08.29
Attacks on the validity of the Bible are nothing new. Every generation has seen it’s set of critics starting with the gnostics of the 1st century. These days the attacks come from the universities and critical forums such as the Jesus Seminar. A common area of attack is to claim that the gospels and many of the epistles were written far after the actual life and death of Christ. Dating the NT books this way would seem to undermine it’s reliability since a first hand account is tremendously more dependable than something written 200 years later. That’s why personal accounts, such as Anne Frank’s diary, are of such great importance to historians. They give that coveted eye-witness account that historians crave.
So how do we date the books of the New Testament? Were they written before 100 AD as Christian apologists claim or were they written as late as 200-300 AD as claimed by the Jesus Seminar and others? First, I’m going to give you Koukl’s argument for an early dating of the NT canon and then I’ll give you another one next time.
Koukl argues like this:
- Apart from the death of Christ, the most traumatic event in the first century of Judaism/Christianity is the total destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD.
- Jesus prophesied the events of 70 AD in Mat. 24:2, Mark 13:2 and Luke 21:6
- The gospels(Matthew,Mark,Luke,John), as well as the book of Acts never mention that prophecy as having been fulfilled or the event as having taken place.
- This gives us a starting date of at least 69 AD at the latest for the book of Acts.
- The book of Acts ends with Paul imprisoned in Rome. Paul’s was killed in 65 AD at the latest, so we can say that Acts must have been written before 65 AD.
- Since Acts was written by Luke as a followup to Luke’s gospel that means we can place Luke’s gospel in the timeframe of 60-65 AD.
- Since the book of Mark pre-dates all the other gospels, we can safely put it’s date at pre-60 AD.
This is significant. If we can date the gospels to sometime in the 50’s AD, that is within 30 years of the death of Christ and still well within the lifetime of most of the apostles. That more than qualifies for eye-witness status as well as genuine apostolic authorship. A shorter version of the argument can just say that since the destruction of the temple is never mentioned in the NT, we can assume that it hadn’t happened by the time the books were written, with the exception of The Revelation of John(who was in exile at the time). That still puts the gospels and epistles as having been written within 37 years of Christ’s death.
I like Koukl’s argument and I think it’s very powerful. The destruction of the temple and the dispersion of the Jews in 70 AD was an absolutely catyclismic event within early Judeo-christianity. Jerusalem was still the center Judaism and Christianity. For such an event not to be present at all in the NT books would be incredible if they had been written later. It would be like the civil war not being mentioned in an American history book written in 1890. Some have tried to argue that Jesus’s prophesy of the temple’s destruction is proof that the books were written later, because after all, nobody knows the future, right?
That argument only works if the authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts are prone to that type of deception. I think it’s pretty obvious that they aren’t. Let me give a few examples of the way the gospel writers normally handle fulfilled prophesy:
- Matthew 26:75 – Here Matthew points out that Peter remembered Jesus prophesy that he would deny Him 3 times.
- Luke 24:8 – Luke records how the Angel at the tomb reminded the disciples of Christ’s prophesy about His resurrection on the 3rd day.
- John 16:4 – Here Christ is telling his disciples to remember the things He is telling them so that when they happen they will not lose hope.
- Acts 1:20 – Peter’s pointing out to the rest of the disciples how the prophesy about Judas was fulfilled when he committed suicide.
In addition to these you have Mat. 1:22, Mat. 2:15, Mat. 2:17, Mat. 2:23, Mat 4:14, etc. There are too many to enumerate here. Just do a word search in the gospels for the word “fulfilled” and you will see that it is very much the style of the gospel writers to point out any time a prophesy is fulfilled. To pass up an opportunity to point out the fulfillment of the 70 AD prophesy should be just too much for any honest historian to accept. Furthermore, it lends honesty to the gospel accounts to see how many times they point out where a prophesy was fulfilled. It give’s the gospels an air of “please believe me”.
Furthermore, in order to believe that the prophesy of the events of 70 AD were included as a deception, you would have to also assume that it’s fulfillment was left out to make the deception more believable. I would say that this is an anachronism on the part of today’s higher critics. Their is no reason to believe that future dating disputes over the gospels would even be an issue in the mind of a 2nd century christian. Next time I’ll give you a different but still powerful dating argument.
