An earlier dating of the Gospels?

[HarryStotle]

I don’t have a point, except to explain what happened in those years.

The rebel government did not mint Roman denarii. No one was minting Roman denarii in or near Jerusalem. That is why there weren’t many. When Roman soldiers took possession of the city, more appeared because they liked to be paid in Roman coin.

And how does that demonstrate that denarii were scarce when Jesus was alive, and therefore the Gospels had to have been written at a time when denarii were more plentiful, after 70 AD?

Jesus died ~ 30 to 33 AD, the number of denarii in Jerusalem in the 60s AD says nothing about the number of denarii there around 30 AD. Get the point?

 

[billsherman]

Just to be clear: modern historians do not base their dating of the Gospels on coins, or on skeptical beliefs that seek to undermine Christianity. The dating is based on internal textual evidence correlated with external textual evidence viewed against the interplay among the four Gospels. There is simply no way this process can be summarized in a forum, so I suggest turning to some of the best scholars who work on it. James Dunn, in particular, is one of the best. You also can’t go wrong with Raymond Brown. Or the article I cited above.

 

[Dovekin]

You have made accusations of “shoddy scholarship” because the various sources did not account for the Jewish revolt in the 60s. How did that scholarship tell us anything about the use of denarii in the 30s? If that is all you cared about was that, why did you bring up events of the 60s?

To be honest, I do not really care for the methodology used in these studies. They do get some things right, and should not be attacked just because you haven’t read all the material cited. I think the more interesting issue is the fiscus judaicus and the effect that would have on the story.

the fact that Jesus, following Daniel, prophesied these things does not entail Jesus couldn’t have voiced his prophecies long before 70 AD and had these recorded in the Gospels long prior to that date.

The analysis is rather different than you and Gorgias are presenting it. Jesus could have predicted the destruction of the Temple, but the way Mark presents that prophecy is as something that will be fulfilled imminently. The urgency of Mark’s apocalyptic is more in line with the events of the year of the four emperors than it is with the 30s. You may think that is not true, but that does not excuse you from listening what others have to say and presenting it fairly imo.

 

[HarryStotle]

The analysis is rather different than you and Gorgias are presenting it. Jesus could have predicted the destruction of the Temple, but the way Mark presents that prophecy is as something that will be fulfilled imminently. The urgency of Mark’s apocalyptic is more in line with the events of the year of the four emperors than it is with the 30s. You may think that is not true, but that does not excuse you from listening what others have to say and presenting it fairly imo.

I know where you are coming from, but you are mistaken. The “urgency” of Jesus’ words in Mark do NOT imply the events will transpire in the 30s. Neither do they imply his prophecy will take place imminently.

Provide the words that compel us to understand Jesus that way. I will be happy to demonstrate why they don’t.

How, for example, do you reconcile verse 10, “And the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations,” or “…about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come” (v 33)?

Most Catholic scholars will correlate the prophecies of destruction by Jesus to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, so who, are you supposing, would claim his words were about events on the 30s?

 

[Dovekin]

It is late and I must not be writing very clearly since you have so totally misunderstood what I wrote.

Mark has an urgent apocalyptic mood. This mood is rooted in the events of the late 60s — Nero, the last of Caesar’s family, not just dying but being run off; Vespasian’s march through Galilee; the struggles to establish a new emperor etc. Someone writing in the late 70s writes about the destruction of the world in an urgent manner. Earlier the sense of the end of an age was not as present as in 66.

If you still do not understand this, maybe tomorrow i can explain it better

 

[HarryStotle]

It is late and I must not be writing very clearly since you have so totally misunderstood what I wrote.

Mark has an urgent apocalyptic mood. This mood is rooted in the events of the late 60s — Nero, the last of Caesar’s family, not just dying but being run off; Vespasian’s march through Galilee; the struggles to establish a new emperor etc. Someone writing in the late 70s writes about the destruction of the world in an urgent manner. Earlier the sense of the end of an age was not as present as in 66.

If you still do not understand this, maybe tomorrow i can explain it better

Certainly, your new statement is clearer, but you are begging the question. You can’t demonstrate Mark wrote late by presuming his late writing is due to his “urgent apocalyptic mood.” That is essentially saying, Mark, writing late, is showing an urgent apocalyptic mood because someone like Mark writing in the 70s would be showing – we would assume – “an urgent apocalyptic mood.” Seems like begging the question by assuming urgency.

Why would someone writing after all the events have taken place write with urgency? Why wouldn’t he simply tell what happened and connect those events to the Gospel as past events? Why the secrecy and pretence after the fact? Why would Mark put on the charade of Jesus having predicted these events, unless you assume, to begin with, that Jesus couldn’t have predicted them, and the Gospel could only profit from depicting the events as predictions?

If Jesus did actually predict them, no sense of urgency needs to be read into the text to corroborate your theory.

 

[Gorgias]

They could have got a great deal of mileage out of that event.

Do you think that they don’t get mileage out of the prediction an event that actually happened? I mean, a tacit nod to it – which is the appearance we get – is just as effective as saying “hey! Jesus said it, and… it happened!!!”

Just to be clear: modern historians do not base their dating of the Gospels on coins, or on skeptical beliefs that seek to undermine Christianity.

Just to be clear: modern Scripture scholars certain do the latter…

Someone writing in the late 70s writes about the destruction of the world in an urgent manner.

Fair enough analysis, if you want to create a narrative about a theory of late authorship. However, that doesn’t mean that someone writing twenty years earlier wouldn’t have had a similar sense of imminence…

 

[Dovekin]

If Jesus did actually predict them, no sense of urgency needs to be read into the text to corroborate your theory.

If you do not have a sense of the urgency in Mark, then you will not, cannot agree with me.

If you can recognize that tone in Mark, you might also recognize it in Tacitus’ Histories where he writes about the year 69 CE:

The story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during times of peace. It tells of four emperors slain by the sword, three several civil wars, an even larger number of foreign wars and some that were both at once: successes in the East, disaster in the West, disturbance in Illyricum, disaffection in the provinces of Gaul, the conquest of Britain and its immediate loss, the rising of the Sarmatian and Suebic tribes. It tells how Dacia had the privilege of exchanging blows with Rome, and how a pretender claiming to be Nero almost deluded the Parthians into declaring war. Now too Italy was smitten with new disasters, or disasters it had not witnessed for a long period of years. Towns along the rich coast of Campania were submerged or buried. The city was devastated by fires, ancient temples were destroyed, and the Capitol itself was fired by Roman hands. Sacred rites were grossly profaned, and there were scandals in high places. The sea swarmed with exiles and the island cliffs were red with blood. Worse horrors reigned in the city. To be rich or well-born was a crime: men were prosecuted for holding or for refusing office: merit of any kind meant certain ruin. Nor were the Informers more hated for their crimes than for their prizes: some carried off a priesthood or the consulship as their spoil, others won offices and influence in the imperial household: the hatred and fear they inspired worked universal havoc. Slaves were bribed against their masters, freedmen against their patrons, and, if a man had no enemies, he was ruined by his friends

.This is a description from a non-Jew who does not care about the destruction of the Temple, a non-Christian who is unaffected by the persecutions under Nero. I feel that Mark was more likely written in the situation described than in any other era. The prediction of the destruction of the Temple had its maximum effect in that era: it showed Jesus knew of the chaos to come. It is not skepticism about whether Jesus really did prophesy all that, but coherence of that prophecy with the “modern times” of 69 CE.

There are more prosaic evidences that testify to a date around 70CE but I am not going to go into those details here. An earlier date is possible, but I doubt that it could have produced the book that is the Gospel according to St Mark.

 

[HarryStotle]

HarryStotle:

They could have got a great deal of mileage out of that event.

Do you think that they don’t get mileage out of the prediction an event that actually happened? I mean, a tacit nod to it – which is the appearance we get – is just as effective as saying “hey! Jesus said it, and… it happened!!!”

I think the skeptics view is that the writers of the Gospels got more mileage by ignoring the fact that the events already did happen and set about proclaiming, after the fact, that Jesus had predicted it, to make him appear more compelling.

The problem with that view is that if they were writing after the fact and everyone knew that what had already taken place had indeed taken place, a claim that Jesus predicted such events would merely be scoffed at – “Yeah, sure, why didn’t you, Mark, write something about that before? Why did the Apostles not tell us about that before now?”

The Gospel writers would have certainly gotten more mileage by making no claims about Jesus, but by playing up the more important fact that Jesus had fulfilled the prophecies in Daniel rather than retrospectively attributing to Jesus words he had never spoken. The latter would have destroyed their credibility.

If these words were attributed to Jesus only after they occurred such claims would actually undermine believability. Human beings might not be knowledgable about everything, but they aren’t gullible.

The same issue comes up with the Resurrection. If the Resurrection was only concocted years later, after Christianity had already been established, potential converts would have scoffed: “Uh huh, why are we only hearing about this Resurrection thing now and not 20 or 30 years ago?”

And such retroactive claims would have only served undermine the beliefs of the earliest Christians if these little bits were only tacked on later. “Yeah, right, these Church leaders are now just making stuff up – I am outta here.”

 

[Gorgias]

I think the skeptics view is that the writers of the Gospels got more mileage by ignoring the fact that the events already did happen and set about proclaiming, after the fact, that Jesus had predicted it, to make him appear more compelling.

And they can certainly make that claim. Short of demonstrating its truth, however, it’s just a hypothetical construct, not a reasoned argument.

 

[Haven]

I do not agree with the second explanation. Certainly, the Resurrection of Christ, which is the center of the Christian message, is the culmination of the entire New Testament, but to invoke the fact that it supersedes everything said in the NT as a reason for the omission (indeed there is no omission) of Saint Paul’s execution is not very convincing. The book of Acts traces the development of the early Church and more precisely of Saint Paul’s apostolate. Luke traced everything that happened to Paul from Jerusalem to Rome before he was executed. He even mentioned the execution of St. Stephen and James; why would he not mention that of St. Paul if it had taken place when the Book of Acts was finished? If he does not mention his execution, it is because it had not yet taken place and since the Gospel according to Luke precedes the book of Acts of the Apostles, it must be concluded that his Gospel was written before the fall of the temple, the same applies to the book of Acts.

Nevertheless, I fully agree on the danger of risking an extremely precise dating of the New Testament writings. All we know is that they come from the people to whom they are attributed. Therefore they can only have been written as long as they were alive.

 

[patrick457]

(Wow, been a long time since I posted here)

In a past thread I went into some detail about Carsten Peter Thiede and his claim about the Magdalen papyrus. Long story short, it doesn’t really hold that much water.

Scraps of Papyrus: Earliest Gospel Texts? Sacred Scripture

[image] [image] These three scraps of papyrus right here contain text from Matthew 26. They were presented by the Reverend Charles Bousfield Huleatt to Magdalen College, Oxford in 1901, hence their name, the ‘Magdalen papyrus’. We don’t know exactly how Huleatt acquired these scraps or their ultimate origin, only that he acquired them while he was in Egypt (which was where quite a lot of papyrus manuscripts were found). The…

 

[AveOTheotokos]

I thought Matthew was written first, and was in Aramaic, not greek…

From Catholic Answers:
Was Matthew’s Gospel First Written In Aramaic Or Hebrew?

Around 180 Irenaeus of Lyons wrote that:

Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia. ( Against Heresies 3:1:1)

Fifty years earlier Papias, bishop of Hieropolis in Asia Minor, wrote, “Matthew compiled the sayings [of the Lord] in the Aramaic language, and everyone translated them as well as he could” ( Explanation of the Sayings of the Lord [cited by Eusebius in History of the Church 3:39]).

Sometime after 244 the Scripture scholar Origen wrote, “Among the four Gospels, which are the only indisputable ones in the Church of God under heaven, I have learned by tradition that the first was written by Matthew, who was once a publican, but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, and it was prepared for the converts from Judaism and published in the Hebrew language” ( Commentaries on Matthew [cited by Eusebius in History of the Church 6:25]).

Eusebius himself declared that “Matthew had begun by preaching to the Hebrews, and when he made up his mind to go to others too, he committed his own Gospel to writing in his native tongue [Aramaic], so that for those with whom he was no longer present the gap left by his departure was filled by what he wrote” ( History of the Church 3:24 [inter 300-325]).

 

[BartholomewB]

Jerome says that he once saw, in the library at Caesarea, a book described as Matthew’s Gospel in Hebrew. (Irenaeus, Eusebius, and Papias all mention the existence of a book of that kind, but none of these three claims to have actually seen, handled, or read it.) Later in life, however, Jerome kept strangely silent about the book he had once seen, suggesting that he may have changed his mind, possibly because the book was too different from the Matthew’s Gospel he knew in Greek for him to be able to accept it as the original of a Greek translation.

All these conjectures and more have been discussed on earlier threads here at CAF, such as this one from a year ago:

Were the Gospels translated from Aramic to Koine Greek? Sacred Scripture

were the Gospels translated from Aramaic to Koine Greek? Where were the earliest copies of the Gospels found?

 

[patrick457]

I thought Matthew was written first, and was in Aramaic, not greek…

The first Christian writer we have to talk about how the gospels were written was Papias. As noted in the quote you give, Papias mentioned that Matthew recorded or compiled the logia (literally ‘words’ or ‘sayings’, though he pretty much uses this word the same way we do ‘gospel’ now -) of Jesus in Hēbraidi dialektō. This Greek expression could be interpreted as either meaning “in the Hebrew literary style” or in “the Hebrew language” (which could mean either the language we call Hebrew or Aramaic).

Most Church Fathers since have gone with the latter sense and thought that Matthew produced a gospel written in ‘Hebrew’, with some (like St. Jerome) even trying to find or claiming to have found it in some nook somewhere. What they usually ended up finding, however, wasn’t some kind of ‘proto-Matthew’ but derivatives of our canonical gospel of Matthew in Hebrew/Aramaic used by certain Jewish Christian sects (of varying orthodoxy).

Because there’s no trace of this Hebrew/Aramaic proto-Matthew anywhere except for this claim passed among the Fathers (even our Greek Matthew doesn’t really seem to bear any mark of it being a translation from either Hebrew or Aramaic - if anything, a few scholars have considered Mark to be the more likely one to be the translation of an Aramaic proto-gospel), some people wonder that maybe Papias was simply just referring to Greek Matthew all along, saying that it was written using Jewish literary modes.

 

[BartholomewB]

What they usually ended up finding, however, wasn’t some kind of ‘proto-Matthew’ but derivatives of our canonical gospel of Matthew in Hebrew/Aramaic used by certain Jewish Christian sects (of varying orthodoxy).

I see. That’s interesting. So one possibility (among others, of course) is that the book Jerome saw in Caesarea was a translation (or adaptation/abridgment) of the Greek Matthew into Aramaic or Hebrew?

 

[Dovekin]

The Peshitta, the bible used by Syriac churches, is believed to have been translated into Aramaic in the 2nd or 3rd century, so it is certainly possible.

 

[Serpent_of_Paradise]

A relevant book is “Eyewitness to Jesus: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence About the Origin of the Gospels” by Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’ Ancona.

https://www.amazon.com/Eyewitness-Jesus-Matthew-DAncona/dp/0385480512

It gives evidence for manuscript evidence for a 60AD Gospel of Matthew!

 

[BartholomewB]

You haven’t been reading the thread, have you? See, specifically, comments posted by @Dan_Defender, @RollTide1987, and @billsherman.

 

[Serpent_of_Paradise]

Got me, … they beat me too it!