CHRISTIANITY EXPLAINED: Dating the New Testament writings

EXPLORING CHRISTIANITY - EYEWITNESS

THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Grace
The importance of grace in the New Testament.

Dating the New Testament writings

It is still possible to find serious works of scholarship dating the entire New Testament before AD 70. (For example: John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament, 1976, and John W. Wenham, Redating Matthew, Mark & Luke: A Fresh Assault on the Synoptic Problem, 1991.) Equally serious works date much of the New Testament considerably later. Maybe the variety of views that are held illustrate the subjectivity that enters in when discussing material that is as personally challenging to one's life-style and one's world-view as is the New Testament!

"Much of the focus of the debate is on the dating of the documents. However, is that the real issue"?

Austin Farrer observed about the dating of the New Testament that the range of possible hypotheses was like a line of tipsy revellers with arms linked. They lurch this way and that, each piece kept in place by its neighbours, without encountering any solid object! Concerning today's efforts at deconstructing the New Testament, Tom Wright, one of Britain's leading New Testament scholars, uses an equally graphic metaphor. He says that it "is like finding yourself in the middle of a rugby field with 5 teams and 10 balls. There is all kinds of excitement: everybody is tackling everybody, and everyone thinks he's on the winning team."

Much of the focus of the debate is on the dating of the documents. However, is that the real issue? If the writers of the New Testament had reliable sources of information and if they were in some instances eye-witnesses of the events they describe, would it matter too much when they wrote them down? We read autobiographies of people who describe events that took place in their childhoods 50 years previously (or hear them on radio), without questioning the truth of those events. After all, they were there when it happened and they sound like honest people.

The questions I would ask are: Do we have in the New Testament material that is written by people directly involved in the events they record? Where this is not the case, did they get it from eyewitnesses? If this is true, then surely it must carry more weight than arguments about the date of the final composition.