Frequently Asked Questions (3)
Larry Hart
The following questions and responses (divided into four separate posts) are related to podcasts 19-24 on Larry’s Inklings. If you prefer listening to reading the questions and answers they can be found as audio on Larry’s Inklings (Podcasts 25-28).
Q) What can be said about the dates for the composition of the New Testament, and what does it matter?
A) When the New Testament was written is a significant issue for many who see it as impacting the historical accuracy of the Bible. Non-confessing scholars believe that the later the date they can claim for the writing of the New Testament the more it strengthens their argument that Christianity is the result of a long developmental process. The original autographs, or manuscripts, of the New Testament were not written, they argue, until very late in the first century or early to mid-second century after undergoing many editorial changes along the way. The Gospels in particular, it is argued, are stories and sayings various writers and groups made up after the apostolic era, after the time of the apostles, to serve their own purposes. So, what is the man or woman of faith to make of this?
Dating the four Gospels and other books of the New Testament is difficult for a number of reasons: The Jewish, Macedonian (Greek), and Roman calendars all began at different times of the year. When dealing with intervals of time, whether a day or a year, it is difficult to determine whether the interval is inclusive (the whole day or year), or exclusive (a part of the day or year). Also, dates are frequently designated not by the calendar, but by the time someone ruled or reigned. It is, therefore, commonly understood that dates for ancient historical events may be a year or two off either way. Occasionally, but not as often as we would like, it is possible to coordinate Biblical events with the dates of established secular events.
For example, in 2 Corinthians 11:32 Paul provides this solid time reference. He writes there: “In Damascus the governor under King Aretas had the city of the Damascenes guarded in order to arrest me.” It is known that King Aretas died in 40 C.E. This would mean Paul’s conversion adventures on the road to and in the city of Damascus occurred sometime prior to 40 at the very latest. Most scholars believe Paul’s conversion and time in Damascus actually took place much earlier––probably within no more than one or two years after Jesus’s crucifixion––so in 33 or 34 C.E.
In Acts 18: 11-12 there is another incident which when coupled with an inscription discovered by archeologists in 1905 helps establish the chronology of Paul’s work and writing. This text in the Acts of the Apostles reads: “And Paul was in the City of Corinth for eighteen months, teaching the word of God among them. But while Gallio was Governor of the Province of Achaia the Jews rose up against Paul and brought him before the judgment seat.”
In 1905 nine fragments of a stone were found at the ancient Greek city of Delphi and put together by a team of international archeologists. The inscription on the stone was from the Roman Emperor Claudius to Gallio who was Proconsul of the region or province of Achaia in which the City of Corinth was located. The inscription itself is an order for Gallio to find a way of repopulating the city of Delphi, which had fallen on hard times. The Emperor, Claudius, declares in this inscription that this is the twelfth year since his ascension to the throne. Since it is known from other sources that his ascension was January 25, 41 C.E., we also know that his 12th year, the year of the inscription, covered January 25, 52 to January 24, 53. This means Gallo was serving as Proconsul between January 25, 52 and January 24, 53. This fixes Paul’s eighteen months in Corinth noted in Acts 18:1 as between January 50 and July 51. With this bit of hard data, John A.T. Robinson proceeds, using chronological data provided in Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, as well as that of Josephus, to construct a chronology for Paul’s life and his letters.
Robinson ends his chronology with Paul’s imprisonment in Rome and the writing of II Timothy around 59 to 62 C.E. However, many scholars believe that Paul was acquitted and released from prison, that he then traveled through Spain establishing Christian communities but was arrested and imprisoned a harsher second time. Either way, however, the tradition and consensus are that Paul was beheaded by Nero shortly after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 C.E. But this is by no means certain. It is possible given the brutal conditions of first century prisons that Paul died sick and alone before that in his cell. But the bottom line is that all of Paul’s epistles were completed before his death which at the latest was in 64 C.E. As noted in one of my earlier podcasts, I believe this includes the Pastoral Letters as well as the Epistle to the Ephesians.
This leads to another logical conclusion. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles is, according to Acts 1:1-7, the sequel to The Gospel According to Luke. Acts ends with Paul waiting for trial but living in Rome in his own rented house. This would indicate, then, that Acts was completed between 62 and 64 prior to Paul’s death. If, as most scholars think, Matthew and Mark are earlier than Luke all three of the synoptic Gospels must have been written before 64.
There is no date more certain or more filled with sorrow for Jews than the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. For the ancient Jews the Temple was the place, more than anywhere else on earth, where God’s presence was to be felt and known and cherished. Their cultural, political, economic, social, and spiritual life was bound up with the Temple. Their very identity was stamped by it as a sacred place. The earliest Christians, like Jesus, were Jewish, and while being Christian meant that Christ was now their center, they steadfastly retained their Jewish identity. It is impossible to read the New Testament from beginning to end without being aware of just how steeped in Judaism it is. My point is simply that for the Christians of this early period the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was, as it was for all Jews both within and outside Israel, a cataclysmic event of unimaginable proportions. It is exceedingly strange, therefore, that not a single book of the New Testament records this historic “shaking of the foundations” (Isaiah 13:13). It is depicted on the Arch of Titus in Rome (81 C. E.). It is there in the early Rabbinic Literature telling of the Jewish Revolt and Fall of Jerusalem. It is there in considerable detail in the work of the Jewish historian Josephus (92-94 C. E.) It is there in the Roman historian Suetonius’s biographies of twelve Roman emperors (121 C.E.). It is there in the third century Greek historian Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius (170). And it is there in Eusebius of Caesarea (290). But it is not in the New Testament. The simplest and most obvious collusion is that the entire New Testament must have been written before 70 C.E.
Now, I am certainly aware of the counter argument to this: namely, that it is mentioned in the Gospels indirectly as an ambiguous prophecy by Jesus:
As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!” “Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down (Mark 3;1-4; see also: Matthew 3:2-3; Luke 21:5-24).
The assumption of the secular non-confessing scholar is that since there is no such thing as the supernatural, there is no such thing as prophecy. Jesus, therefore, could not have predicted the destruction of Jerusalem leaving as the only possibility that his words were written sometime well after the fact. I am not going to debate either the possibility or impossibility of prophecy here, but without getting overly complicated there are a couple of responses that should be made.
First: I am going to argue that one need not believe in anything supernatural at all to believe Jesus could very well have predict the devastation of 70. It is known for a fact that a person by the name of Jesus Son of Ananias went around Jerusalem in 62 prophesying the city’s destruction eight years before the event. The Jewish authorities handed him over to the Romans who tortured him to make sure they got accurate and actionable information. However, they concluded he was a madman and released him. No one today believes he had any supernatural power, but neither does anyone doubt he predicted the fall of Jerusalem before it occurred.
Between the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, I wrote an article for the magazine Episcopal Life in which I predicted America would lose the Afghanistan War. When America pulled out in disarray twenty years later and the Taliban reasserted its authority, no one was at all amazed by my prediction or called me a prophet. There is nothing astonishing about Jesus’s prediction that demands it be explained away as pointing to a later composition date for Matthew, Mark, or Luke. What is amazing is that the New Testament nowhere speaks with any specificity, directness, or detail of the Jewish Revolt of 66 through 70 or the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple as past events, but only as cryptic predictions. If the proponents of late dating are correct, then it seems to me that the authors of those New Testament books supposedly written after 70 (some it is claimed as late as 160) missed a great marketing opportunity. It would have made perfect sense for them to have said in explicit language, “Look! the Lord prophesied the destruction of the Temple and it happened as he said it would.”
My second response to the notion that Jesus’s prediction of the destruction of the Temple indicates a late date for the Gospels is simply that many literary scholars, even if they subscribe to a late dating of the New Testament, believe because the original question of the disciples is never answered, and because of the lack of connection between the disciples’ question and Jesus’s answer, that the text was not written retrospectively.
My third response is to note that not only does Jesus’s prediction, or prophecy, lack sufficient detail, but at times the detail given does not fit events as they actually happened. I will not go into what I believe is the more accurate interpretation of the relevant texts here, but I will point out that in Luke the disciples are told: “When you see the abomination of desolation. . . those in Judea must flee to the hills.” This cannot, as often claimed, refer to the desecration by Titus’s soldiers because by that time it was too late to flee to the hills. Not only this, but we also know that before the war broke out and the city was under siege Christians, believing they were acting on Jesus’s prophecy, fled, not to the hills, but to Pella in the Decapolis which is actually below sea level. So, Jesus’s prophecy of the temple’s destruction lacks the sort of detail to be expected if it had been written retrospectively, and the details that are given do not match up in the way we would expect. I remain convinced that the entire New Testament was written before the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.
These, then, are some of the reasons I would agree with those who favor an earlier rather than later date for the writing of the New Testament. For those interested in a more thorough investigation I usually suggest reading John A. T. Robinson’s Redating the New Testament, Larry Hurtado’s Introduction to One God One Lord: Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Early Christianity, and also the Introduction to J. N. Kelly’s A Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles.