When Was The New Testament Written?

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No one seems to have answered this, so I will.

The earliest Christian documents are almost certainly the undisputed letters of Paul, which few find any reason to place later than between 50-60, and with some (eg Galatians) dated possibly in the 40s.

The only reasons for dating any later are claims to pseudo-epigraphy on, say, the pastoral epistles - dates which would be be based simply on when Paul would be well-known enough to imitate. However, note that a significant body of scholarship thinks these letters to be Paul’s.

In the case of the gospels, the tendency even amongst conservative scholars is to take the consensus view for the sake of argument - the reason being that it’s plausible and actually close to events, as historical records go. That consenus tends to place Mark around 60-65, Matthew and Luke/Acts (because they seem to use Mark as a source) maybe late 60s-early70s (some saying as late as the 80s), and John in the 80s-90s.

The older views that the gospels were late and legendary, from the 2nd century or later, are now very much outliers: all seem to have been composed within living memory of the ministry of Jesus.

However, Bishop John Robinson’s book (as linked by Mung) was a refreshing look by a liberal theologian at the suppositions underlying those dates. He found them extraordinarily weak, and came to the conclusion that nothing in any of the gospels demanded a date later than 69AD (the Fall of Jerusalem).

Robisnosn was deliberately provocative, but dated Matthew to 42, Mark to 45, Luke before 56 (with Acts a sequel a few years later) and John to 65 in its complete form. Other scholars, such as John Wenham (who must be OK because I knew his brother!), have also argued for similar early dating overall, and leading NT scholars doing more detailed work have made strong cases for eye-witness testimony even in John (eg Richard Bauckham, (who must be equally good because he lent me his typewriter at uni!). Bauckham employs fascinating evidence such as the frequency of first names in the gospels, which matches the pattern of graves dating to Jesus’s time, but not of those later - much as in England, “George” or “Millie” are now common, but were disliked in my generation.

The reasons for later dating (the weakness of which surprised Robinson, a non-NT specialist) are interesting, and often circular. For example, one key date is the Fall of Jerusalem, prophesied by Jesus in all four gospels. Since future prophecy “doesn’t happen”, Jesus and the evangelsists could not have known the details, and therefore the gospels were written after that date.

However, supernatural insight aside, closer examination shows that in all the synoptics, the apparent details match the Old Testament parallels used by Jesus (eg Daniel) and not the actual seige described by Josephus.

In fact, it’s remarkable that such a cataclysmic event (equivalent even in numerical terms to the Holocaust), cited in the gospels as a vindication of Jesus’s Messiahship, does not have a single mention in any of the New Testment books apart from, in the future, in the gospels. Even in Revelation it is only hinted as imminent. That would indicate a complete NT corpus before 69-70AD.

Other, circular, arguments are based on the assumption that, since the gospels are legendary, they must be late in order for the legends to arise. However, comparison with other ancient legends suggest they’d need to be written two or three centuries after the events for such legends to arise, and nobody even attempts to claim that with the earliest bit of gospel manuscript, from maybe 120AD, being found in Egypt.

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42

Thank you, this was very helpful.

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43

What circumstances?

No, I meant the Resurrection.

Is it the same point? It’s not really clear what Luke meant, it takes some interpretation. Repenting at Jonah’s preaching is mentioned, which confuses things. Matthew’s “3 days” language makes a clearer point. So if Jesus said that, why wouldn’t Luke include it?

This is important, as a if it was fabricated, we should expect they would smooth over these differences in language, much in the same way you are pointing to the 3 days here.

I don’t get this. It’s not as if they were working together on their accounts. Presumably neither knew the other was writing theirs.

Another thing I like about this site is it often gives me a good reason to read the Bible :slight_smile: It’s an interesting passage, but the writers of the Gospels knew about it certainly, as did others. Paul is explicit of course, if lacking detail, and the Gospel writers do make it clear that a resurrection occurred. So plenty of voices do attest to the Resurrection. That’s not the problem. Did you watch the Ehrman video I posted? It’s short. I think he was debating Mike Licona. I watched about half of that NT Wright video, up to four main points he delineated. I wasn’t impressed but I want to try to track down his book on the subject.

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Was there a cohesive Christian community post AD 70 and where was it located? What might the Gospel accounts look like had they in fact independently arisen after AD 70?

If we look just at the texts themselves can we tell anything about whether they arose from diverse and spread out groups of people or do they appear to have arisen from a community that was closer in location and time? Was there a Matthean community, a Markan community, a Lukan community and why on earth would early Christian groups have come together along those three lines?

You don’t have to answer these questions. :slight_smile:

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John: Yes, I have continued to argue for integrity of both the written and oral text, while continuing to argue against either the written or oral traditions having been substantially embellished. Remember, Dibelius and Bultmann convinced generations that the text was content strung together using verbiage from many different authors. More recently, the focus has been on the oral tradition being the culprit (in terms of embellishments entering in to the narrative.) Why? Because the evidence shows that the written narrative did not substantially change. Yet, even above, you have the original authors of the written material using the oral tradition with “differences as Ehrman pointed out” (oral tradition) or “some of their own embellishments” (written tradition).

I firmly believe that the oral tradition was sacred and, while minor details (i.e. times of day for events) may have been lost in transcription, the major details remain and are seen today in the texts that we read. I had “conflated the two issues” (written and oral traditions) because I want to juxtapose what I believe what would have happened if there was, as has been suggested by Ehman and countless others, an attitude of willingness to change the text in order to gain converts. I believe that what we would see if this attitude truly existed, is that the texts, geographically disseminated throughout the known world, would continue to be embellished.

I agree that this did not happen, because it is what we see in the evidence. The written scriptures remained substantially unchanged. There has been a very high degree of integrity in the handling of them. So, the goalposts move back, and the oral tradition must be where the myths made their way into the narrative. This is the new version of the theory, because we know that the written tradition has not been compromised. There is simply no evidence (as you have noted above) that errors in the written forms extended beyond transcriptions errors or occasional interpolations.

I believe that the NT books that we have now are exactly what we would expect from a church that cared deeply about and carefully maintained an attitude of integrity around the stories of Jesus, in both orally and written form. Absent an a priori assumption that the resurrection did not happen, I do not agree that one should conclude that the early church was not in 100% agreement that Jesus Christ was not resurrected.

I am curious, though. If you will assume that the miracles happened and that Jesus Christ was resurrected, how would you imagine that the text would vary from what we see today, 2000 years later?

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That’s an interesting one, because as far as I can make out the Jerusalem Church, which escaped to Pella before the destruction both in response to Jesus’s prophecy and a later prophetic word, returned soon afterwards and seem to have been almost the only organised religious group left in Jerusalem.

The Sadducees had been wiped out (not before time), the Zealots had been destroyed, and the Pharisees were in disarray until they eventually regrouped and began to formulate Rabbinic Judaism a good while later. Christians had been taught by Jesus that rebellion aginst the Romans was not the way to go, of course.

The first leader, James, having been executed by the Jewish leaders in the 50s (during a lapse in Roman authority), tradition has it that his brother Jude became the leader. Jewish leadership of the Jeruslem church continued until the revolt of 130, after which Jews were prohibited from Jerusalem, and the church there became predominantly gentile.

The Judaean Christians appear to have fragmented into sects at that time (Ebionites etc), but I suspect many became diaspora Jews and strengthened the Gentile churches with their knowledge of the Scriptures and so on.

Life would probably have been hard for diaspora Jews around 70AD as well, but the churches of Paul and the other apostles, which were interconnected but autonomous, likely continued without interruption - Antioch remained an important centre, Alexandria a second, and Rome increasingly so. With other strong churches where you might expect - Corinth, Ephesus etc. Clement of Rome was writing brotherly advice to Corinth probably near the end of the first century, so there’s no evidence that there was a “Pope in Jerusalem” organising everything.

However, there is evidence of early Judean Jewish influence in all four gospels, to a varying degree (John, for example, having more obvious local knowledge than Luke, who always claimed to rely on other sources). The degree of interdependence constitutes the perennial “Synoptic Problem”, but by the same token shows that all four originate from around a single “tradition”, rather than springing up across the world in response to ancient legends.

There is actually no evidence whatsoever for the “communities” elaborating a particular guru’s teaching - it appears to be more twentieth century scholarly imagination that conjures these up for convenience. In fact, Richard Bauckham did a great little essay showing up the nonsense of this.

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Is this a story about Peaceful Science? :wink:

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Of course! The story of Piglet and the balloon teaches us so much about inflation theory.

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It doesn’t have to have been written to Paul to be as old as his stuff… and if it’s by James, who was murdered in 62, then it can’t be that much newer anyway.

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No - the idea that the Council of Nicea discussed the biblical canon has no evidence whatsoever (and proceedings are available, so it’s not about absence of evidence.) Motto - Dan Brown bad source for church history!

The main source of the idea that the Bible was created at the Council of Nicaea seems to be Voltaire, who popularised a story that the canon was determined by placing all the competing books on an altar during the Council and then keeping the ones that did not fall off. The original source of this “fictitious anecdote” is the Synodicon Vetus ,[80] a pseudo-historical account of early Church councils from AD 887:

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@Alice_Linsley Any insights from anthropology from this time period?

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That’s very hard to say. It might not differ at all. No one ever claimed that very many people witnessed it, and they may not have been able to get it down into writing. Then again, who knows?

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Now I’ve got started, I just have to mention the astonishing textual consistency of the gospels, which is strongly suggestive of their early authority given that the idea of a Nicean “bonfire of the variants” doesn’t hold water.

It’s no secret that there are more manuscripts of the NT than any other ancient book, and the variations found are predominantly spelling and minor word changes, occasional variants suggesting trying to tidy up difficult sentences, etc. The greatest issue are things like alternative endings to Mark, the variable addition of the woman taken in adultery, late addition of occasional dubious phrases…

Compare that to a nice uncontroversial manuscript book like Piers Plowman, from 14th century. There are two or three early manuscripts that are so different that you have to choose which version to buy - major extra or changed chunks, either because the writer changed it or because some early reader improved it - there was no copyright law, of course.

So if any attempt was made to copy the gospels accurately (or any of the other NT books, come to that), it was because they were considered to be sacrosanct.

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I’ve been told on the other hand that the Koran and Jewish texts were transcribed almost without error through history. I haven’t checked though :slight_smile:

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I stand corrected. So where, when, and how was the canon actually determined?

And when you quote, could you also cite?

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Early Quranic variations are interesting - but there’s a different tradition of scholarship given the belief in infallible transmission.

The Jewish story is different - we know the obsessional measures taken by the Massoretes in accurate copying, and though they were later, the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that there was no substantial change in that text-family between the DSS and the earliest mediaeval text - a thousand years or so.

What is more problematic is that the DSS also shows a few significant variant text families - though some of that was known already in the differences between the Greek Septuagint and the Samaritan text, from the Massoretic.

However, for the most part that only affects things like numbers (very badly preserved, often) and relatively minor points. The only fairly seriously variant text found in the DSS is that of Jeremiah - though when I came to compare the two online, the prophet’s message is more or less the same. That produces some questions about “inerrant autographs”, but not really about the message of the Old Testament.

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From what I’ve heard, Islam today is nothing like what Mohamed preached. Islam, at it’s conception, had nothing to do with Jesus or Christianity, and today, Jesus (or Isa as they call him) is considered the second greatest prophet after Mohamed.

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Sorry - that quote was Wikipedia on the Nicene Creed, as a convenience - I’ve read the same in numerous more salubrious sources.

Canonisation was actually a complicated process - what one finds first is numerous quotations and approximate allusions (partly because privately owned books were rare and learning by memory was the norm) in many texts from the late 1st century on. There is a huge preponderance of the canonical NT, cited with assumed divine authority, relatively fewer of the “orthodox” books like Hermas, and virtually no reference, except in a very few aberrant cases, to apocryphal gospels or epistles. What this seems to show is that there was a collection of books considered authoritative, but not universally available as a whole at first. It doesn’t seem an “official” list at this stage because of the odd inclusion of other stuff.

Irenaeus (2nd century) lays great stress on the significance of the fourfold gospel, and cites Papias on their origins (who said he studied under St John) but incompletely (so we get the end of the description of Mark, Luke and some of John).

The first list of books is from the heretic Marcion (before 140), whose Gnostic views led him to shorten the list severely: he hated the OT, so included only Luke and Paul’s letters in expurgated form. What is more significant is that what he does include is all from our canon, not the apocryphal ones.

The earliest “orthodox” list comes from a damaged manuscript called the Muratorian Canon from (originally) about 170. Note that it has no official status - it records “a” canonical list at that time and place. It is almost the same as the modern one, except in missing out Hebrews, James and 1 & 2 Peter, and counts 1-3 John as 2 letters. It also includes the Wisdom of Solomon (OT deuterocanonical) and The Apocalypse of St Peter with the proviso that some don’t allow it to be read in church.

Later lists vary a little - some don’t accept 2 Peter, or Revelation, but I can’t recall if or when any official council made a definitive list, as the myths say Constantine did at Nicea. It was more that the canonical books were always widely recognised as apostolic and authoritative, barring one or two that took a while to bed in, and that they were listed in the end for clarification rather than establishing a shortlist.

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Why does textual consistency of the gospels strongly suggest early authority?

From Nathan Lents’ Human Errors book page 70 “Each cell has 4.6 billion letters of DNA code, and each day the average person experiences somewhere around 10^11 cell division so that is literally 100 quintillion chances a day for a cell to make a mistake while copying DNA Cells are terrific copy editors, making fewer than one mistake in a million letters and immediately catching and correcting 99.9 percent of the rare errors.”

So textual consistency is not suggestive of any kind of supernatural authority.

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Perhaps to help others on the statistics in comparing the NT text to other ancient documents (e.g., Josephus, Pliny, Tacitus, Seutonius, Plutarch, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius):

  1. The average is about 1000 years between the described events and the earliest extant manuscript (the first edition usually arose within 100 years of the events described); but the NT is within 100-200 years (and some examples much closer than this gap)

  2. We have over 24,000 NT manuscripts (not full, of course), with about 0.5% variant (7/8 of which are stylistic)…not to mention over 86,000 NT quotations in the church fathers, over 2100 church service manuals, early translations (including 2nd and 3rd c.), and even fragments in Dead Sea scrolls - 2nd place is not even close: Homer’s Iliad (ca. 800 BCE) with 643 copies and 5% discrepancy

Here is a quote from Sir Frederic Kenyon from the British Museum: “The interval, then, between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.”

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