Thoughts on the Dating of the New Testament

When were the books of the New Testament originally written? One doubt many people have is the dating of the New Testament (at one time, I was one of those people). The people that are unaware of the facts and evidence typically think the books of the Bible were probably written many decades or even centuries after the life and times of Jesus, thus making it easy for them to disbelieve any book of the New Testament has any credibility or truth to them - surely these texts are nothing but myths and legends, made up by very imaginative (or deranged) people.

However, after I did some research, I found it amazing that most of the books of the New Testament have actually been dated by professional scholars and archaeologists very soon after the death of Jesus (there are many books on this subject, such as Bruce Metzger's "The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration"). There is a high degree of certainty that these books really are the words and testimony of actual eyewitnesses to the events they describe (or of those who interviewed those eyewitnesses).

There is such a wealth of information on this subject, I can't begin to summarize it all. However, I would like to talk about one specific issue that I think helps support the notion that most of the New Testament can be said to have been written earlier than 70 AD (at most a mere 40 years after Jesus was crucified).

First let's quickly discuss what happened in 70 AD. The Roman army, led by the future Emperor Titus, besieged and conquered the city of Jerusalem, destroying the city and its temple in 70 AD. It cannot be overstated what a disastrous event this was for the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem. As Norman Geisler puts it in his book "I Don't Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist" (page 237):

"The center of [the Jews'] national, economic and religious life is Jerusalem, and especially the temple. It has been that way in ... almost every Jew's family for a thousand years - ever since Solomon built the first temple."

What is surprising (and something most non-Christians and those unfamiliar with the New Testament are not aware of) is that the Gospels tell us that Jesus actually predicted this destruction (though he did not say exactly when it would happen). See Mark 13:1-2 as one instance where this is documented - Luke and Matthew repeat this, something I will get to shortly).

Why is this important? One of my prior objections to this prediction of Jesus being proof of the dating of the New Testament went something like this: if I was writing a legendary story of a religious figure many decades/centuries after the fact, I would go through history, pick out a very important event that happened, and put words in the mouth of the mythical religious figure "predicting" that important event. Couldn't it be true that Mark (and Matthew and Luke) was written after 70 AD and they simply lied, saying that Jesus predicted it would happen - effectively post-dating this "prophesy"?

Here's the problem with that. Let's take a look at the Gospel of Matthew, specifically these verses:

• Matthew 1:22-23


• Matthew 2:14-15


• Matthew 2:17-18


• Matthew 2:23


• Matthew 3:3


• Matthew 4:13-14


• Matthew 8:16-17


• Matthew 12:15-17


• Matthew 13:13-14


• Matthew 13:34-35


• Matthew 21:2-5


• Matthew 27:6-10

Time after time after time, Matthew makes a point to always explicitly call out when the things he is documenting was predicted by previous prophesies. "All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet", "And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet", "Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled", "This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah" and on and on. Now take a look at Matthew 24:1-2:

"Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. "Do you see all these things?" he asked. 'I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.'"

That's it. Just a straight matter-of-fact statement of what Jesus predicted. No "this was fulfilled" or "this has happened just as he said". Nothing. As a example of what I would be expecting, read Matthew 28:5-6:

"The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay."

Granted, that is Matthew quoting the angel, but the point here is that Matthew explicitly writes down that one of Jesus' prophesies happened "just as he said". You would think that Jesus being able to successfully predict such a massive and devastating event as the destruction of Jerusalem and the razing of the temple would warrant some kind of mention in or around Matthew 24:1-2, but there is nothing. Not so much as a "just as he said". It is as if, at the time Matthew wrote those words, the destruction of Jerusalem hasn't happened yet!

Take a look at Matthew 28:15

"So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day"

Note the words I've emphasized here - "to this very day". Here you see Matthew is not averse to mentioning things happening as of the very moment he was writing the words. If that is true, why is there no place in his Gospel a discussion about the destruction of the Jews' "center of national, economic and religious life" (in the words of Norman Geisler)?

Now, keep in mind that most scholars agree that Mark was written before Matthew and Luke. So if Matthew can be said to have been written before 70 AD, then Mark must have been written prior to that date as well. Furthermore, the Gospel of Luke has the same 'problem' - it too mentions this prophesy of Jesus, but also never mentions the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. And in Luke's case, it is even more puzzling (for those who think he, too, wrote after 70 AD) because of all the authors of the New Testament documents, Luke is the one who does the most painstakingly detailed historical reporting. You would think if anyone, it would have been Luke to have mentioned the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. But he doesn't.

I'll further quote Norman Geisler again from his book, because he makes a very good point:

"Question: if you and your fellow-followers write accounts of Jesus after the temple and city were destroyed in AD 70, aren't you going to at least mention that unprecedented national, human, economic and religious tragedy somewhere in your writings, especially since this risen Jesus had predicted it? Of course! Well, here's the problem for those who say the New Testament was written after 70 - there's absolutely no mention of the fulfilment of this predicted tragedy anywhere in the New Testament documents. This means most, if not all, of the documents must have been written prior to 70."

Again, this is just one aspect used to help date the New Testament documents. But it's one that I, myself, find very useful. Taken together with the rest of the arguments for the early dating of the New Testament (again, tons of books and articles have been published on this), I found it all very convincing.

Why Jesus Can Not Be Just a Good Man

Very few people today deny Jesus was an actual person who lived in the first century (and those that do are far outside the mainstream - there are many logical arguments and historical documents, both Biblical and non-Biblical, that point to the fact that Jesus did exist).

So the question becomes, was Jesus God?

Some people try to take the easy way out and say, "I don't believe Jesus was God, but I do believe Jesus was a good man of high morals and a good teacher".

But is that even a valid possibility for who Jesus could be? Could Jesus be just a good, moral teacher?

C.S. Lewis formalized his "trilemmia" this way:

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us."

Being a "moral man" is not an option. Being a "good teacher" is not an option. Here's why.

First, contrary to some (arguably outside-the-mainstream) scholars, the New Testament (NT), as a historical document, is very reliable. Josh McDowell, Bruce Metzger, F.F. Bruce and others have amply documented the reasons why the NT can be considered a reliable historical document (note, this is not to say they have proven the NT is "the Word of God" - that is a faith claim, which is entirely different from being able to call the NT a reliable historical document). If you do not believe that the NT is historically accurate (that is, the NT was written truthfully by disciples and eyewitnesses of the time and whose core doctrinal messages come to us relatively unaltered over time), stop reading now - for if you do not see the NT documents as accurate, nothing you read about Christianity will ring convincing to you, and you could refute every Christian argument with "it's all a myth - legendary stories concocted centuries after the fact". I happen to believe those "myth" arguments can be debunked, but it is up to you to convince yourself either way.

Second, in the NT, Jesus clearly claims to be God. Some people argue that Jesus didn't actually claim to be God, but rather it was his disciples and later Christian followers that put that label onto Jesus, either mistakenly (they thought that's what he meant) or on purpose (they know he didn't claim to be God but labelled him God anyway). Of course, if that is the case, that immediately throws out the "Jesus was a good teacher" argument, because clearly, if he was such a good teacher, how could his disciples have gotten Jesus' message so wrong (or, if his followers did this knowing Jesus never claimed to be God, he still can't claimed to be a good teacher because they would clearly be going against Jesus' teachings - why lie to your neighbor that your teacher was God to get them to believe your message? That doesn't seem to be in line with Jesus' teachings) . But in any event, if Jesus never claimed to be God, you have to ask yourself why then did the Jewish Sanhedrin and a lot of the Jewish community in Jerusalem hate Jesus so much to want to put him to death? They apparently thought he claimed to be God. For further reading on this, and to get a good set of arguments on Jesus' claim of divinity, see "Contending with Christianity's Critics", Chapter 12, "Who Did Jesus Think He Was?".

Not only did Jesus claim to be God, he allowed his disciples to believe that he was God. He had his disciples believe in his message so deeply, all of them followed his instructions and evangelized his message throughout the region and most gave up their lives for him. By the mid-30s AD, all of his disciples were convinced that Jesus was God (the Gospels and Epistles clearly show this). If Jesus wasn't God, then how did his disciples get that message so wrong? Clearly, Jesus must not have been a very good teacher if such a core doctrine was so badly transferred from master to pupil!

If Jesus wasn't God and he knew he wasn't God, he was a flat out liar. He left his disciples to live a poor, humbling lifestyle, instructed them to leave their homes and families to deliver a false message to a public that was, at best, sceptical and, at worse, deadly violent to that message, and in the end sent them to their deaths for a lie. This is not the mark of a good or moral man, it is the sign of a cunning and evil man.

What if Jesus wasn't God but he thought he was God? In this case, Jesus was a mentally unstable man who managed to convince everyone close to him that he was God (note that there is no strong evidence of mental instability in Jesus found within the NT texts; on the contrary, he comes across as a calm, stable, intelligent and wise individual). Can someone who is so mentally unfit that he convinced himself and his followers to die for this lie, be a good man of high moral standing? Possibly. But, then again, "good" would be a relative term. This mentally unstable man did end up wrongly convincing his followers to die for his (false) cause - he may have been a proficient teacher to pull that off, but it is arguable that he could be considered good and moral for doing so. Put it into perspective - if someone as mentally unstable as this lived today - would you label him as a good moral man and a good teacher?

It is hard to claim that Jesus was merely a good, moral teacher if he also wasn't God. He could have been a cunning liar and deceiver or he could have been a highly motivated but mentally unstable man. But he couldn't be those things and be a good, moral man and teacher.

You must either deny Jesus' message entirely, or you must accept his claim as the Son of God. He can't have been just a good man. As C.S. Lewis puts it, "He has not left that open to us.".

Explain How Jesus Died For My Sins?

One of the Christian doctrines that I've had a hard time understanding is the answer to "how and why did Jesus die for my sins?" You always hear it - "Jesus died for your sins - by just believing in Jesus, your sins are forgiven". But that sounds too simple and easy. Why did Jesus die for my sins? How are my sins forgiven through the death of Jesus two thousand years ago? Why, by just believing in Jesus, are my sins forgiven?

Penal Substitution

I recently read a book, edited in part by William Lane Craig, titled "Contending with Christianity's Critics". It has an essay written by Steven L. Porter titled "Dostoyevsky, Woody Allen, and the Doctrine of Penal Substitution" - it addresses this through the doctrine of "penal substitution". It is actually the first thing that I've ever read that actually helps explain penal substitution in a way I understand.

In short, it goes like this (I will not do it justice, but here's my summary):

1) We have been given an incredible privilege - to live an earthly life as physical stewards over God's creation and, spiritually, in loving dependence on God. We have all, in our own ways, abused that privilege time and time again.

2) God's moral nature and holiness demands that punishment be exacted for those very serious sins against him - the punishment being to withdraw those very privileges given to us by God (i.e. take away our physical and spiritual life).

3) Wouldn't it be better, and more in keeping with God's merciful nature, for God to forgive human sin and continue to offer the privilege of physical and spiritual life even though we continue to abuse this opportunity and therefore do not deserve it?

4) But if God does continue to offer these privileges and waive punishment, this diminishes the human sinner's responsibility and trivializes the wrong done to God thus trivializing God Himself.

5) BUT! What if there was a way for God to do BOTH!? Exact a punishment in keeping with the seriousness of the "crime" (and thus not devaluing nor trivializing God) but yet mercifully forgive the human sinner and allow him to retain physical and spiritual life and therefore be given a second (and third and fourth...) chance?

Enter "the Lamb of God".

The suffering on the cross is the just penalty of human sin (i.e. the loss of life) - it demonstrates that sin against God is not a trivial matter and God takes human sin very seriously. Thus "justice is served" and the seriousness of sin is affirmed. However, God mercifully takes on this punishment we deserve via the incarnate Christ's voluntary submission to that suffering. Jesus was "without sin", so clearly He wasn't punished for his own sins (since He had none). He was the perfect sacrificial lamb - the "Lamb of God".

Thus God miraculously does both! He exacts the punishment for human sin as demanded by his moral nature and holiness, but yet mercifully let's the human sinner retain life!

Another Way To Atonement?

Thanks to "Catholic Nick" and his comments to the original version of this blog entry, I've come to question certain aspects of the notion of penal substitution (did God, the Father, pour out his wrath on his own Son, Jesus, as penalty for our sins?) I'm finding pretty good answers in another explanation. Indeed, after studying his arguments, Nick points out problems with penal substitution (both in his own blog and links to other documents - see the comments section for links to references, from which I will quote below) in part through the description of what it meant in the OT to offer "blood sacrifices" and how Jesus's suffering in the NT correlates to the OT notation of sacrifice and atonement of sins.

As mentioned earlier, God's merciful nature could forgive man's sin with amnesty, but because sin is so serious in God's eye, forgiveness must be more than a matter of ignoring it or forgetting it - that would diminish and trivialize God. But how then does that sin get forgiven?

First, for those unfamiliar with the Old Testament, let it be clear that God did not require the sacrifice of animals because He is bloodthirsty. God did not need man's sacrifices for his own sake; He was not pleased by animal sacrifices simply as such. God did not accept the life of an animal in lieu of human life, if that meant that having sacrificed an animal a man did not also need to offer his own spiritual life to God. Rather, God accepted the sacrificial offering of animal life as a visual expression of a man's spiritual self-offering (which was the true sacrifice that God wanted). In other words, a man parting with something of value (the sacrifice) was his outward expression of his desire to be closer to God (it is for this reason why the sacrificial animals were to be "perfect" and "without blemish" - for what good is a sacrifice if it isn't of any great value?). This explains the "expiatory power" in sacrificial blood (where the blood of the sacrifice represents the very life of the animal, a symbol of the human life whose sins are to be atoned for). To be clear, God wasn't punishing the animal, He was lovingly and mercifully extinguishing the guilt of the sinner due to the visible expression of the sinner's invisible offering of his own life to God.

Now let's move to the new covenant, ushered in by Jesus Christ. Yes, Christ stands in the place of sinners - but He is not guilty of the sin nor is He receiving punishment from God due to the sin, but rather He is atoning (i.e. making amends or reconciling) for the sin through His voluntary suffering on the cross. His bearing of our sins is expiatory, not penal - just as in the Old Testament the animal wasn't being punished in substitution. How do we benefit from Jesus' sacrifice? By putting our faith and trust in Him that He did this for us! We must provide ourselves (an invisible self-offering) to God and seek His forgiveness, through Jesus Christ - if we are sincere, God will freely forgive us for all our sins.

Conclusion

I have a feeling that it may not be possible to articulate a perfect theory of Atonement. The two theories above definitely do have different approaches, but underlying them both (and underlying most other theories) is Jesus Christ, the need to place our faith and trust in Him and that what He did, He did out of love for us. On that we Christians can all agree.

And to go further, I think I finally have some clarity to John 3:16 - it makes a whole lot more sense now. "For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son" (i.e. He so loved the world that He showered mercy on all human sinners by providing a way to atone for our sins through the suffering of His Son) "that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life" (i.e. if you believe Jesus suffered for you, that's all you need to receive the gift of God's eternal mercy).

Postscript

I'm just now in the process of reading C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" and to my amazement he actually directly addresses my exact concerns and comes to the same conclusion I did (perhaps this is God working in his "mysterious" ways, perhaps it's just coincidence, but I find it interesting that so soon after I post this blog entry and fail to come to a satisfactory answer to my question "how and why did Jesus die for my sins?", that I start to read C.S. Lewis and find that he, himself, wondered the same thing and provides me confirmation of my own conclusions). Here's his thinking on the subject, from pages 54-56:

"The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work. ... Theories about Christ's death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works. Christians would not all agree as to how important those theories are. ... But I think they will all agree that the thing itself is infinitely more important than any explanations that theologians have produced. ... In my view the theories are not themselves the thing you are asked to accept. ... A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works ... We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary."

I couldn't have said it better myself (though I did try my best earlier :)