There’s no universal agreement. There’s no agreement on which of the Gospels came first. There’s no agreement on which of Paul’s epistles were actually written by him. There’s no agreement on who wrote the other epistles (1 and 2 Peter, James, Jude, etc). As such there’s no agreement on the dating of any of them. There’s consensus and then there’s all the other opinions on when they were written. If you want the consensus critical opinion I’ll describe it for you.
Yes, but many say, for example, that the gospel of Revelations was written in 95-100A.D.. Did the church early church fathers believe revelations was written around that time as well? I was told that one of the criteria was which one was the oldest. If that’s the case, how did they believe the gospels were? They had to have believe the gospels were a certain age if they were to judge based off of how old a certain gospel is.
Revelation is one of those rare NT books where early church tradition agrees with modern scholarship on its age. Dating is usually achieved by interpreting the imagery the author uses (and I don’t mean that in an eschatological sense of interpretation). Some scholars believe parts of it could have been written during the 60s. The two Roman emperors who persecuted the early church the worst were Nero (ruled 54 – 68AD) and Domitian (ruled 81 – 96AD). The number of the beast in some of the earliest manuscripts of Revelation is 616 and the numerological meaning using Hebrew letters is “Nero Caesar”. That clue is sometimes used to show that parts of Revelation might be very early. Other parts of Revelation show a slightly later date such as calling Rome “Babylon” since this nom de guerre was used for Rome after the fall of the temple in Jerusalem. Add in the meaning of other imagery and the fact that Christian persecution got worse towards the end of the reign of Domitian and you get a slightly later dating for Revelation such as the one you give.
Juju_114 said
I was told that one of the criteria was which one was the oldest. If that’s the case, how did they believe the gospels were? They had to have believe the gospels were a certain age if they were to judge based off of how old a certain gospel is.
Not sure what you’re saying here. Greg’s right. There’s on a consensus and part of that is owed to the very nature of textual dating.
Elaine Pagels describes it as wartime literature:
the Book of Revelation’s author, who calls himself John, was likely a refugee whose home in Jerusalem had been leveled by the Romans in response to a Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire.
“I don’t think we understand this book until we understand that it’s wartime literature,” she says. “It comes out of that war, and it comes out of people who have been destroyed by war.” This is why setting the timeframe of things like using Babylon to describe Rome is useful for getting an idea of how old Revelation is.
Pagels also thinks some of the imagery is tied to the eruption of mt Vesuvius in 79
Let me see if I can reword what i’m trying to say. We know that majority of scholars believe that the book of Matthew was written somewhere in the 60’s. Did the early church father’s believe that as well or did they not date the books of the new testament like we do today? How on earth did they know which book was older than another if the book have no dates on them?
The majority of scholars don’t believe Matthew was written in the 60s. The vast majority of critical scholars (both Christian and secular) believe Mark was written after the first Jewish War (70AD) and that Matthew and Luke used Mark when writing their own Gospels. This puts Matthew after 70AD. The quibbling over the date begins from there. As far as what the early church believed, I don’t think they cared about the dating beyond the fact that the Gospels were “early enough” to have been written by people with first hand knowledge of the followers of Jesus, or in the case of John and Matthew to have been a disciple. Actually, though, since we don’t know who they thought the authors of the Gospels were when they were first written (the name of the author isn’t given in the text) we don’t even know if they believed that. We only get the names of the Gospels for the first time from the Muratorian Canon which is dated 170AD. Prior to that, any reference to words from the Gospels are merely referenced by “it is written”.
They weren’t considered Scripture (the inspired word like the OT was) until I think the second century. There are references to the Gospels in the writings of some very early church fathers so they definitely knew about the Gospels from the turn of the 2nd century. It was a little later that they gradually started to believe that the writings of Paul and the Gospels and some other books were indeed “Scripture”. At that point I doubt they much cared about precise dating. I can say that I’ve never read anything that suggests they cared about the precise dating. I would highly recommend Bruce Metzger’s The Canon of the New Testament as he discusses which early church fathers referenced which books that would later become the canon. This is important to your question. Metzger was Bart Ehrman’s mentor and one of the most influential NT scholars of the 20th century. He was also a Christian if you care about that.
Juju_114 said
Let me see if I can reword what i’m trying to say. We know that majority of scholars believe that the book of Matthew was written somewhere in the 60’s. Did the early church father’s believe that as well or did they not date the books of the new testament like we do today? How on earth did they know which book was older than another if the book have no dates on them?
Ditto
Except I have sometimes seen it dated to 65 or 70. I’m not sure about either the processes or what lay behind dating.
I’m with Greg on that. I doubt early Christians (Disciples, et al) were to interested in dates since they seem to have believed that the end was immanent; would come like a thief in the night. Not much point in worrying about dates etc if you think the world will end tomorrow. I think concern for things like dates became a question about the same time as Historico critical method came on the scene
Greg Matthews said
That can’t even be true of Mark. It was at least after 70AD.
For some reason I can’t recall any of the arguments for this and can’t seem to locate anything with Google.
I have heard that Mark was written (being written) during the opening skirmishes of that war although on the face of it any evidence
would seem to be ambiguous about the time frame. Can you point me in the right direction?
spiker said
For some reason I can’t recall any of the arguments for this and can’t seem to locate anything with Google.
I have heard that Mark was written (being written) during the opening skirmishes of that war although on the face of it any evidence
would seem to be ambiguous about the time frame. Can you point me in the right direction?
Mark chapter 13, in the guise of being “prophecy”, is a description of the POV of someone aware of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem during the Jewish War which started in 66AD and lasted several years. The area of Galilee was a hotbed of fighting and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70AD. You can look at each event and “sign” from that chapter and correlate to what must have happened during the war. Things like running to the hills (Jews running to the hills around Galilee to escape the Romans); the “abomination” from verse 14 is debatable as to who that was (Caligula? Vespasian? Nero?), but it had to have been one of the Roman leaders; the claim by Jesus that many would claim to be him (there were many supposed Messiahs during this time, etc etc etc.
A couple of place where you can read about this is the Joel Marcus commentary on Mark and probably Burton Mack’s book on Mark. Mack touches on it in his book on who Wrote the New Testament, but he’s got a book on Mark which I have and so far have only read parts of where he most likely goes into it further.
I’m going to bring the topic back to the dating of the gospels because I am still a bit confused. I have been looking into both sides of the debate and I don’t understand how fundamentalist say that one of the criteria was apostolitcity or how old something was. People like Dr. Daniel Wallace asserts that the reason why some books did not make it into the New Testament was because they were a 2nd century document, as if there was something that gave the church this indication. I’m thinking that the early church fathers used some sort of technique to figure out the age of the books that were known. I mean, how else were they suppose to know when the book was written?
If you would get that book I told you about it will answer your questions. There were people alive during the first century who lived during a time when the first books were being written. Those earliest books carried the greatest weight in terms authenticity. If you lived in the year 200 and all of a sudden something new starts appearing then you know that while it may be authentic it doesn’t carry the same weight as something written during the first century.
The important thing to remember is that the books that are in our NT today were not always agreed upon as being authentic or inspired. From the very beginning there were church groups that didn’t believe in the inspiration of our 4 Gospels. Some realized that not all of the letters attributed to Paul were authentic. Some accepted books that other congregations did not (like III Corinthians or the Gospel of Peter).
There was no magic method to determine what was accepted and what was not because no one agreed on what was accepted! Far from it. That didn’t happen until centuries later.
The book I’ve told you about explains all that and it tells which early church father accepted what book and which ones they mentioned in their own writings from the earliest days of the church’s written history.
Juju_114 said
I’m going to bring the topic back to the dating of the gospels because I am still a bit confused. I have been looking into both sides of the debate and I don’t understand how fundamentalist say that one of the criteria was apostolitcity or how old something was. People like Dr. Daniel Wallace asserts that the reason why some books did not make it into the New Testament was because they were a 2nd century document, as if there was something that gave the church this indication. I’m thinking that the early church fathers used some sort of technique to figure out the age of the books that were known. I mean, how else were they suppose to know when the book was written?
First you might want to consider this in the same terms as the professionals do: Use of the critical method. I hate to say it, but most Christian apologetics, IMHO, is nothing more than theological inbreeding. However, the idea that something is earlier is also a part of the independent sources criteria. Apostolicity is not quite the same. This would have to be established with the Critical Method, that an apostle or more likely the apostles, actually said or believed X . In that case what you are really looking for is an authoritative account of what Jesus said believed and did: That is to say we would want multiple early sources (in this case the Apostles saying the same thing without colluding)
RE: Wallace. It seems rather arbitrary to cut things off at the second century. Consider that the dating of John’s Gospel is, if Memory serves 90-120, do Christians throw that out if we find out it was written, say in, 105? I suspect the 2nd century criteria may have been a way of dismissing other works one didn’t approve of. Consider that the First Epistle of Clement is from the same timeframe as John, but could be construed as more “apostolic” because its earliest date is 80AD whereas John’s is 90AD. This looks like what you might call the having your cake and eating it too argument. While Clement is not considered canonical, Christians often cite him when trying to establish some historical data.
Greg Matthews said
spiker said
For some reason I can’t recall any of the arguments for this and can’t seem to locate anything with Google.
I have heard that Mark was written (being written) during the opening skirmishes of that war although on the face of it any evidence
would seem to be ambiguous about the time frame. Can you point me in the right direction?
Mark chapter 13, in the guise of being “prophecy”, is a description of the POV of someone aware of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem during the Jewish War which started in 66AD and lasted several years. The area of Galilee was a hotbed of fighting and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70AD. You can look at each event and “sign” from that chapter and correlate to what must have happened during the war. Things like running to the hills (Jews running to the hills around Galilee to escape the Romans); the “abomination” from verse 14 is debatable as to who that was (Caligula? Vespasian? Nero?), but it had to have been one of the Roman leaders; the claim by Jesus that many would claim to be him (there were many supposed Messiahs during this time, etc etc etc.
A couple of place where you can read about this is the Joel Marcus commentary on Mark and probably Burton Mack’s book on Mark. Mack touches on it in his book on who Wrote the New Testament, but he’s got a book on Mark which I have and so far have only read parts of where he most likely goes into it further.
Sorry Greg,
I think I’m looking for the reasons for dating Mark to the year 70 or after. What I have in mind is that there must be a bit more than the destruction of the temple. While trying to find this data I cam across some apologetic efforts at an earlier dating. 1 explanation was that Mark was given the year 70 out of the belief that Jesus could not prophecy (there’s that ol’ materialistic commitment again!) The other was to date Mark by starting with the dating of Acts which was arbitrarily set that to 63AD because the “best explanation” is that Luke wrote up to the very minute what was happening. As to why Luke wouldn’t have waited to find out Paul was victorious at trial goes unexplained.
Juju_114 said
How do we know the dates of the gospels and other christian writings in the new testament? Did the early fathers believe those were the dates before they were canonized or did we later determine the dates of the gospels years later?
Justin Johnson
What you have to do to find out the date of a document is find out the earliest it could have been written (terminus ante quem) and the latest it could have been written (terminus post quem).
To do this one must look at what information the writing makes knowledge of and when the writing is first referenced.
After that you can use more specifically what is in the documents to determine where, within those two dates, it is most likely that the document was written.
For the Gospels (I will be dealing with the Synoptics), the terminus ante quem is usually placed at the Jewish War and Olivet Discourse, due to the Synoptic Apocalypse (so, around 70CE).
I have not seen many scholars actually talk about the terminus post quem, but that is most probably Justin Martyr’s mention of it, as Papias’s mention of Mark and Matthew doesn’t seem to reflect what we know of our Mark and Matthew at all, and all other mentions before Justin Martyr are suspect as to whether they actually refer to the Gospels we have or not (so, around 155 CE).
Now, I would actually place the terminus post quem for Luke even later because every quote that is considered to be from Luke in Justin Martyr can be found in either the Gospel of the Lord of the Infancy Gospel of James, and Justin seems to have knowledge of the Infancy Gospel of James, so there is no reason to also posit knowledge of Luke. This then makes it so that the terminus post quem for Luke is 180 CE when Irenaeus mentions the Gospel.
So, the question becomes when, in this long period, were the Gospels written? You can use different context clues if need be (if a document doesn’t mention an event that one suspects it should, it probably came before that event). You can also judge this by the significance placed on certain events in the document (the more significant, the closer it was written to the event). There are other ways you can judge this, but these are some of the basics.
Now, what the Synoptic Apocalypse refers to is something that can be debated. The vast majority of scholars say it is the Jewish War and Olivet Discourse. Some, though a minority, say that, at least in Mark and Matthew, it refers to the Caligula Crisis. Others, also a minority, say that, at least in Mark and Matthew, it refers to the Bar Kochba Revolt.
All of these greatly impact when the Gospels were written.
I also am unaware of how many dates are agreed upon via church father tradition and modern scholarship, but, if I am remembering correctly, it isn’t that much.
spiker said
Sorry Greg,
I think I’m looking for the reasons for dating Mark to the year 70 or after. What I have in mind is that there must be a bit more than the destruction of the temple.
What I listed, the destruction of the temple, the various other bits that reflect a people under siege are the reasons. When you look at what Bart, Mark Goodacre, Burton Mack, Joel Marcus, Bruce Metzger and others who believe in a post 70AD dating say when talking about the dating of Mark, “the destruction of the Temple” is what they all say.
What I listed, the destruction of the temple, the various other bits that reflect a people under siege are the reasons. When you look at what Bart, Mark Goodacre, Burton Mack, Joel Marcus, Bruce Metzger and others who believe in a post 70AD dating say when talking about the dating of Mark, “the destruction of the Temple” is what they all say.
Yea, I had a chance to read Bart’s thouhts on this. He sees Mark’s references as too vauge, but suggests that this is due to Mark just begining to hear about it and not having a good grasp of it yet.
Guess I was trying to get you to do the leg work for me! Truth is I am in the middle of HJBG, a book on Critical method to be followed by Bart’s latest, Meeks work on Paul’s social environment and some of Dale Allison’s work. By then Prof Ehrman will have produced another 10 books and I will never be caught up!
Btw did you get a chance to read Hurtado’s article. The quest for the Mark Community. He mentions Marcus’s thesis.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert