels (2016), by Bart D. Ehrman (Chapter: Why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?)