When were the Gospels written?

[Guest]

I have the opportunity to talk to a Pastor/Bible scholar about the Gospels being written many years later than Jesus time like AD 70 for Mark and later for the others. He believes that nothing Jesus said was preserved in the Gospel accounts we have, but were preserved verbally up to a certain point and then later written down to different groups (Matthew to Jews, etc.) so that's why they vary, because they are not historically accurate. They are just after the fact literature that shouldn't be taken as historical. Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts/questions for him.

[Guest]

I can't write much now because I've got to run, but has this pastor ever read "Eyewitness to Jesus" by Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D'Ancona?

Damon

[Guest]

The argument my friend gives is this guy has studied under the smartest people in the world and how could I (since I am obviously not so smart as them) resist his arguements.

This guy also uses the parables in the Gospels to somehow date the books.

[Guest]

If that's the argument he uses, then just reply that you're smart enough not to argue with him and leave it at that. Intellectual vanity isn't worth the effort it would take to correct it.

Damon

[Guest]

There are four Gospels and good reasons why I believe that they were written in the order they appear in the Bible.

1) Matthew: Of all the disciples, Matthew knew how to write in Greek. He was the tax collector and had experience with writing and communicating in Greek. The others, by comparison, we assume, were simple fishermen and farmers, etc. It makes complete sense that Matthew was selected to write down an account of the Gospel.

The next question is as to when. Personally, I think they decided to write early on. There are some indications that Matthew may have been written in Aramaic/Hebrew and then translated into Greek by Matthew. The Hebraism in the Greek point to that as I understand. It could have been the stoning of Stephen that convinced the remaining 10 to write out their account. Or it may have been subsequent martyrdoms, which suggest a very, very early date. Given the fact that there were many who believed at Pentecost, and only a handful of disciples, I would think that Matthew could have been started as early as the mid 30s AD.

And surely, it was a group effort for the Gospel of Matthew, for the disciple Matthew was not part of the inner circle with Peter, James and John. These three would have had to give Matthew the inside scoop such as the private explanation of the Olivet Discourse. Mark actually record that there were only 4 of the disciples present. This leads us to Mark.

2) Mark: I believe the gospel of Mark was written after mid 60s AD, after Peter’s death. Mark simply recorded what Peter preached day in and day out to the Romans. Mark was Peter’s interpreter or sidekick. There would have been no need to write these things down until after Peter’s death at the hands of Nero’s thugs. As you read Mark and compare it with Matthew, you’ll note that where Matthew has extensive info about Peter, Mark records none of it such as the walking on the water episode or loosing and binding scene. This just once again points to the authentic source of Peter’s preaching. The whole point of the Gospel of Mark is to point the hearers to the Son of God not to Peter, so Peter left out parts about himself. Peter also threw in actual Aramaic quotes from Jesus in various places such as when He raises Jarius’ daughter 5:41.

The Gospel of Mark has as its goal a message that was preached, I believe, evidenced by all the uses of the term “immediately” to keep the listeners on track. It’s very possible that the order of events may have become subservient to Peter’s message. So I usually look to Matthew or Luke for order of events and Mark for Peter’s take and additional info from his perspective. One such example is that Peter actually knew the name of one of the blind beggars when Jesus went through Jericho in Mark 10:46. At the time of Matthew’s writing, his name may not have been important and to Matthew, beggars may not have been important either until later in life. I suspect, that Bartimaeus may have become an important figure in the church and that it would have been disingenuous for Peter not to mention him by name.

It was Paul who called for the assistance of Mark with Luke at his side in his letter to Timothy (2 Tim. 4:11). Apparently Mark accompanied Peter when he arrived later after this letter. This leads us to Luke.

3) Luke: The opening four verses of Luke tell you what the book was about. There is a person Theophilus (Friend of God) who wants to find out if what they have been told is true. It was known that there were those who secretly followed Christ in Nero’s household and Theopholis could have been a higher up in the government who could afford to send Luke out on this expedition. So Luke, who they know, is sent out back to Judea to do some investigation. The implication to me is that now Paul is dead. Luke is also assembled after the mid 60s. It’s record could have been put together about the same time Mark was. Clearly, I believe Luke had heard Peter’s preaching and they all had access to Matthew. In Luke’s case, he went and interviewed people who were from the broader crowd.
Like I said, Luke did not go ask the disciples, rather he went around to people who were there. If you read Luke 21, ask yourself. Did Jesus leave the Temple venue? Is there any indication in the passage that Jesus taught in the Temple what Luke records in chapter 21. Consider Luke 21:37 and the context and Luke’s goal. I believe Jesus clearly taught what was recorded in Luke 21 in the Temple. Later that evening, four of the disciples came to him for a private explanation with refined questions based on what they heard earlier. This was the typical pattern; Jesus teaches publicly and explain privately to the disciples. To the disciples he does not mention Jerusalem or 70AD’s events. He clearly has something else in mind, but if you’re a preterist, you are less likely to see it and if you’re a Dispensationalist, you probably think Matthew 24 is for Israel. A lot of confusion comes from less than careful reading of the text or even understanding of who and why things were written.

John: John was the last Gospel to be written. I believe it was potentially penned anywhere between the late 60s and mid 90s. It is a wonderful reflection of John’s spin and understanding of what happened. It is very possible it was not written until after Revelation was received and written. Revelation in many ways is John’s section of the Olivet Discourse.

Good luck in studying.

[_Steve]

Cameron's post presents a view of the order and dating of the four Gospels which substantially agrees with the beliefs of the early church about these matters. However, the presentation may not be of much value in convincing the skeptic, as it is full of conjecture. There is nothing wrong with such conjecture, and I have many conjectures of my own, but such arguments may not impress the man who is looking for the facts.

In our day, most New Testament scholars believe in the "priority of Mark"--meaning they believe that Mark's Gospel was written before the others and served as one of at least two sources for the material in Mathew and Luke. The other alleged source is a document that is entirely hypothetical. No one has ever found it and it may never have existed. Scholars have dubbed this phantom document "Q" (the initial letter of the German word for "source").

According to most scholars, Mark's Gospel contributed most of the narrative material for Matthew and Luke, whereas "Q" supplied much or most of the sayings of Jesus, few of which are found in Mark. John's Gospel is recognized as an entirely independant production, not related to the other three Gospels.

I disagree with these scholars, primarily because their premises seem flawed (why would Matthew, an eye-witness, for example, have to depend upon "sources" other than his memory?), and also because of the beliefs of the early church fathers from earliest times.

The earliest church fathers believed in the priority of Matthew, not Mark. In agreement with what Cameron said above, the fathers taught that Matthew first wrote a catalogue of the sayings of Jesus in Aramaic (the language spoken by Christ and the apostles). This Aramaic document might have been translated directly into Greek to become our Gospel of Matthew, or the present book may have been an expansion upon the original work.

Mark was indeed Peter's "interpreter" (according to Papias), and seems to have written in his Gospel only what he heard from Peter. Mark was also an inhabitant of Jerusalem during the lifetime of Christ, and may have witnessed some of the events he records with his own eyes as well, but the real authority behind his Gospel is Peter.

Luke is well-known to us as Paul's companion, and he was probably not an eye-witness of any of the events recorded in his Gospel. However, he knew the apostles personally, and interviewed people whom he describes as eye-witnesses (Luke 1:2), which makes his Gospel pretty authoritative in my judgment.

The author of the Fourth Gospel was "the beloved disciple" (John 21:20-24), who is credibly identified as John. This man was one of Jesus' "inner circle" and witnessed most of the things Jesus said and did in the years of His public ministry. He specifically affirms that he was an eye-witness of the crucifixion (John 19;35). His material does not overlap that of the three synoptic Gospels much. The reason appears to be that John wrote later than the others, and saw no need to duplicate their material. In his old age, he was the last surviving witness of many things that had not been recorded in the other Gospels, and so he left a record of his memoirs to supplement the existing recorded history of Christ.

The strongest reason to accept the above summary is that it was passed down to us by men living at the end of the first century, when the trail of the Gospels' literary history had not yet gone cold. Papias, our main source for this information, lived at the end of the first century, and may have known John. Certainly his testimony carries more weight than do the speculations of critics living 2000 years removed from the appearance of these documents.

As for the dates of the Gospels' appearance, the fathers have not left us exact information. However, this much can be reasonably deduced:

1. Luke wrote Acts, apparently, when Paul was still in prison, awaiting trial before Nero. Paul had been in Rome under house arrest already for two years at the time of Luke's writing the Book of Acts (Acts 28:30). Since Paul arrived in Rome in AD 60, this would mean that Acts was written in AD 62.

2. We know that the book of Luke was written before the book of Acts (Acts 1:1), so Luke must have been written no later than, say, 60 or 61 AD.

3. Luke was not the first to write a Gospel. He knew of "many" who had done so previous to him (Luke 1:1). It is a fair inference that Matthew and Mark were among those "many," since all scholars either believe in the priority either of Matthew or of Mark. This suggests that these two Gospels were written prior to about AD 60...perhaps considerably earlier.

4. Some scholars have believed that Mark's Gospel appeared as early as AD 50, which may or may not be the case, but Papias suggests that Matthew's Aramaic version existed earlier still than all the other Gospels. In any case, the evidence suggests that all three synoptic Gospels were written no later than AD 60 (see points 1 through 3, above), which was only 30 years after the events that they describe, and well within the lifetimes of hundreds of people who actually saw Jesus, and who could have refuted the Gospel accounts, if they were very inaccurate.

5. Since John wrote the Fourth Gospel, it is clear that it must have appeared in the first century as well, though possibly near the end of John's life, in the last decade of the first century.

The above analysis is derived from the best internal and external evidence available in the early centuries of the church, and there is nothing about these conclusions that is inherently unlikely, or that can be disproven by modern scholarship.

F.F. Bruce has rightly observed that those who discount the historical reliability of the Gospels are not historians, but, rather, liberal theologians. The historical accuracy of the Gospels is well-attested by the normal procedures of historical research. The liberal theologians have an agenda that makes them wish to reject the recorded actions and claims of Jesus Christ. The most effective way to do this is to disregard the records of His life that have come down to us. However, this they cannot do by any appeal to historical data.

For more on this subject, see my answer to Melissa at http://www.wvss.com/forumc/viewtopic.php?t=84

[Guest]

Although Mark's gospel is short it is full about specific historical details particularly the last 6 chapters which refer to Jesus's time in Jerusalem. This part of Mark refers five times to the "high priest" (14.53,54,60,61,63) without mentioning his name. This would imply that Caiaphas was still the high priest when the story was being written ,there being no need to mention his name. Since Caiaphas was high priest until 37AD this description suggests Mark was written contemporaneously. As to the author ,since Peter was at that stage associated with the home of Mark (Acts 12.12-17) i think it would suggest that Peter collaberated with Mark on the last six chapters and perhaps even wrote the final verses himself in chap 16 since it appears to be his writing style IMO. Am i reading to much into this? Appreciate any comments.

[_Steve]

Interesting thesis. I can't think of any way it could be refuted.