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In this video, Jimmy takes on Dr. Robyn Walsh—a member of the “Bart Ehrman Team”—as she analyzes the question, “How reliable are our dates for the Gospels?”
Jimmy goes through Robyn’s arguments one by one, compares them to what Bart Ehrman also says, and exposes the arguments as lacking in evidential force.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
ROBYN WALSH: How reliable are our dates for the four canonical gospels? Hi everybody, I’m Robyn Walsh. I’m a scholar of New Testament and early Christianity, and I’m part of the Bart Ehrman team. Today I want to talk about the dates that scholars traditionally give to the four canonical gospels: Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
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“How Reliable Are the Dates for the Gospels?”
Recently, Bart Ehrman published a video on his YouTube channel featuring Dr. Robyn Walsh called “How Reliable Are the Dates for the Gospels?” As Robyn says, she’s “a part of the Bart Ehrman team.”
Now, in scholarly circles, people have their own opinions. So I can’t say that Robyn Walsh’s opinions are exactly the same as Bart Ehrman’s. As a scholar, her opinions are her own, so I wouldn’t assume that they are the same as Bart’s.
In fact, in the 5th edition of his book A Brief Introduction to the New Testament, Bart gives somewhat different dates that Robyn gives for the gospels. In that work, Bart says that most scholars have concluded that
- Mark: “around 70” (66-70 “or soon after”)
- Matthew: “Around 80-85”
- Luke: “Around 80-85”
- John: “Around 90-95”
Now since he’s writing an introduction—which is meant to be a basic, summary work, Bart may here be summarizing what he takes scholarly opinion to be, so these may not be the dates he’d choose himself if you asked him.
The dates Bart gives are a little different than those you’ll hear Robyn give, so just be aware that scholars have different opinions.
Still Robyn is part of the Bart Ehrman team, so she’s speaking from a fundamentally similar point of view.
Robyn’s Views & Mine
In the video, Robyn first presents what she takes to be the dates traditionally assigned by scholars to the four Gospels, and then she presents her own assessment.
What she proposes are not actually the traditional dates; they are dates that are common among scholars today, and they only became common in the 20th century.
Now, scholars propose different dates for when the Gospels were written. In the mid- to late-20th century, many proposed dates between the A.D. 70s and the A.D. 90s. Some—typically more liberal scholars—would extend that into the early second century.
While others would argue that they were written earlier, including options for all of them being written before A.D. 70.
And while the latest proposed dates tend to be favored by liberal scholars, the difference of opinion regarding dates does not divide neatly along liberal and conservative lines.
For example, many conservative scholars accept the dates from the 70s to the 90s, while some liberal scholars accept the pre-A.D. 70 dates.
Thus liberal German scholar Adolf von Harnack dated the three Synoptics to before A.D. 70, and liberal Anglican scholar John A. T. Robinson dated all four of them to before 70.
Personally, I agree with the early date school, and this is not because I assume that two of the Gospels—Matthew and John—were written by apostles. It’s based on other evidence.
It wouldn’t bother me if the Gospels did have the later dates. I just don’t think the evidence points in that direction.
In her video, after Robyn surveys what she takes to be scholarly opinion on the dates of the Gospels, she gives her own opinion. She’s not very specific about what this opinion is, but it seems she would be inclined to date the Gospels—especially Matthew, Luke, and John—even later.
Her video is titled “How Reliable Are the Dates for the Gospels?” And it’s a short video, but even still, you’d think that she’d devote more space to the question of how reliable the proposed dates are than she actually does.
What I want to do in this video is not argue for my own preferred dates for the Gospels—that’s something I can do in future episodes—but to respond to the arguments that Robyn presents and see how well they hold up.
A Secret About Gospel Dates
First, though, I want to share with you a secret about the dates you’ll see proposed for the Gospels.
You tend to find these dates in two types of resources: commentaries and introductions to the New Testament.
But when you read what commentaries have to say about the dates of the work that they’re commenting on, you often find that the treatment is extremely short. It may name a handful of factors supporting the date that the author ends up proposing, but it doesn’t go into depth. The section on the date—if there even is such a section—is often just a few paragraphs long, and it largely summarizes arguments proposed by others.
What this shows us is that most of the commentators are not experts in biblical chronology and have not done a thorough study on the dating of the book. After all, if you’re reading a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, what you’re here to read is a commentary on what the text of Matthew means, and so that’s what the author is really interested in.
He wants to get into the text of Matthew and start explaining it. Precisely when Matthew wrote is a secondary question for him, and so most commentary authors haven’t studied the question of dates in depth.
Introductions, in turn, tend to summarize what commentaries say.
Most of the scholars, therefore, don’t really do a careful study of the issue of dating and tend to repeat what they were taught in school or what they’ve heard other authors say.
But I have done such a study. I’m a biblical chronology geek, and so I’ve not only read the commentaries and introductions, I’ve also read multiple specialist works devoted specifically to the chronology of the New Testament and the dating of its documents.
So I was interested in what Robyn would have to say.
The Dating of Mark
ROBYN: So Mark is usually considered the earliest. Let’s start with him. And he’s dated to around 70 C.E. The reason that date is important is because it is when the temple and Jerusalem falls during what is traditionally referred to as the Jewish War or the first Jewish revolt, which took place between about 66 and 73. In 70, and we have this attested in many sources. The temple in Jerusalem was sacked by the Romans. The reason that that date becomes important for Mark is that in Mark 13 there is a description of Jesus predicting the fall of the temple. And so scholars have concluded that that description in Mark 13 suggests that whoever the author of Mark was had some knowledge of that temple’s destruction.
Here Robyn says that Mark was written “around” 70. Later she will make it clear that she thinks Mark was written no earlier than 70.
And in this, she’s varying from what many scholars think. Many hold that it’s possible that Mark was written shortly before 70, and one of the reasons for that is that Mark’s description of the temple’s destruction is not very detailed.
Mark has Jesus mentioning that the stones of the temple would be dismantled. He records Jesus saying:
Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down (Mark 13:2).
But Mark does not mention the dramatic fact that—before the temple was torn down—the Romans burned it—which is the kind of dramatic thing that you might expect to be written in accounts of the temple’s destruction that were composed after the fact.
The burning of the temple is very definitely mentioned in other ancient sources, and the fact that it’s not mentioned in Mark has been proposed as a sign that Mark was written before 70.
Skeptical scholars have proposed that maybe the Jewish war against the Romans was going badly, and so the destruction of the temple could be foreseen when Mark was written.
But there’s a problem with this argument as well, which we’ll get to in a bit.
ROBYN: Mark, we think, was used by Matthew and Luke as source material. And his gospel tends to be a little bit shorter. The sentences are shorter, the structure is shorter. He doesn’t go into a great deal of detail in the way that Matthew and Luke do, especially Luke. And Matthew also goes to great pains to really explain Jesus’s teachings. Mark is happy for you to be a little bit confused.
It’s true that most scholars agree that Mark was one of the sources used by Matthew and Luke, and I agree with that.
In fact, I’d be even more definite about that fact than Robyn was. She said Mark was one of their sources “we think,” which is a common scholarly qualifier, but I consider it basically certain that this was the case.
Robyn then characterizes Mark’s Gospel as shorter. She first says this about Mark’s Gospel as a whole—and that’s certainly true; Mark’s Gospel is the shortest of the four canonical Gospels. But Robyn then says that its sentences are shorter, and its structure is shorter.
I’m not sure what she means by saying its structure is shorter, but what does the length of its sentences have to do with anything?
In context, Robyn would seem to be relating information about how we know Mark was one of Matthew and Luke’s sources, but the length of the Gospel and the length of its sentences tells you nothing about that.
If we look up the average sentence length in the Gospels, we find that Matthew’s sentences are a little over 20 words long in Greek, and that Luke’s are also a little over 20 words long.
By contrast, Mark’s sentences are a little over 19 words long. That’s not enough of a difference to draw any conclusions from.
In fact, what would sentence length have to do with what order the Gospels were written in?
Surely sentence length is a matter of an author’s style of writing—and it’s something that happens on the purely subconscious level. It’s not like authors decide how many words will be in their average sentence.
And it’s certainly not the case that sentence length tells you anything about what order books were written in.
It’s not like early biographies of Abraham Lincoln have shorter sentences than modern ones. This is just a matter of an author’s style.
If sentence length did tell you what order books were written in, then it would turn out that John was the earliest of the four Gospels, because his sentences are only about 18 1/2 words long, while Mark’s are over 19 and Matthew’s and Luke’s are over 20.
So if sentence length had anything to do with dating, that would mean John was earlier than Mark.
But—as you’ll hear—Robyn certainly doesn’t believe that John was the first Gospel written.
It appears that Robyn is just stating irrelevant facts about Mark that have nothing to do with when it was written or how we know it was used as a source by Matthew and Luke.
She then says:
ROBYN: So that truncated style along with Mark 13 in the references to that war, scholars will put Mark right at the fall of the temple.
So Robyn cites two reasons scholars propose a date of 70 for Mark: First, his “truncated style” and second, the material in Mark 13 about the destruction of the temple.
Again, she’s ignoring those scholars who put Mark earlier than 70—even by just a few years—but what can we say about the two factors that she’s named?
It appears that Robyn does not have a good grasp on the arguments regarding Mark’s date.
She hasn’t done anything to show us that Mark has a truncated style compared to Matthew and Luke. His sentences are ever so slightly shorter, but sentence length does not determine style.
You have to look at whole pericopes—or sections—of a Gospel to get a sense of an author’s style, and here the truth is actually the reverse of what Robyn suggests. Mark has a more expansive style in covering the events that he includes.
You can see this even in English translation if you simply use a Gospel synopsis that presents the text from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in parallel columns—like Kurt Aland’s famous Synopsis of the Four Gospels.
The way a synopsis works is it takes the same stories that appear in multiple Gospels and presents them in parallel columns, so if a story appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it will appear in 3 columns, and if it appears in all four Gospels, it will have 4 columns.
Typically, Matthew will be the column on the left, Mark will be right next to it, Luke will be next to Mark, and John will be on the right.
So all you have to do is compare the Matthew column and the Mark column and see who’s longer. When you do that, Mark is normally the longer one. We see that in Mark’s account of:
- The cleansing of the leper
- The healing of Peter’s mother-in-law
- The stilling of the storm
- The Gadarene or Gerasene demoniac
- The healing of the paralytic
- The call of Matthew
- The question about fasting
- Jairus’s daughter
- And so forth
This is a regular pattern. Mark consistently tells the same story in more words than Matthew does.
What’s going on is Matthew is taking material from Mark and abbreviating it because he has other material he wants to include in his Gospel. But he needs to keep his Gospel to the common length of a scroll, so he needs to abbreviate what he takes from Mark.
It’s simply wrong to say that Mark has a truncated style. He actually has a more expansive style.
What Robyn may be thinking of is the idea that stories about Jesus grew over time as people exaggerated and added new details. This is a common claim among liberal Bible scholars. But the evidence indicates that it isn’t true.
And—once again—style doesn’t tell you when a work was written. I could tell by the way Matthew abbreviates Mark that Mark was written before Matthew, but that doesn’t help determine when Mark was written unless you know when Matthew was written.
So the only argument that Robyn has for the dating of Mark is her claim that it shows awareness of the destruction of the temple.
But even that doesn’t tell her it was written after the temple’s destruction in 70, and she knows that, because listen closely to what she says in her initial assessment of when Mark was written
ROBYN: How do I feel about that? Maybe I’ll save that all for the end, a longer discourse on that. But I’ll say that putting it right at 70 is really the earliest you can go. I think that you really are accommodating there the idea that maybe there might’ve been an oral tradition or something like that that predated Mark actually being written down, but we also don’t have great evidence for that. So I would say that 70 is as generous as we can be.
So she assures us that “right at 70 is really the earliest you can go” and that “70 is as generous as we can be.”
In saying this, she’s giving her own opinion rather than summarizing the general view of scholars. In his introduction to the New Testament, Bart Ehrman wrote:
Many scholars believe that the Gospel [of Mark] was written during the late stages of the Jewish War against Rome (66-70 C.E.), or shortly after its conclusion, when the Temple itself was destroyed.
So Ehrman acknowledges that—in his words—many scholars hold that Mark was written in the period between 66 and 70 or shortly thereafter. They are thus not closed to the idea of it being written before 70.
But Robyn’s opinion is:
ROBYN: Putting it right at 70 is really the earliest you can go. 70 is as generous as we can be.
Though many scholars disagree.
And notice what Robyn said right between those two things:
ROBYN: I think that you really are accommodating or the idea that maybe there might’ve been an oral tradition or something like that, that predated Mark actually being written down, but we also don’t have great evidence for that.
So Robyn acknowledges—as many scholars have proposed—that the prediction of the temple’s destruction in Mark 13 may be based on an earlier oral tradition.
And that’s correct! In fact, Jesus was far from the only person who predicted the temple’s coming destruction before it happened. Multiple other people predicted it as well!
This is the other problem with the argument that I mentioned earlier.
So the mere fact that the temple’s destruction is predicted in Mark 13 is not an argument that Mark 13 was written after A.D. 70.
What you’d need to show that is that Mark 13 contains specific details about the temple’s destruction that could not have been guessed prior to 70, and we’ve already seen that it doesn’t have those. In fact, it omits the blindingly obvious fact that the temple was burned—which someone writing after 70 would have known.
Robyn also says that we don’t have great evidence for Mark 13 being based on an earlier oral tradition, but here she is just blowing smoke.
There were multiple people before A.D. 70 who predicted the temple’s destruction—I can tell you about them in a future episode—and there’s no reason why Jesus couldn’t have been one of such person.
Further, Mark 13 presents itself as the recording of an earlier oral tradition. That’s what the Gospels do: They present oral traditions about Jesus that were earlier than the writing of the Gospels themselves.
And there’s the fact that Mark 13’s description of the destruction of the temple omits key details someone writing after 70 would have known.
So this is just a bad argument—and it’s the only one Robyn has since she’s also just wrong about Mark’s style, and Mark’s style as an author doesn’t tell you in what decade he wrote.
Given the number of problems with both her factual claims and her reasoning, I suspect that Robyn may never have made a detailed study of the chronology of Mark and is simply repeating what she’s heard other people say.
And since Mark is her lynchpin for dating the other Gospels, this does not bode well for the dates she will propose for them.
The Dating of Matthew
When it comes to the dating of Matthew, Robyn says:
ROBYN: After that, usually Matthew comes next and he’s usually dated to around 80. And this is more or less because scholars presume that it would take about a decade for the Gospel of Mark to circulate widely enough. And remember publishing an antiquity was something not like today. It didn’t happen in mass production. If you wanted to read something, you had to have somebody copy it at great expense and labor. So the idea there is that Mark was maybe circulating, whoever Matthew was got a hold of it, wanted to either write his own version, maybe a better version in his mind, or maybe explain some of the aspects of Mark he thought were confusing. And so he takes Mark as source material and produces his own gospel. So scholars give that about 10 years as a process in time, but that’s purely speculation and really just a guesstimation of how long it might take for that to get into Matthew’s hands.
So Robyn says that scholars date Matthew to around 80 because they—in her words—presume that it took about 10 years for Mark to get into Matthew’s hands.
This date is in line with the one in Ehrman’s introduction, where he said scholars have estimated it being written between 80 and 85.
That presumption is itself problematic because it assumes a model in which Christians were largely uninterested in having written accounts of what Jesus said and did, and so they didn’t have any purposeful distribution of Christian literature—with only occasional copies being made and shared.
Robyn’s right that they didn’t have modern publishing where a book is launched with thousands of copies being put into print at once.
But the model of Christians being uninterested in having written accounts of their own Savior’s life is wrong. You can read about that in the excellent anthology The Gospels for All Christians, edited by Richard Bauckham.
Christians were interested in literature about Jesus, and—although a book might not launch with thousands of copies in print—it could launch with multiple copies in print.
Just like today, ancient authors tended to keep a copy of what they wrote in addition to one or more copies they gave to others. In fact, the book of Revelation was written to the seven churches of Asia, so if each one of those received a copy—plus the copy John kept for himself on the island of Patmos—that would be at least 8 copies to launch the book.
And it only took weeks for a book to be shipped from one part of the empire to another, so we don’t need to propose that it took 10 years for Mark to get into Matthew’s hands. We only need to propose a few weeks.
This reveals just how unreliable the 10-year estimate Robyn proposes is.
In fact, she acknowledges
ROBYN: But that’s purely speculation and really just a guesstimation of how long it might take for that to get into Matthew’s hands.
And that’s correct. It’s pure speculation, and not even well-grounded speculation.
With that—plus the fact that Robyn’s date for mark is super-shaky—the answer to Robyn’s question of how reliable are the dates she proposes for the Gospels is looking like . . . not very.
The Dating of Luke
When it comes to dating the Gospel of Luke, Robyn says:
ROBYN: Similarly, Luke is dated about 10 years after that, so maybe 80 to 90, giving him a little bit of time to get ahold of Mark and what other source materials he may have had. And his preface, he talks about having talked to some people who may have been eyewitnesses, that might’ve been more rhetorical than actual, but he does say that he consulted a lot of different sources to write his piece. So about 90 for his production.
So Robyn initially says that Luke was written between A.D. 80 and 90, but then she pivots to saying it was written around 90.
This date is a bit later than the one in Ehrman’s introduction, where he said most scholars date Luke between 80 and 85—the same timeframe as Matthew.
However, Robyn gives us no real arguments for her position. She alludes to Luke needing to get Mark and his other source materials together, but she gives us no reason to think—even if you grant that Mark was written in 70—that it would take Luke 20 years to do this.
This is, once again, pure speculation based on a model where Christians were largely uninterested in producing literature about Jesus so that it happened on a timescale of decades.
The Dating of John
When it comes to the dating of John, Robyn says
ROBYN: And then John, which has very different teachings, a very different style, a bit more philosophical you might even say, than the other gospels a little bit more. Some people would even say theological and its tenor and its descriptions of Jesus’ status that is usually dated later to maybe the late first century, early second century. The irony with that is that he’s—actually the gospel of John—our earliest scraps of papyri of the New Testament are actually of John. So interesting there that that’s the case. But John is usually considered something of an outlier, although some scholars do debate this and dated to a much later kind of theology.
So Robyn says that John’s Gospel is usually dated to the late first or early second century.
This is a later date than the estimate Ehrman provides in his introduction, where he said most scholars date John to between A.D. 90 and 95. That would be the late first century but not the early second century.
The reasons that she gives for this dating include that John is written in a more philosophical style and that it makes stronger theological claims about Jesus’ status, which implies a later theology.
The first of these—the philosophical style—has nothing to do with dating. An author who is more interested in philosophy is going to write in a more philosophical style, so what that tells you about is the author’s interests, not when he was writing.
The second of these arguments is referring to the fact that John’s Gospel contains explicit statements about Jesus’ divinity. This is what’s known as a High Christology. For example
- John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word”—implying Jesus existed in heaven before his birth
- John 8:5 “Before Abraham was, I am
- John 10:30 “I and the Father are one”
- John 14:9 Seeing Jesus is seeing the Father
- John 20:28 “My Lord and my God!”
And there are other passages in John.
The other three Gospels contain declarations of Jesus’ divinity, but they’re not as obvious for people coming from a Greco-Roman rather than a Jewish culture.
The problem is that individuals like Robyn are taking these as indications of a late theology, and that’s not true.
In fact, scholars like Robyn and Bart often hold that St. Paul’s writings are the earliest in the New Testament, and St. Paul has a high Christology.
In fact, Bart Ehrman acknowledges that! On his blog he has a post titled “Paul’s Incredibly High Christology.”
For example—just like John—Paul teaches that Jesus existed in heaven before his birth. In Philippians—around A.D. 60—Paul says that
Though [Christ Jesus] was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death (Philippians 2:6-8).
Even earlier, around A.D. 50, Paul wrote in Galatians that:
When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law (Galatians 4:4).
Ehrman points out that—since every human being is born of a woman, so you don’t need to mention that fact—Paul is implying that Jesus was something more than human, that he was a pre-existent heavenly person.
Ehrman also notes that in Romans—which Paul wrote around A.D. 55—Paul directly calls Jesus God, saying:
To [the Jewish people] belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all (Romans 9:5).
So even Bart Ehrman agrees that Paul referred to Jesus as God, and he concludes:
If someone as early in the Christian tradition as Paul can see Christ as an incarnate divine being, it is no surprise that the same view emerges later in the tradition as well. Nowhere does it emerge more clearly or forcefully than in the Gospel of John.
What this means is that you can’t use John’s high Christology to give John a late date. If Paul—writing in the A.D. 50s—has the same kind of high Christology, then there’s no reason that John couldn’t be just as early.
I’m not saying that John does date to the A.D. 50s, I’m just saying that this argument from Robyn and similar scholars is worthless.
Robyn’s Conclusions
Robyn has now gone through each of the four Gospels and proposed what she takes to be the dates scholars usually assign to them.
She’s glossing over scholars who disagree, but now she offers her own assessment.
ROBYN: So that’s the general landscape of how we date the gospels. What do I think of that? I think it needs a rethink.
I agree! I think all the arguments we’ve heard thus far are lousy, so I definitely agree that this whole approach needs a re-think.
But what does Robyn think about what we’ve heard thus far?
ROBYN: I think that as a starting point, it’s not bad, and I would say that I’m comfortable with it being post-war, the dating. I think that all of the gospels are post-war, post that Jewish war, not because of Mark 13 per se.
Okay, let’s see it!
ROBYN: Mostly because the kind of practices that Jesus promotes in the gospels through his teachings. Although he as a young man does things like go to the temple, he otherwise does not require the temple to be a part of what we might consider the Jesus movement or early Christianity. In fact, he sort of presents a version or an interpretation of the Jewish scriptures and of, we might even say a form of Judaism that doesn’t require the temple. So something that would’ve been very relevant to a period of time after the fall of the temple, obviously.
Obviously. . . . Except for two things.
First, we know that there were other forms of Judaism that existed before the fall of the temple that did not require attendance at the temple services.
For example, that was the position of the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They believed that the Jerusalem temple had become corrupt, and they refused to worship there.
But the Dead Sea Scrolls were written before the Jewish War, and so there already were versions of Judaism that did not require temple worship.
And second—as Robyn noted—Jesus himself did attend the temple. It’s just that the Gospels don’t require this for all Christians.
Can you think of any other reasons—besides being written after A.D. 70—why they might not do that?
How about the fact that there were numerous gentile converts coming into Christianity—through the ministries of St. Paul, St. Barnabas, and others—in the A.D. 50s and 60s.
In fact, the issue of how to deal with gentile converts had already become so prominent that in A.D. 49 the Jerusalem church held a council in Acts 15 to decide whether they needed to be circumcised and become Jews.
The answer was they did not.
But if gentile Christians did not need to become Jews, then they did not need to worship at the temple.
Oh, and the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and John are all written with gentile Christians in mind.
So it’s no surprise that they wouldn’t stress the need to worship at the temple, regardless of whether they were written before or after A.D. 70.
But what do we find in the one Gospel that’s clearly written for an audience of Jewish Christians—the Gospel of Matthew? What do we find Jesus teaching there?
Well, in the Sermon on the Mount we read:
If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift (Matthew 5:23-24).
So here Jesus expects that his Jewish followers will be offering sacrifices at the Jerusalem temple.
And in Matthew 17:24-27, St. Peter is asked whether Jesus pays the temple tax, and Peter says yes. Afterward, Jesus points out that—since he’s God’s Son—he doesn’t need to do this, but he urges Peter to pay the tax for both himself and for Jesus so as “Not to give offense to them.”
That makes it sound like Jesus is encouraging Jewish Christians to go ahead and pay the temple tax, which means the temple was still functioning.
Finally, in Matthew 24—in his prediction about the coming destruction of the temple—Jesus says:
Let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. . . . Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath (Matthew 24:16, 20).
This statement would clearly be superfluous if Matthew were written after the temple was destroyed.
We thus see—in the one Gospel aimed at Jewish Christians—that it does presuppose that the temple is still there and functioning, and it envisions Jewish Christians participating in its services.
But Robyn says:
ROBYN: So I think that something about the fall of that temple inspired the production of the gospels. Maybe people thought this could have been the end of the world. This could have been when Jesus would return, and he didn’t, so let’s go back and think about his life and his teachings. What did we miss? And I also think that it presented again, a version of Jesus’s teachings and a way to carry forward that did not require something like sacrifice at the temple. So in my mind, the temple is gone by the time the gospels are written.
Well, that may be the way it is in Robyn’s mind, but she hasn’t established this by argument. It’s just speculation, and there are other explanations for the same facts if the Gospels were written early.
And now Robyn brings it all in for a landing.
ROBYN: But whether or not they are late first century, early second century, because our manuscript tradition is really just so late, and I really recommend the work of Brent Nongbri on this. If you haven’t seen already, his book, God’s Library goes through a lot of our early manuscript traditions and the papyri that we have because it’s so late. I think we’re being very generous by placing Mark, for example, as early as we do.
I can recommend the work of Brent Nongbri, too. In particular, his book God’s Library is a really good read.
But Robyn is misunderstanding the role that manuscripts play in dating works. Since no original copies of books from the ancient world survive, what datable manuscripts do is tell you is that the book must have been written before the earliest manuscript you have.
We have manuscripts for the Gospels from the second and third centuries, so we know that they had to be written before those manuscripts.
But the manuscripts don’t really tell you anything about how far before the manuscript a book was written.
And Robyn is just wrong to say
ROBYN: It’s our manuscript tradition is really just so late.
Because it isn’t so late. In fact, it’s remarkably early.
Even on Robyn’s dating, the gap between the Gospel of John and our earliest manuscript of it is only decades at most. And—again on her datings—the gap between the other Gospels and our earliest manuscripts of them is around a century.
That is not late. In fact, it’s remarkably early.
For example, our earliest manuscripts of Plato date from the 9th century A.D.—in the Middle Ages—but Plato’s works were written in the 5th century B.C., so that’s a gap of 13 centuries!
Once again, Robyn just doesn’t seem to know what she’s talking about.
My Conclusions
My own conclusion is that it does not appear that Robyn has done serious study on the dating of the Gospels.
It appears that she has a superficial understanding of these issues that is largely based on what she’s read or heard from others—not a serious, personal, detailed, and open-minded study of the question that looks at the issue from multiple perspectives.
Her video also doesn’t really address the central question it set out to answer. That question was:
ROBYN: How reliable are our dates for the four canonical gospels?
But she barely goes into the question of how reliable the dates are.
She provides almost no argumentation for the dates themselves, much less a significant assessment of how reliable we should regard those dates as being.
And—based on what she does present—I’d say that the dates she offers are not reliable at all.
Just notice the number of things she admits:
ROBYN: That description in Mark 13 suggests . . . Mark, we think was used by Matthew and Luke . . . and this is more or less because scholars presume that it would take about a decade . . . Mark was maybe circulating whoever Matthew was, got a hold of it . . . But that’s purely speculation and really just kind of a guesstimation of how long it might take for that to get into Matthew’s hands . . . John is usually considered something of an outlier, although some scholars do debate this . . . Something about the fall of that temple inspired the production of the gospels . . . Maybe people thought this could have been the end of the world.
Notice in particular the number of times she says things like “suggests,” “we think,” “more or less,” “presume,” “maybe,” “purely speculation,” and “guestimation.”
Let’s hear it again.
ROBYN: That description in Mark 13 suggests . . . Mark, we think was used by Matthew and Luke . . . and this is more or less because scholars presume that it would take about a decade . . . Mark was maybe circulating whoever Matthew was, got a hold of it . . . But that’s purely speculation and really just kind of a guesstimation of how long it might take for that to get into Matthew’s hands . . . John is usually considered something of an outlier, although some scholars do debate this . . . Something about the fall of that temple inspired the production of the gospels . . . Maybe people thought this could have been the end of the world.
So yeah, based on what Robyn has presented here, I don’t think we can have any confidence in the dates proposed. Partly, that’s signaled by the number of qualifiers she’s forced to include, but—even more importantly—the arguments she provides are just lousy.
Fortunately, there are much better arguments available, and I’ll share them with you in future episodes.
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God bless you always!
SOURCES:
Robyn Walsh’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM-R9TNI1wc
Matricciani and Caro “A Deep-Language Mathematical Analysis of Gospels, Acts, and Revelation”: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/4/257