It has become a truism of biblical studies that the canonical gospels are anonymous works. This truism stumbles against the evidence. Most notably, I am aware of no extant ancient copy of any canonical gospels that lacks the traditional attributions where we would expect them to physically be. Absent other arguments, this suffices to establish as probable that the traditional attributions are original to the texts.
Above I put in the rider, "Absent other arguments." One argument frequently advanced is that the standardization of the titles suggests that they are secondary. By standardization, I mean the fact that they are consistently known as the "The Gospel According to Mark," "The Gospel According to Matthew," etc. The more I think about this line of argumentation however, the more I realize that it is deeply problematic. Virtually all scholars today agree that Mark's Gospel was the first one written, and served as a source for both Matthew's and Luke's. Given the data, it doesn't take much historical imagination to think that the authors of Matthew's Gospel and Luke's emulated the form of the Markan title. Although the question of John's relationship to the Synoptics is a perennial debate, the winds these days seem to be shifting towards the supposition that the author knew at least Mark's Gospel. Again, that the author of John's Gospel might have emulated the title of Mark's Gospel is hardly beyond imagining.
It has been objected that the formulation "According to..." only became necessary when two or more gospels existed, and thus they needed to be distinguished from each other. This is really quite speculative, to be placed in the category of a possibility lacking positive evidence. It is perhaps as plausible as the hypothesis that the titles are original to the gospels, but in having to introduce an additional compositional step in the processes leading to these texts as we know them from the manuscript tradition we render this hypothesis less parsimonious.
To summarize the above: one can build a quite plausible account for the standardization of the titles, without appealing to the otherwise unsupported hypothesis that these are secondary additions. The originality of the titles—and thus the attributions—would thus far seem to remain not only able to explain the totality of the relevant data, but to do so in the most parsimonious fashion. This means that the gospels are not anonymous. One or more of these texts might very well be pseudonymous, and indeed I struggle to explain specifically the Gospel of Matthew in its entirety if the historical Matthew is the primary author (notably, supposing Markan priority, we have to assume that he took a story about Levi's conversion and turned it into a story about his own. Not necessarily impossible, and I can think of conditions under which this might happen, but it does seem a bit odd to me). But pseudonymity is not the same as anonymity, and insofar as clarity is a virtue we should with regard to the canonical gospels abandon the latter term as factually inaccurate.
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