[dating of the gospels] part 3 some of the arguments

Part 2 had a mini-bio of John A. T. Robinson.

The dating

Why should his reputation suffer such a sudden fall? Because he dates the New Testament and other works thus:

The Didache c. 40-60

Mark c. 45-60

Matthew c. 40-60+

John c. -40-65+

James c. 47-8

1 Thessalonians early 50

2 Thessalonians 50-1

1 Corinthians spring 55

1 Timothy autumn 55

2 Corinthians early 56

Galatians later 56

Romans early 57

Titus late spring 57

Philippians spring 58

Philemon summer 58

Colossians summer 58

Ephesians late summer 58

2 Timothy autumn 58

Luke -57-60+

Acts -57-62+

Jude 61-2

2 Peter 61-2

1 John c. 60-65

2 John c. 60-65

3 John c. 60-65

1 Peter spring 65

Hebrews c. 67

Revelation late 68 (-70)

1 Clement early 70

Barnabas c. 75

The Shepherd of Hermas -c. 85

The Significance of 70
Robinson's contention

"One of the oddest facts about the New Testament is that what on any showing would appear to be the single most datable and climactic event of the period - the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and with it the collapse of institutional Judaism based on the temple - is never once mentioned as a past fact.

It is, of course, predicted; and these predictions are, in some cases at least, assumed to be written (or written up) after the event. But the silence is nevertheless as significant as the silence for Sherlock Holmes of the dog that did not bark.

S.G.F. Brandon made this oddness the key to his entire interpretation of the New Testament: everything from the gospel of Mark onwards was a studied rewriting of history to suppress the truth that Jesus and the earliest Christians were identified with the revolt that failed. But the sympathies of Jesus and the Palestinian church with the Zealot cause are entirely unproven and Brandon's views have won scant scholarly credence. Yet if the silence is not studied it is very remarkable.

As James Moffatt said,

We should expect . . . that an event like the fall of Jerusalem would have dinted some of the literature of the primitive church, almost as the victory at Salamis has marked the Perae. It might be supposed that such an epochal-making crisis would even furnish criteria for determining the dates of some of the NT writings. As a matter of fact, the catastrophe is practically ignored in the extant Christian literature of the first century.

Similarly C.F.D. Moule :

It is hard to believe that a Judaistic type of Christianity which had itself been closely involved in the cataclysm of the years leading up to AD 70 would not have shown the scars - or, alternatively, would not have made capital out of this signal evidence that they, and not non-Christian Judaism, were the true Israel. But in fact our traditions are silent.

Explanations for this silence have of course been attempted. Yet the simplest explanation of all, that 'perhaps . . . there is extremely little in the New Testament later than AD 70' and that its events are not mentioned because they had not yet occurred, seems to me to demand more attention than it has received in critical circles.

Bo Reicke begins a recent essay with the words:

An amazing example of uncritical dogmatism in New Testament studies is the belief that the Synoptic Gospels should be dated after the Jewish War of AD 66-70 because they contain prophecies ex eventu of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70.

In fact this is too sweeping a statement, because the dominant consensus of scholarly opinion places Mark's gospel, if not before the beginning of the Jewish War, at any rate before the capture of the city.

Indeed one of the arguments to be assessed is that which distinguishes between the evidence of Mark on the one hand and that of Matthew and Luke on the other.

In what follows I shall start from the presumption of most contemporary scholars that Mark's version is the earliest and was used by Matthew and Luke. As will become clear, I am by no means satisfied with this as an overall explanation of the synoptic phenomena. I believe that one must be open to the possibility that at points Matthew or Luke may represent the earliest form of the common tradition, which Mark also alters for editorials reasons.

I shall therefore concentrate on the differences between the versions without prejudging their priority or dependence. the relative order of the synoptic gospels is in any case of secondary importance for assessing their absolute relation to the events of 70. Whatever their sequence, all or any could have been written before or after the fall of Jerusalem.

Let us start by looking again at the discourse of Mark 13. It begins:

As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples exclaimed, 'Look, Master, what huge stones! What fine buildings!' Jesus said to him, 'You see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.'

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives facing the temple he was questioned privately by Peter, James, John, and Andrew. 'Tell us,' they said, 'when will this happen? What will be the sign when the fulfilment of all this is at hand?' (12.1-4)

(On Christ's Second Coming)

"The parousia is clearly understood, not as a separate catastrophic occurrence, but as a separate pervasion of the daily life of the disciples and the Church. The coming is an abiding presence." [Jesus and His Coming (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), p .176]

(On Revelation 11:1 ; Early Date of Revelation)

"It is indeed generally agreed that this passage must bespeak a pre-70 situation. . . . There seems therefore no reason why the oracle should not have been uttered by a Christian prophet as the doom of the city drew nigh." (Redating New Testament pp.. 240-242).

"It was at this point that I began to ask myself just why any of the books of the New Testament needed to be put after the fall of Jerusalem in 70. As one began to look at them, and in particular the epistle to the Hebrews, Acts and the Apocalypse, was it not strange that this cataclysmic event was never once mentioned or apparently hinted at (as a past fact)? (Redating, p. 10).

"One of the oddest facts about the New Testament is that what on any showing would appear to be the single most datable and climactic event of the period — the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 — is never once mentioned as a past fact. . . . [T]he silence is nevertheless as significant as the silence for Sherlock Holmes of the dog that did not bark". (Ibid., p. 13.)

(On the Forty Years and That Generation)

"I believe that John represents in date, as theology, not only the omega but also the alpha of New Testament development. He bestrides the period like a colossus and marks out its span, the span that lies between two dramatic moments in Jerusalem which boldly we may date with unusual precision.

The first was when, on 9 April 30, 'early on the Sunday morning, while it was still dark,' one man 'saw and believed' (Jno. 20:1-9). And the second was when, on 26 September 70, 'the dawn of the eight day of the month Gorpiaeus broke upon Jerusalem in flames.'

Over those forty years, I believe, all the books of the New Testament came to completion, and during most of that period, if we are right, the Johannine literature was in the process of maturation." (p. 311)"

(Parousia)

"Coming - presence" (Parousia) of Christ should not be seen as future events, but as a symbolical mythological presentation of "...what must happen, and is happening already, whenever the Christ comes in love and power, whenever are to be traced the signs of His presence, wherever to be seen the marks of His cross.

'Judgement DAY' is a dramatized idealized picture of everyday" (His in the end... Clarke, London, 1950 Pg. 69).

"...Did Jesus ever use language which suggested that He would return to earth from heaven? A critical examination of the data leads him to answer `NO'. Jesus' sayings on the subject really express the twin themes of vindication and visitation. e.g. His reply to the high priest's question whether or not He was the Messiah (Mark 14:62+): `1 am: and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power: and coming with the clouds of heaven'. In Math 26:64 and Lk.22:69 a word or phrase meaning from now on' or 'hereafter' is inserted before `you will see"' (Jesus and His coming - S.C.M., London 1957).

(On The Pella Flight Tradition)

"Moreover, the only tradition we have as to what Christians actually did, or were told to do, is that preserved by Eusebius apparently on the basis of the Memoirs of Hegesippus used also by Epiphanius. This says that they had been commanded by an oracle given "before the war" to depart from the city, and that so far from taking to the mountains of Judea, as Mark’s instruction implies, they were to make for Pella, a Greek city of the Decapolis, which lay below sea level on the east side of the Jordan valley." (Robinson 1976:16.)

(On the Parousia)

"The parousia is clearly understood, not as a separate catastrophic occurrence, but as a separate pervasion of the daily life of the disciples and the Church. The coming is an abiding presence." [Jesus and His Coming (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), p .176]

"...Did Jesus ever use language which suggested that He would return to earth from heaven? A critical examination of the data leads him to answer `NO'. Jesus' sayings on the subject really express the twin themes of vindication and visitation. e.g. His reply to the high priest's question whether or not He was the Messiah (Mark 14:62+): `1 am: and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power: and coming with the clouds of heaven'. In Math 26:64 and Lk.22:69 a word or phrase meaning from now on' or 'hereafter' is inserted before `you will see"' (Jesus and His coming - S.C.M., London 1957).

And so on. This post is hardly required - the contention has been put in the dates above and the reasoning behind them is within the whole of the books Bishop Robinson devoted to the issue. One short post can only sample the arguments.

Part 4 has some commentaries on the issue.

[dating of the gospels] part 4 some of the comments

Part 3 showed some of Robinson's arguments.

Mark Goodacre

An example of a flawed answer to this is in the argument of post-dater Mark Goodacre (2008), who writes:

The claim is unimpressive, though, given that most of the documents in question are either written in the pre-70 period (Paul’s letters) or set in the pre-70 period (Gospels-Acts).

But they’re not! They’re not set in the post-70 period at all, as Robinson points out. So Goodacre uses the presumption that something which was argued is not and therefore that is his argument that it is not.

He then invokes Jesus ben Ananias and claims that:

That Jesus could have predicted the doom of Jerusalem and its sanctuary is no more inherently improbable than that another Jesus, the son of Ananias, should have done so in the autumn of 62.

This is pseudo-historicism of the worst kind. It’s like the CIA predicting 911 pre 911 and then negating that by saying that Nostrodamus also predicted the end of the world and look how that turned out. Therefore, the CIA could never have predicted that. The two are mutually exclusive.

Anne Rice

"This and his book, The Priority of John, are of great importance to anyone undertaking serious study of the gospels or study of "the historical Jesus." He left me pretty well convinced by his ideas about the early date of the gospels, and I've read much since -- published after his death -- that supports his view.

The case for the early date of the gospels is growing. Check out the work of Richard Bauckham. Look at the arguments of Bernard Orchid. The old Enlightenment cliches about the gospels being "late date" and "inauthentic" are now truly being swept aside by new investigation by fine scholars.

It's too bad an entire generation of clergy was brought up with these old fashioned ideas that the gospels were fabricated by later communities. Increasingly scholars are studying the physical manuscript evidence for new clues to date, and this field is one of the most promising." (Amazon.com Review)

Greg Koukl

The so-called "search for the historic Jesus" is over one hundred years old. Virtually nothing discovered during that time undermines the Gospel accounts. There is no "new evidence" supporting the idea that the miracle-working Son of God was the result of an evolution of myth over a long period of time. To the contrary, recent discoveries have given more credibility to the content of the Gospels themselves.

For example, we know the Apostle Paul died during the Neronian persecution of A.D. 64. Paul was still alive at the close of Acts, so that writing came some time before A.D. 64. Acts was a continuation of Luke's Gospel, which must have been written earlier still. The book of Mark predates Luke, even by the Jesus Seminar's reckoning. This pushes Mark's Gospel into the 50s, just over twenty years after the crucifixion.

It is undisputed that Paul wrote Romans in the mid-50s, yet he proclaims Jesus as the resurrected Son of God in the opening lines of that epistle. Galatians, another uncontested Pauline epistle of the mid-50s, records Paul's interaction with the principle disciples (Peter and James) at least 14 years earlier (Gal 1:18, cf. 2:1).

The Jesus Seminar claims that the humble sage of Nazareth was transformed into a wonder-working Son of God in the late first and early second century. The epistles, though, record a high Christology within 10 to 20 years of the crucifixion. That simply is not enough time for myth and legend to take hold, especially when so many were still alive to contradict the alleged errors of the events they personally witnessed.

There is no good reason to assume the Gospels were fabricated or seriously distorted in the retelling. Time and again the New Testament writers claim to be eyewitnesses to the facts. And their accounts were written early on while they’re memories were clear and other witnesses could vouch for their accounts. The Gospels are early accounts of Jesus’ life and deeds.

Established Christology

This point about an already established Christology [above] is most important and is ignored by the anti-early daters. Arguments centre on whether the stone was moved, whether the body was stolen and so on but not on why Christology should not only have got a grip on contemporaries of the time but have withstood the pressure exerted to expunge the very notion.

Paul Tobin

He comes in as an admitted sceptic of early dating and his argument proceeds from there:

"Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place."

The above, Robinson argues, is a mistaken prophecy. For the world obviously did not end. The evangelists would have left this out had the time between Jesus death and the composition of the gospels were a long time.

Thus he argues for an early date of composition for the gospels, before the Jewish revolt of 66-70 CE.

This is so mired in mistruths. Between “long time” and “Thus he argues” are virtually the whole of Robinson’s arguments leading to his conclusion and yet Tobin conveniently leave these out, then concludes that Robinson is wrong.

Tobin goes on, having failed to establish anything, yet thinking that leaving out 90% of the book of the man he’s debunking means that he has estabilished his point:

This argument is flawed. While I do not disagree that the above is an example of a failed prophecy of Jesus, I do disagree with the use of that passage to date the gospel as pre-70 CE documents.

So he uses his conclusion to reinforce his argument. Again, this is the sort of shoddy scholarship which passes for intellectual debate.

Matthew J. Slick [2008]

"At the earliest, Acts cannot have been written prior to the latest firm chronological marker recorded in the book - Festus's appointment as procurator (24:27), which, on the basis of independent sources, appears to have occurred between A.D. 55 and 59."

"It is increasingly admitted that the Logia [Q] was very early, before 50 A.D., and Mark likewise if Luke wrote the Acts while Paul was still alive. Luke's Gospel comes (Acts 1:1) before the Acts. The date of Acts is still in dispute, but the early date (about A.D. 63) is gaining support constantly."

For clarity, Q is supposedly one of the source documents used by both Matthew and Luke in writing their gospels. If Q actually existed then that would push the first writings of Christ's words and deeds back even further lessening the available time for myth to creep in and adding to the validity and accuracy of the gospel accounts. If what is said of Acts is true, this would mean that Luke was written at least before A.D. 63 and possibly before 55 - 59 since Acts is the second in the series of writings by Luke. This means that the gospel of Luke was written within 30 years of Jesus' death.

For those interested, some other sources include:

1. McDowell, Josh, A Ready Defense, Thomas Nelson Publishers; Nashville, Tenn., 1993, p. 80.
2. Walvoord, John F., and Zuck, Roy B., The Bible Knowledge Commentary, (Wheaton, Illinois: Scripture Press Publications, Inc.) 1983, 1985.
3. Mays, James Luther, Ph.D., Editor, Harper's Bible Commentary, (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.) 1988.
4. Douglas, J. D., Comfort, Philip W. & Mitchell, Donald, Editors, Who's Who in Christian History, Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.; 1992.
5. Achtemeier, Paul J., Th.D., Harper's Bible Dictionary, (San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; 1985).

Part 5 concerns the Rev. Duggan's contention.

[dating of the gospels] part 5 duggan's contention

Bishop John A. T. Robinson

Part 4 contained comments on the dating issue.

Reverend George H. Duggan, S.M., is a New Zealander. After earning his S.T.D. at the Angelicum in Rome, he taught philosophy for fifteen years at the Marist seminary, Greenmeadows, and then was rector in turn of a university hall of residence and the Marist tertianship. He is now living in retirement at St. Patrick's College, Silverstream. He is the author of Evolution and Philosophy (1949), Hans Kung and Reunion (1964), Teilhardism and the Faith (1968), and Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1987). His last article in HPR appeared in October 1992.

When were the Gospels written? Or, to frame the question more precisely, when had the Gospels arrived at the state in which we now have them? The present text, we have reason to believe, was preceded by earlier drafts. If that is so, we could not say that the Gospel of St. Mark was written in 45, as we can say, for example, that Second Corinthians was written in 55 or 56.

If we accept the Gospels as the inspired word of God, does it really matter, one might ask, when they were written? In the days when everyone accepted the traditional dating,1 one could perhaps have dismissed the question as unimportant. But those days are long gone. Ever since Reimarus (1694-1768) sought to convict the evangelists of conscious fraud and innumerable contradictions, his rationalist followers have put the writing of the Gospels late, in order to lessen their value as sources of reliable information about the life of Christ and his teaching.

D. F. Strauss (1808-1874), in his Life of Jesus, (published in 1835-6), anticipated Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) in holding that the Gospels, although they contain some historical facts, were mainly mythology and were written late in the 2nd century. Similarly F. C. Baur (1792-1860), an Hegelian rationalist, held that the Gospels were written between 130 and 170. But Strauss, in the words of Giuseppe Ricciotti,

"honestly confessed that his theory would collapse if the Gospels were composed during the first century."2

If they were so early, there would not be enough time for the myths to develop. Moreover, it is plain that, the nearer a document is to the facts it narrates, the more likely it is that it will be factually accurate, just as an entry in a diary is more likely to be accurate than memoirs written forty or fifty years afterwards.

John A. T. Robinson was therefore justified when he ended his book Redating the New Testament with the words:

"Dates remain disturbingly fundamental data."3

The current dating of the four Gospels, accepted by the biblical establishment, which includes scholars of every persuasion, is: Mark 65-70; Matthew and Luke in the 80s; John in the 90s. These dates are repeated by the columnists who write in our Catholic newspapers and the experts who draw up the curricula for religious education in our Catholic schools.

For much of this late dating there is little real evidence. This point was made by C. H. Dodd, arguably the greatest English-speaking biblical scholar of the century. In a letter that serves as an appendix to Robinson's book Redating the New Testament, Dodd wrote:

"I should agree with you that much of the late dating is quite arbitrary, even wanton, the offspring not of any argument that can be presented, but rather of the critic's prejudice that, if he appears to assent to the traditional position of the early church, he will be thought no better than a stick-in-the-mud."5

Many years earlier the same point was made by C. C. Torrey, professor of Semitic Languages at Yale from 1900 to 1932. He wrote:

"I challenged my NT colleagues to designate one passage from any one of the four Gospels giving clear evidence of a date later than 50 A.D. . . . The challenge was not met, nor will it be, for there is no such passage."6

In 1976, the eminent New Testament scholar, John A. T. Robinson, "put a cat among the pigeons" with his book Redating the New Testament, published by SCM Press. He maintained that there are no real grounds for putting any of the NT books later than 70 A.D. His main argument is that there is no clear reference in any of them to the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple which occurred on September 26th of that year.

This cataclysmic event brought to an end the sacrificial worship that was the center of the Jewish religion and it should have merited a mention in the NT books if they were written afterwards. In particular, one would have expected to find a reference to the event in the Epistle to the Hebrews, for it would have greatly strengthened the author's argument that the Temple worship was now obsolete.

Robinson dated the composition of Matthew from 40 to 60, using dots to indicate the traditions behind the text, dashes to indicate a first draft, and a continuous line to indicate writing and rewriting. Similarly, he dated Mark from 45 to 60, Luke from 55 to 62, and John from 40 to 65.

Robinson's book was the first comprehensive treatment of the dating of the NT books since Harnack's Chronologie des altchristlichen Litteratur, published in 1897. It is a genuine work of scholarship by a man thoroughly versed in the NT text and the literature bearing on it.

But it was not welcomed by the biblical establishment, and it was not refuted, but ignored:"

German New Testament scholars," Carsten Thiede has written, "all but ignored Redating the New Testament, and not until 1986, ten years later, did Robinson's work appear in Germany, when a Catholic and an Evangelical publishing house joined forces to have it translated and put into print."7

In 1987, the Franciscan Herald Press published The Birth of the Synoptics by Jean Carmignac, a scholar who for some years was a member of the team working on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He tells us he would have preferred "Twenty Years of Work on the Formation of the Synoptic Gospels" as a title for the book, but the publishers ruled this out as too long.

Carmignac is sure that Matthew and Mark were originally written in Hebrew. This would not have been the classical Hebrew of the Old Testament, nor that of the Mishnah (c. 200 A.D.) but an intermediate form of the language, such as the Qumran sectaries were using in the 1st century A.D.

Papias, the Bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, who died about 130 A.D., tells us that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew, and Carmignac has made a good case for holding that the same is true of Mark. He found that this compelled him to put the composition of these Gospels much earlier than the dates proposed by the biblical establishment.

He writes:

"I increasingly came to realize the consequences of my work . . . . The latest dates that can be admitted for Mark (and the Collection of Discourses) is 50, and around 55 for the Completed Mark; around 55-60 for Matthew; between 58 and 60 for Luke. But the earliest dates are clearly more probable: Mark around 42; Completed Mark around 45; (Hebrew) Matthew around 50; (Greek) Luke a little after 50."8

On page 87 he sets out the provisional results (some certain, some probable, others possible) of his twenty years' research and remarks that his conclusions almost square with those of J. W. Wenham.9

In 1992, Hodder and Stoughton published Redating Matthew, Mark and Luke by John Wenham, the author of a well-known grammar of New Testament Greek. Born in 1913, he is an Anglican scholar who has spent his life in academic and pastoral work. He tells us that his attention was drawn to the Synoptic Problem in 1937, when he read Dom John Chapman's book Matthew, Mark and Luke. He has been grappling with the problem ever since and in this book he offers his solution of the problem; but his main concern is the dates of the Synoptics.

Wenham's book received high praise from Michael Green, the editor of the series I Believe, which includes works by such well-known scholars as I. Howard Marsall and the late George Eldon Ladd. The book, Green writes:

"is full of careful research, respect for evidence, brilliant inspiration and fearless judgement. It is a book no New Testament scholar will be able to neglect."

Green may be too optimistic. Wenham will probably get the same treatment as Robinson: not a detailed refutation, but dismissed as not worthy of serious consideration.

Wenham puts the first draft of Matthew before 42. For twelve years (30-42) the Apostles had remained in Jerusalem, constituting, in words of the Swedish scholar B. Gerhardsson, a kind of Christian Sanhedrin, hoping to win over the Jewish people to faith in Christ. Matthew's Gospel, written in Hebrew, would have had an apologetic purpose, endeavoring to convince the Jews, by citing various Old Testament texts, that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of David and the long-awaited Messiah.

The persecution of the Church in 42 by Herod Agrippa I, in which the Apostle James suffered martyrdom, put an end to those hopes. Peter, miraculously freed from prison, went, we are told "to another place" (Acts 12:17). There are grounds for thinking that this "other place" was Rome, where there was a big Jewish community and where he would be out of the reach of Herod Agrippa.

There, using Matthew's text, and amplifying it with personal reminiscences, he preached the gospel. When Agrippa died in 44, Peter was able to return to Palestine. After his departure from Rome, Mark produced the first draft of his Gospel, based on Peter's preaching.

Luke was in Philippi from 49 to 55, and it was during this time that he produced the first draft of his Gospel, beginning with our present chapter 3, which records the preaching of John the Baptist.10 It was to this Gospel, Origen explained, that St. Paul was referring when, writing to the Corinthians in 56, he described Luke as "the brother whose fame in the gospel has gone through all the churches" (2 Cor. 8:18).

We know that Luke was in Palestine when Paul was in custody in Caesarea (58-59). He would have been able to move round Galilee, interviewing people who had known the Holy Family, and probably making the acquaintance of a draft in the Hebrew of the Infancy Narrative, and so gathering material for the first two chapters of the present Gospel. In the finished text he introduced this and the rest of the Gospel with the prologue in which he assures Theophilus that he intends to write history.

There are no grounds for putting Luke's Gospel in the early 80s as R. F. Karris does,11 or, with Joseph Fitzmyer, placing it as "not earlier than 80-85."12

The date of Luke's Gospel is closely connected with that of Acts, its companion volume, for if Acts is early, then Luke will be earlier still. In 1896, Harnack put Acts between 79 and 93, but by 1911 he had come to the conclusion that "it is the highest degree probable" that Acts is to be dated before 62. If Luke does not mention the outcome of the trial of Paul, it is, Harnack argued, because he did not know, for when Luke wrote, the trial had not yet taken place.

C. J. Hemer, in his magisterial work, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, which was published posthumously in 1989, gives fifteen general indications, of varying weight but cumulative in their force, which point to a date before 70. Indeed, many of these point to a date before 65, the year in which the Neroian persecution of the Church began.13

In 1996, Weidenfeld and Nicholson published The Jesus Papyrus by Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew d'Ancona. Thiede is Director of the Institute for Basic Epistemological Research in Paderborn, Germany, and a member of the International Papyrological Association. Matthew d'Ancona is a journalist and Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper.

The book is about several papyrus fragments, and in particular three found in Luxor, Egypt, which contain passages from the Gospel of St. Matthew, and one found in Qumran, which contains twenty letters from the Gospel of St. Mark.

The three Luxor fragments-the Jesus papyrus-came into the possession of the Reverend Charles Huleatt, the Anglican chaplain in that city, who sent them in 1901 to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he had graduated in 1888. They did not attract scholarly attention until 1953, when Colin H. Roberts examined them. He dated them as belonging to the late 2nd century.

Then in 1994, they came to the notice of C. P. Thiede, who suspected that they might be much older than Roberts thought. Examining them with a confocal laser scanning microscope, and comparing them with the script in a document dated July 24, 66, he came to the conclusion that the fragments should be dated as belonging to the middle of the first century.

The Qumran fragment is small-3.3 cm x 2.3 cm-an area that is slightly larger than a postage stamp. It contains twenty letters, on five lines, ten of the letters being damaged. It is fragment no. 5 from Cave 7 and it is designated 7Q5. A similar fragment from the same Cave-7Q2-has one more letter-twenty-one as against twenty, on five lines. The identification of this fragment as Baruch (or the Letter of Jeremiah) 6:43-44 has never been disputed.

In 1972 Fr. José O'Callaghan, S.J., a Spanish papyrologist, declared that the words on 7Q5 were from the Gospel of St. Mark: 6:52-53. This identification was widely questioned, but many papyrologists rallied to his support, and there are good reasons for thinking that O'Callaghan was right.

Thiede writes:

"In 1994, the last word on this particular identification seemed to have been uttered by one of the great papyrologists of our time, Orsolina Montevecchi, Honorary President of the International Papyrological Association. She summarized the results in a single unequivocal sentence: 'I do not think there can be any doubt about the identification of 7Q5.'"14

This implies that St. Marks' Gospel was in being some time before the monastery at Qumran was destroyed by the Romans in 68.

Those who object that texts of the Gospels could not have reached such out of the way places as Luxor or Qumran as early as the 60s of the first century do not realize how efficient the means of communication were in the Empire at that time. Luxor was even then a famous tourist attraction, and, with favorable winds a letter from Rome could reach Alexandria in three days-at least as quickly as an airmail letter in 1996. Nor was Qumran far from Jerusalem, and we know that the monks took a lively interest in the religious and intellectual movements of the time.

New Testament scholars dealing with the Synoptic Gospels will obviously have to take more notice of the findings of the papyrologists than they have so far been prepared to do, however painful it may be to discard received opinions.

When was St. John's Gospel written?

That John, the son of Zebedee, and one of the Apostles, wrote the Gospel that bears his name, was established long ago, on the basis of external and internal evidence, by B. F. Westcott and M. J. Lagrange, O.P., and their view, though not universally accepted, has not really been shaken.

St. Irenaeus, writing in 180, tells us that John lived until the reign of the Emperor Trajan, which began in 98. From this some have inferred that John wrote his Gospel in the 90s. But this inference is obviously fallacious. The majority of modern scholars do indeed date the Gospel in the 90s, but a growing number put it earlier, and Robinson mentions seventeen, including P. Gardner-Smith, R. M. Grant and Leon Morris, who favor a date before 70. To them we could add Klaus Berger, of Heidelberg, who puts it in 66.

Robinson decisively refutes the arguments brought forward by Raymond Brown and others to establish a later date, viz. the manner of referring to "the Jews," and the reference to excommunication in chapter 9.15

He adds:

"There is nothing in the Gospel that suggests or presupposes that the Temple is already destroyed or that Jerusalem is in ruins-signs of which calamity are inescapably present in any Jewish or Christian literature that can with any certainty be dated to the period 70-100."16

Robinson also points out that John, when describing the cure of the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda, tells us that this pool "is surrounded by five porticos, or covered colonnades" (5:2). Since these porticos were destroyed in 70, John's use of the present tense-"is"-seems to imply that the porticos were still in being when he wrote.

"Too much weight," he admits, "must not be put on this-though it is the only present tense in the context; and elsewhere (4:6; 11:18; 18:1; 19:41), John assimilates his topographical descriptions to the tense of the narrative."17

This article will have served its purpose if it has encouraged the reader to consider seriously the evidence for an early date for the Gospels, refusing to be overawed by such statements as that "the majority of modern biblical scholars hold" or that "there is now a consensus among modern biblical scholars" that the Gospels are to be dated from 65 to 90 A.D.

The account I have given of the writing of the Synoptic Gospels is categorical in style, but it is presented only as a likely scenario. However, it would seem to be more likely than one based on the assumption that among the Jews, a literate people, it was thirty years or more before anyone wrote a connected account of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

"I do not wish," C. S. Lewis once said to a group of divinity students, "to reduce the skeptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else."18 This something else, I suggest could include the widely accepted view that the Gospels were written late.

It will be easier to do this if the reader is acquainted with the judgment of the eminent jurist, Sir Norman Anderson, who describes himself as "an academic from another discipline who has browsed widely in the writings of contemporary theologians and biblical scholars."

At times, he is, he tells us, "astonished by the way in which they handle their evidence, by the presuppositions and a priori convictions with which some of them clearly (and even, on occasion, on their own admission) approach the documents concerned, and by the positively staggering assurance with which they make categorical pronouncements on points which are, on any showing, open to question, and on which equally competent colleagues take a diametrically opposite view."19

1 The traditional dating is given in the Douay-Rheims-Challoner version in its introductions to the Gospels: Matthew about 36; Mark about 40; Luke about 54; John about 93. 2 Ricciotti, The Life of Christ (E.T. Alba I. Zizzamia), Bruce, Milwaukee, 1944, p. 186. 3 Redating the New Testament, SCM Press, London, 1976, p. 358. 4 Thus in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1989, D. J. Harrington puts Mark before 70; B. T. Viviani, O.P., puts Matthew between 80 and 90; R. J. Karris, O.F.M., puts Luke 80-85; Pheme Perkins puts John in the 90s. 5 Redating the New Testament, p. 360. 6 Quoted in J. Wenham, Redating Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Hodder and Stoughton, London, p. 299 note 2. 7 C. P. Thiede and M. d'Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1996, p. 45. 8 J. Carmignac, The Birth of the Synoptics, (E. T. Michael J. Wrenn)

Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, 1987, pp. 6, 61. 9 Ibid., p. 99 note 29. 10 Robinson suggests that this may be the case, op. cit. p. 282 note 142. 11 R. J. Karris, in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 670. 12 Richard Dillon and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Prentice-Hall International, London, 1968, Vol. 2, p. 165. 13 J. Wenham, op. cit., pp. 225-226. 14 C. P. Thiede and M. d'Ancona, op. cit., p. 56. 15 Robinson, op. cit., pp. 272-285. 16 Ibid., p. 275. 17 Ibid., p. 278. 18 "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" in Christian Reflections, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1967, p. 164. 19A Lawyer Among Theologians, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1973, p. 15.

[jagger] just a mannish boy next to muddy waters

Punch has the Jagger/Muddy Waters jam up and I commented:

White boy ain't got that soul. Fair enough - MW was guesting with the Stones but Jagger comes over as so weak. Great on his own stuff but best let this one alone.

Harry Hook also has this one up today:



Laugh? I almost wet myself. [The coffee almost spilt, you see.] Incidentally, if you look closely, you'll see Hookie posted in the middle of the night. Now that's dedication for you.

[jealousy] a less popular perspective

What chance you could go through a life of relationships and not strike jealousy and suspicion?

I’d say a very slim chance for some very good reasons. Firstly, women tend to go for bad boys, in order to tame them and the result must inevitably be heartbreak somewhere down the track when she disoovers he is, in fact, a pitbull in a nice suit.

Men almost always fall for the gorgeous doll, completely failing to appreciate that she has had a lifetime’s practice of giving men a hard time. What chance a selfless, demure siren for whom fidelity is the key issue? Practically zero.

People come together for all the wrong reasons too and when they go ahead anyway, do they discuss the groundrules? And what if there’s no marriage and no ties that bind? What is there, beyond love, to keep the roving eye from roving?

Also, each partner has a different line over which the other must not cross – some baulk at their partner stealing a kiss; some don’t mind the partner having sex with someone else as long as he assures the other she’s top of his list.

One always loves more

This is the single greatest root cause, IMHO, of jealousy. The one who loves is going to be far more anxious, over time, which will cause the other to tumble to the fact that he has a captive heart on his hands and can do virtually as he wishes – she’ll always take him back, despite anything she says.

[I say he/she and for the purpose of this post, he will be the villain and she the victim but it could equally be the other way around. It’s just for literary convenience.]

Defining the terms

First, one should define jealousy. It’s not necessarily envy as such because envy is wanting something you don’t have because someone else has it. It can be no more than keeping up with the Joneses and plunging into credit debt.

Nor is it protecting one’s territory. Both men and women are territorial – don’t believe that old line that women aren’t – and they’ll fight for their partner with jealousy not so much the uppermost emotion but rather that of protecting one’s remit.

Jealousy, to me, is not wanting your girlfriend to be with another man [or vice versa] and while it is perfectly understandable, there need to be defined and agreed limits to it.

Hypocrisy

But there’s so much hypocrisy attached to it.

I’ve just finished an Agatha Christie, in which there is an easygoing, charming, goodlooking, womanizer and a horrible, frumpy, jealous wife and quite frankly, Agatha Christie was out of order on this portrayal. The young girl enters the fray and though Christie is at pains to keep both the bright young things platonic, the wife is insanely jealous.

I’m sorry but I ask the question immediately; “What exactly has that man been doing, over the years, what little gestures, what little flirtation taken too far, what slightly overextended handshake, what other build up of all the little issues which add up to scant attention being paid to his own woman?”

In other words, what ego?




Naturally, our young heroine falls under his spell and won’t have it that this man could be the murderer, despite her husband having the Lothario at the top of the list. Even in there are the seeds of divorce if she doesn’t wake up.

The thing which galls me about the one who loves less [and I’ve been on both sides of the ledger] is that he’s on clover – captive heart, not anxious, relaxed, therefore more attractive to the other gender and the more he succeeds, the more he is tempted to keep a string of liaisons running, most quite innocent.

When she turns around and seems so unreasonable, when her voice is strident and she bursts into tears, when she is not a delight to come home to any more, he has an arsenal of weaponry to use on her. All his friends agree with him, he says, that you’re so jealous you’re going to break us up. Why shouldn’t I see whom I like? Why can’t I have friends of the opposite gender?

There’s not just mental cruelty in here – and if you’ve ever loved someone, not to be fully loved in return, you’ll know what I mean – but there’s also dishonesty. The guilt is laid on the one less able to cope and that person is made out to be something other than what she was at the beginning – now a lesser person, less desirable certainly.

Oh, she’d be jealous of a tree, he says and a friend agrees that she’s a clingy, needy woman.

What the Lothario does

Nothing is said about the day they were in the café and a femme fatale walked in and her man went straight up and chatted, the two chattees going into the next room and when he returns, as happy as Larry, refusing to tell her anything about it, seeing her wooden expression, he blusters at her and lectures her on jealousy, saying, “I really detest jealous people.”

Nothing is said about this not being the first time but it being the latest in a long string of non-affairs, each one unpleasant to his partner. In his eyes, he’s eminently reasonable and perfectly innocent.

Except that he’s not. Not at all. He’s a right bastard and I'm including myself here. [Or the female equivalent the other way around]. Perhaps the unfairest thing of all is the way she’s ganged up on by all and sundry who consider she, the victim, is the unreasonable one here. I’d lay money on the fact that if he was not as he is, if he spent the bulk of his time on her, she wouldn’t be half as clingy and needy as she is.

Solution

1. One solution is to come to an agreement on what is acceptable or not, if they can keep genuine dialogue going long enough to come to an agreement.

2. The other solution is to leave him [or her]. The logic is that anyone can make a mistake once, anyone can fall under a spell once but when it happens again, it has become a system.

What has been lost is trust. Now, her only chance is to follow him or hire a private detective, stand out in the pouring rain all night and become thoroughly miserable and for what?

She says she still loves him, that if only she can get him away from that vixen and so on …

No, no, dear, it’s pointless. She thought she had a catch, a good man. She doesn’t – she has a lying, cheating sociopath who's pleased as Punch with his effect on the opposite gender; he's sociopathic insomuch as he doesn't consider her feelings. He should let her go but he keeps her hanging on for his ego reassurance.

She can’t leave him though, can she? She can’t say goodbye. And nor can he, for different reasons.




The charmer has his say

“Can I get a word in edgeways please? You know, Mr. Higham, she really is as needy as I say she is. I never knew that when I met her. I'm not this sociopath you accuse me of - I'm a normal guy who has a few female acquaintances, that's all. She's so jealous it's poisoning our relationship.”

Simple test. Devote a week, firstly to her and secondly to your work, in that order and see if the neediness diminishes. Then talk about the groundrules, one being that you cease flirting. Full stop. Period. After that, if she can't cut it down then either she is needy or else the trust has gone.

Trust

If I think a woman’s in love with me [tall order – tall tale], then I don’t care if she goes out for a candlelit dinner with some man, provided there was a purpose, e.g. he’s her boss or client. I’ve been in that situation and it was necessary. I don't mind the occasional tryst with an old flame because I know her and trust her.

What I did object to was picking up that light blue dress for her for us to go out, only to find she wore it for the boss. This peeved. This brings us to what is reasonable jealousy.

Reasonable jealousy

Protecting one’s territory, first and foremost, is quite acceptable. Everyone has territory, usually called one's home and no one's talking about goods and chattels. No other human being is your property, eer but you do have a right to a certain loyalty if the two of you have an understanding. That's because, on the basis of that understanding, you lowered your defences and let your heart go out.

So, if I’m in conversation with a girl and all she wants to talk about is this new guy she’s met and he’s such a nice guy, that I’d like him a lot, yada, yada, doesn’t she understand I’m not remotely interested in this other guy, even if he’s the male equivalent of Mother Theresa? I'm interested in her alone.

Why would I be interested some men she knows?

If I’m blogging and having a long talk to a lady blogger and she starts speaking of other male bloggers she’s really impressed with, I might agree, in passing but when she goes on and on about them, then I excuse myself and go and do something else. I know she has other males she spends net time with, I have no claim on her per se but at the same time, I don’t particularly need to think or talk about other men 24/7 with a woman I like. I have my own male blogmates and we visit one another.

I don’t even see that as jealousy – I see it as her lack of courtesy and something unpleasant for me. If she started talking about her girlfriends, well, that would be OK.

There’ll be all sorts of things said about me for taking that line now but I say no! No, I refuse to assume any guilt at all over that feeling and neither would you feel guilty about it, should you find yourself in that same situation. That’s the hypocrisy I was referring to above – those doing the accusing would do exactly the same as me in similar circumstances.

Look, I’m no more and no less jealous than the next person, including women - in fact,in some ways, I haven't a jealous bone in the body but on the other hand, there are things which are done and things which are not done. There are things which are pleasant and things which are not pleasant.

Finally

Show me a person who has no jealousy and I'll show you a person who doesn't care, who is primarily into him/herself.

That’s all I have to say on that topic and thank you for your patience. ☺

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