Bart has done more than anyone to shift NT scholarship away from theological assumptions — yet the standard chronology of Christian origins (Paul’s letters in the 50s, the Gospels 70–100 CE) remains largely inherited from pre-critical tradition rather than derived from first-principles historical analysis.
I want to open a discussion around a thesis I’ve been developing: that the NT documents, including the Pauline letters, are best understood as products of the post-70 CE period — composed after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple — and that the Temple’s destruction is not merely background context but the generative trauma that called Christianity into existence.
A few things that push me in this direction:
1. **The silence of Paul on the Temple.** The letters show no awareness of a functioning Temple cult, yet Paul’s atonement theology (e.g. Romans 3:25, the λύτρον of Matthew 20:28) only makes sense as a *replacement* theology — filling the void left by a destroyed sacrificial system.
2. **Acts 2 and Josephus Wars 6.283–287.** The Pentecost narrative maps almost point-for-point onto Josephus’s account of the false prophet who led crowds into the Temple precincts with promises of salvation, resulting in mass death. The “3,000 saved” reads like a deliberate inversion of the “6,000 who perished.”
3. **Galatians 4:25** — “the present Jerusalem is in slavery” — is a post-70 statement of fact, not a metaphor about Torah observance.
I recognise Bart has addressed post-70 dating for some documents. My question for the community is: what would it take, evidentially, to shift the *entire* corpus later? And has anyone seriously modelled what early Christianity looks like if we remove the pre-70 anchor entirely?
I’ve written at length on this at ad70.com.au — happy to discuss any of the specific evidence items here.
Welcome Paul!
An interesting provocative take. We’ve had some occasional discussions here about dating and it’s exciting to see some of the younger critical scholars in the field revisiting this question.
Just as an initial response I am interested in the idea of dating the gospels later, some even in the second century. My only problem is with Mark. The author makes such an intense connection in the text between the sacrifice of Jesus and the destruction of the Temple and the coming of the Parousia that it’s hard for me to see it being much later than 70ish. But I’m open to arguments otherwise!
Paul is a bit different. The situation described in the 7 letters traditionally considered authentic does seem to reflect a mid-first century environment. And his scant mention of the Temple could simply be a reflection of the fact that he was a Diaspora Jew ministering to pagans and Gentiles.
But he does use the Temple as a metaphor in these writings. In 1 Corinthians 3,16–17, Paul addresses the entire church congregation in Corinth. The “you” in the Greek text is plural.
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.
This doesn’t sound like he is aware of the Temple’s destruction. In fact he is contrasting the Temple in Jerusalem with the community of believers.
Good to have you here, Paul, and thank you for putting the thesis up in a form people can actually engage with. I am fairly new here myself, and I can tell you ‘they’ do not bite, though I admit the discussions here sometimes make me want to 
I think Stephen’s question about 1 Corinthians 9:13 is a good place to stay, because it raises the larger methodological issue without having to take on the whole thesis at once.
I do think you are right that 70 CE was not merely background. It was a formative trauma for early Christian memory and theology, and that deserves to be taken seriously.
But I am not yet seeing how you move from post-70 meaning to post-70 composition. A pre-70 tradition could be reread, sharpened, edited, or theologically intensified after 70 without the whole tradition beginning after 70.
My methodological question is: what would count against a post-70 reading of a passage like 1Cor 9:13? If a text resonates with the Temple or its destruction, how do we decide whether that is evidence of late composition, later interpretation, or simply Jewish scriptural/theological language already available before 70?
Thank you, Stephen, for the warm welcome and the thoughtful engagement — this is exactly the kind of exchange I was hoping for.
On Mark, I take your point seriously. The intensity of the Temple-Parousia connection in Mark 13 is striking. But I’d actually argue that intensity supports a post-70 date rather than complicating it. The urgency reads more naturally as retrospective theological interpretation of a catastrophe that has already occurred than as genuine predictive anxiety. The “abomination of desolation” language, the specific detail about fleeing to the mountains, the instruction not to go back for one’s cloak — these have the texture of a community processing lived trauma, not anticipating it. The famous “let the reader understand” aside (13:14) strongly suggests the author is writing with the event already in view. I’d push back gently on the idea that theological intensity implies proximity to the events described; sometimes the reverse is true.
On the Pauline letters, the two passages you cite are precisely the kind of evidence I find most interesting to work through, so thank you for raising them directly.
On 1 Corinthians 3:16–17, I’d argue the metaphor actually works better after 70 than before it. The rhetorical force of “you are God’s temple” depends on the reader feeling the weight of what that claim means — and that weight is enormously amplified when the physical Temple no longer exists. Before 70, the metaphor creates a somewhat awkward competition between two simultaneously existing sacred spaces. After 70, the community-as-temple fills a void. The theological logic is: the Temple is gone, but God has not abandoned his people — you are now where he dwells. That’s a post-catastrophe consolation, not a pre-destruction contrast.
On 1 Corinthians 9:13, the present-tense language about temple service is worth looking at carefully. Paul’s point here is an analogical argument about the rights of those who preach the gospel: just as those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial food, so too those who preach the gospel should be supported by the community. The analogy functions rhetorically regardless of whether the Temple is standing. We use analogies drawn from defunct institutions all the time — “don’t change horses midstream” works as rhetoric even for people who have never ridden a horse. More importantly, a post-70 author deploying temple-service language as a known institution would be entirely unremarkable; it remained culturally vivid for decades after its destruction, as Josephus, the rabbis, and the entire Mishnaic tractate Kodashim demonstrate.
What I’d flag more broadly is that “sounds like the Temple is still active” is doing a lot of work in traditional arguments, and I think it needs to be tested rather than assumed. A community writing in the 70s–90s CE, steeped in the scriptures of a Temple-centred religion and processing the loss of that Temple, would naturally reach for Temple language constantly — both as mourning and as theological reappropriation. Absence of explicit acknowledgment of the destruction is not evidence of pre-destruction composition; it may equally be evidence of a community for whom the Temple’s loss is the very ground of their theology, already sublimated rather than freshly noted.
I’d be very interested in your further thoughts, particularly on Mark.
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