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Redating the New Testament

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What a pity that this pathbreaking work is out of print while publishers flood the bookstores with fantasy-as-history in an unending stream.

Bishop Robinson, a theological modernist whose "Honest to God" made him controversial within the Anglican communion, began this book as what he labels "a theological joke": "I thought I would see how far one could get with the hypothesis that the whole of the New Testament was written before 70", the year in which the Roman army sacked and burned the Temple of Jerusalem. As it turned out, he got much further than he had ever expected, a journey made more impressive by his lack of any predisposition toward a "conservative" point of view.

His conclusion is that there is no compelling evidence - indeed, little evidence of any kind - that anything in the New Testament canon reflects knowledge of the Temple's destruction. Furthermore, other considerations point consistently toward early dates and away from the common assumption (a prejudice with a seriously circular foundation) that a majority of primitive Christian authors wrote in the very late First or early-to-middle Second Century under assumed names.

For want of data, absolute proof of Robinson's thesis is impossible, and the weight of his arguments varies - from overwhelming in the case of the Epistle to the Hebrews through powerful (the Gospels, Acts and the Epistles of John) to merely strong (the Pastoral Epistles, the non-Johannine Catholic Epistles and Revelation).

In a postscript, Robinson reconsiders the dates of several subapostolic works: The Clementine Epistles, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Didache, the accepted dates for which range from the 90's to the latter half of the Second Century. He shows that, freed of the "push" of late dating of the canon, the most natural dates for these writings are earlier and that all could well have been written by 85 A.D.

Whether or not one agrees with every word of Robinson's analysis, he makes his case well and should force all students of the New Testament to rethink seriously the presuppositions that underlie much of what is currently written about First Century Christianity. Of course, that's not likely to happen unless some publisher brings "Redating the New Testament" back into print.

Robinson (now deceased) was an Anglican bishop who published books that ruffled conservative feathers. He decided as a joke to try to prove that all the gospels were written before 70 AD, an idea then regarded as ridiculous.

The result was "Redating the New Testament" which showed why early dating is more logical. The book has become famous. Fads in biblical scholarship have come and gone and their works gather dust in libraries. But Robinson's book continues to impact.

Robinson's main argument is that all the gospels must have been written before 70 AD when the temple in Jerusalem was burned to the ground. And it is very, very strange that the destruction isn't mentioned. Why? Because the gospels repeatedly state that Jesus predicted that "not one stone would remain on another" of the temple (Mark 13:2, Luke 21:5, and Matthew 24:1). So then why didn't the evangelists try to score points by pointing out the destruction?

And even stranger: Jesus predicted in Matthew 24 that "this generation shall not pass away" until they saw the temple pulled down. Then, sure enough, 40 years (40 years = one generation for the ancient Jews) to the day the temple fell. Again, if the gospels were written after the temple's destruction, why didn't anyone mention it?

The temple was destroyed during a short, brutal war between the Jews and the Romans. The war left one million Jews dead, their country in ruins, and the temple burned to the ground. Few people today can grasp how shattering that would be to the Jews, and how significant for Christians. The entire theocracy of the Jews was extinguished. Gone were the Sadduccees. Burned along with the temple were all records proving lineage, and thus, the priesthood was destroyed. Never again could there be a high priest. Or a sacrifice. There was no longer a legal outlet for purgation from sin for the Jews.

Historically, the war also marked a permanent breach between Jews and Christians. Henceforth, they were utterly separate. One reason may be because, as Eusebius says, the Christians refused to take part in the insurrection and stayed in Pella.

By the way, Robinson's argument is not new. He even quotes Torrey, who puts it quite succinctly: "It is perhaps conceivable that one evangelist writing after the year 70 might fail to allude to the destruction of the temple by the Roman armies...but that three or four should thus fail is quite incredible. On the contrary, what is shown is that all four gospels were written before the year 70."

All four gospels refer to the temple in the present tense, saying the temple "is" instead of "was". And then there is the temple tax issue. There was no reason for the gospel writers to insist that everyone pay the temple tax once the temple was destroyed.

In sum, Robinson argues that Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts were all written before 65 AD. Some portions may have been written in proto-Matthew (Q) in the early 40s. He concluded John was written before 70 AD, as well as James and the Didache.

Anyone interested in this subject should read "Redating Matthew, Mark, and Luke" by John Wenham, who also supports early dates. Another book arguing for early dates is Jean Carmignac's "Birth of the Synoptic Gospels". Carmignac, a noted linguist and Dead Sea scroll scholar, insists he found linguistic and textual proof some of the gospels were written in Hebrew.

This man was brilliant, and his criticisms of Biblical scholarship are as fitting for today as they were when this book first saw print. His reasoning and his arguments are all highly persuasive. 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.

For years I have studied the latest in Biblical criticism, and all during that time, I have been uncomfortable with the critical "orthodoxy" which dates all non-Pauline New Testament writings as after 70 A.D. and rejects the traditional authorship of the majority of the books. It has always seemed to me that the conclusions reached were not based on unbiased research, but upon presuppositions which are based upon further presuppositions. Usually the most seemingly obvious conclusions were rejected simply because they contradicted some scholar's extremely convoluted assumptions.

Robinson's work is like a breath of fresh air in the stale world that is modern Biblical criticism. Instead of simply making the same assumptions that every other biblical scholar seems to make, he questions them all, and in doing so, comes to a startling conclusion: that every single New Testament work was written before 70 A.D. and the fall of Jerusalem (and that most were written by their traditionally-assigned authors). For those not familiar with modern Biblical criticism, this is almost the equivalent to telling ancients that the world is round, not flat.

Robinson carefully goes through all 27 books of the New Testament (plus four post-apostolic works) and gives his defense of his dating for each. Note that he doesn't simply use the fall of Jerusalem as his reason for dating each before 70 A.D.; this is simply a starting point. In many cases, his defense of an early date of a book is almost completely unrelated to their lack of mentioning Jerusalem's fall - he uses both internal and external evidence in many ways to defend early dates.

The strength of his arguments vary from book to book. In some cases (such as the Epistle to the Hebrews and the book of Acts), his arguments are very strong. In other cases (such as II Peter), they are less so. But regardless of whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, reading this book will hopefully allow one to question the precarious conclusions reached by critical orthodoxy but which are proclaimed quite dogmatically by their defenders.

Dr. Robinson does an excellent job. Tho a difficult read--it's not the Sunday funnies--it is very scholarly. Dr. Robinson's premise is that a very important event in Jewish/Christian history is absent from the New Testament; since the destruction of the Temple (in 70 AD by the Romans) isn't mentioned anywhere in the NT, that indicates a pre 70 AD writing of each New Testament source.

I found Robinson's arguments to be persuasive and compelling. His central thesis (a failure to mention the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem) cannot be argued with since nearly everyone has failed to deal with it. His scholarship is beyond question.

The argument that conservatives and evangelicals have used it to support late dating is absurd. Conservatives and evangelical have ignored this work with all diligence as suspect because of Robinson's liberal reputation.

His assumptions are compelling since he makes it clear that his argument began with the Gospel of John but in the book he makes the Gospel his last argument.

Even if you disagree with him you must take his work seriously.

This is a fascinating but mystifying book, given Bishop Robinson's more famous earlier book, Honest to God. That one, and others by him, promoted a liberal theology involving a demythologized Jesus, absent of all myths and miracles, fairly fit for the Modern World.

Here, in Redating the New Testament (1976), Robinson apparently swings to the right, perhaps out of liberal guilt, and joins the conservative camp, at least to some extent. His "redating" is actually an earlier dating, that is, earlier than the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70, and also earlier than almost all other liberal Christian scholars estimate. Such an early dating of all the New Testament texts is typically a conservative Christian desire. Conservatives think it supports their supernaturalist position, verifying the reputed claims and miracles of Jesus circa A.D. 30. After all, if the texts were written by eyewitnesses to the ministry of Jesus, or by others but still before the year 70, chances are that those texts are historically accurate, right? Hence the miracles and metaphysical claims are fact. Or so the logic goes.

Alas, Robinson never addresses this basic contradiction between his books. And there is no subject index here, nor an index of scriptural passages, so the reader cannot quickly check Robinson's thoughts on such subjects as the nativity stories, various other miracles, a resurrection, or supernaturalism in general. Reading the entire long book very carefully (both a privilege and a chore), I found only one or two tiny mentions of miracles, and none that might resolve this ambiguity. Robinson, despite his brilliant and systematic scholarship, seems to have lost the forest (the supernaturalism issue) for the trees (the dating evidence). He thereby gives the supernaturalists much support, though at one point he does finally, momentarily, and lamely distance himself from "literalism" (p. 355?).

Yet, with regard at least to the 21 epistles (letters) of the New Testament, a pre-70 date seems fairly reasonable and in any case would be nothing earth-shaking. None of them mentions any miracles by Jesus, except for a vague resurrection and a Second Coming that never came. So an early dating for them would actually be welcome news for liberal Christians and other skeptics of the supernatural (like me). Consider the Epistle of James, for example, and the probability that it is the earliest extant Christian text (late 40s). It is very revealing for the concerns and beliefs of such early Christians. So, too, is the Epistle to the Hebrews.

As for the gospels, even if Robinson is correct in dating them, or their early drafts, to the 50s, that would of course not confirm their supernatural episodes as historically true. Why should we suppose that religious fictions are necessarily slow to develop, taking many decades? Such fictions could easily have formed more quickly, within a mere decade or two, in the minds of some devoted, emotional, superstitious followers of Jesus. Even eyewitnesses can fantasize, especially hero-worshipping eyewitnesses. Considering other wild beliefs of 1st century Mediterranean religions, both Jewish and Gentile, it's no wonder that Jesus was soon portrayed as a prolific miracle-worker (above and beyond his few probably real faith-healings). Yet, the closest Robinson comes to stating this point is found in his few very vague references to a "rapid development of Christology" by the 50s, which could mean many other things.

On the early dating question again, much depends on the Gospel of Mark, by all accounts the first gospel written - but exactly when? In Chapter II, Robinson discusses the allusion in Mark 13:14 to a destruction of the Temple, made in the form of a prediction spoken by Jesus. Robinson sees it as a general warning from a time years before A.D. 70, and perhaps even as the words of Jesus himself circa 30. Robinson denies that this passage is a retrospective invention reflecting the actual siege and destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, as most liberal scholars think. Personally, I myself, as a religious agnostic and newcomer to this dating question, do not know exactly what those many New Testament scholars say who believe that Mark 13 (and the whole gospel) was written at about the time of the actual siege and destruction in 70, but I tend to side with them. The cryptic parenthetical words in 13:14, "let the reader understand," raise a question that Robinson does not really address: Understand what? If nothing terrible had yet happened to the Temple/Jerusalem/Judea since Jesus (perhaps) foretold its doom, what could any reader, if reading Mark in the 50s or early 60s, knowingly "understand"? The author's cryptic words seem to allude to something terrible that had already occurred there, and the only real candidate for that event is the siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 69-70. If so, Mark dates from then or even later. Moreover, other alleged predictions by Jesus in Mark 13 (e.g., 13:9, 10, 11), and their parallels in Matthew and Luke, seem to be not the words of Jesus, but clearly of later date. And the whole of Mark 13, which purports to be a spontaneous prophecy spoken by Jesus, is incredibly long. On that count alone it seems artificial and of much later date.

Robinson considers the lack of any specifically historical reference to the destruction of the Temple in all four gospels as powerful collective evidence for their pre-70 date. But I think that the Gospel of Mark may have started a significant trend in this regard. If its author, a non-Jewish Christian writing about A.D. 70, did not wish or dare to refer openly (and gloatingly) to the tragic siege/destruction of the Jewish Temple that year, the later gospel writers may simply have followed suit, as they did in so much else, thinking Mark's discretion wise. Thus, largely because of Mark, the latter three, writing A.D. 80-100, would also have referred only ambiguously to the Temple's destruction. Robinson's "four" gospels offered as combined evidence for a pre-70 date would thereby by reduced essentially to just one.

Besides, all four gospels are set in the period of the ministry of Jesus, circa 30, so any direct reference in them to the actual destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 would be jarring and out of context, wouldn't it? Surely the gospel authors realized that and therefore refrained from including it.

Robinson cites the Epistle of Barnabas as one post-70 text that clearly refers to the destruction of Jerusalem, showing what he expects from other texts if they are to be judged post-70 too. He neglects to mention that that long epistle refers to the destruction only very briefly, in a single verse or two (16:4-5). If not for that one little passage, Robinson could presumably date the epistle earlier than 70.

Again with regard to Mark, Robinson more than once (Ch. II and IV) offers, as evidence for its pre-70 date, the passage "take to the hills/flee to the mountains" (Mark 13:14). He claims this cannot be a veiled allusion written c. 70 to Christians fleeing Judaea/Jerusalem during the Jewish-Roman War 66-70, because history records that they fled to Pella, a city located not amid hills, but in the lowland of the Jordan Valley ("below sea level," Robinson pointedly writes). But Robinson's argument is weak and open to several objections. First, did the author of Mark, if located far from Palestine c. A.D. 70, even know about that very recent escape of some Christians to Pella? Second, "take to the hills" could easily be only a figurative expression for "escape," whichever route was chosen. Third, leaving Jerusalem, one does indeed encounter hills/mountains, and the frantic Christian flight to Pella 66-70, and probably to other places as well, must have involved much travel through hills of some sort, even if the final destination was not so hilly. Fourth, Pella was in fact nestled in hilly country, though admittedly at the bottom of the Jordan Valley. All in all, then, Robinson's "take to the hills" argument for a pre-70 date of Mark seems very weak to me. Moreover, the absence in the New Testament of any direct firsthand testimony to the siege and destruction of Jerusalem is very possibly due to that tiny and impoverished band of Christian refugees in Pella having soon died off and therefore left no writings that could later be incorporated into the New Testament.

Also in Chapter IV, one of Robinson's main arguments for dating the Gospel of Mark to the 50s is a brief, 2nd century passage by Papias suggesting that Mark himself, though not an eyewitness to Jesus, was Peter's "interpreter" in Rome and then "accurately" wrote his gospel while Peter was still alive. But these circumstances may very well have been telescoped by Papias and others, considering their much later and distant perspectives, and the effects of rumor and wishful thinking. One simply must take into account the understandable wish of 2nd c. Christians to have (or invent) a dignified pedigree for their traditions. Robinson does not adequately explore the real possibility or probability that Mark, or whoever authored the Gospel of Mark, could have worked with Peter sometime in the 50s yet not written his gospel about Jesus until c. 70, thereby recording much authentic history but also adding much unauthentic, legendary material.

In fact, Robinson reveals that the earliest recorded comments by Peter, or Peter's followers (transmitted via Clement c. 100, then Eusebius c. 325) about the Gospel of Mark were actually only lukewarm at best. "Peter," Clement's passage states, "neither strongly forbade it [the Gospel of Mark] nor urged it forward" (p. 107). Robinson rightly describes this comment as "damning with faint praise," but then he drops the subject. We, however, must ask what prompted the original negativity. Was it all those gaudy, fictional miracles in Mark? Or maybe the passage reflects Clement's own attempt to account for the fact that there simply were no known comments made by Peter on the Gospel of Mark, because, unknown to Clement, Peter was dead by the time Mark was written in the late 60s or 70.

In his final chapter, XI, Robinson confesses an ultimate uncertainty about his redating (early dating) effort. He emphasizes the chaos and confusion of trying to date any of the New Testament texts (except the letters of Paul, mostly from the 50s) more precisely than the general period of the second half of the 1st century. Still, on the whole, his book is a very useful, one-volume corrective to those too-liberal, too-skeptical scholars who at one time or another have dated almost every text of the New Testament to the 2nd century.

Believe me, I really wanted to like this book. Tresmontant's masterpiece "The Hebrew Christ" spoke glowingly of it, and no less an authority than Raymond Brown admitted that the issues raised here have not been satisfactorily answered.

Actually, when this book first came out critics derided it as "an unconvincing tour de force" and that the author "steamrollers the evidence". Well let me tell you his evidence IS the steamroller. When you read about the destruction of Jerusalem in documents certain to have been written after 70 AD (Jewish apocalypses, the Letter of Barnabas, etc.) and compare them with the alleged depiction of the same events in the Gospels, you too will be convinced that they could not possibly have been written in the same period and/or are talking about completely different things.

And make no mistake, this is not a tirade by some fundamentalist arguing that the NT contains literal divine words or even inspired words. Rev. Robinson recognized that the writing of the NT involved the collection, rejection and editing of various oral traditions. He just shows this took less time than "mainstream" scholars claim. Rev. Robinson clearly was a critical scholar of the first order, and it was reassuring to read here that the academic argument for a pre-70 dating of the Gospels and Acts has an eminent pedigree indeed. Moreover, it was shocking to find out exactly how flimsy is the evidence for a post-70 dating.

But there are too many pitfalls which lessen the impact of this book. The author's credibility appears seriously hampered by both his insistence in dating the ENTIRE New Testament before AD 70 and his almost uncritical acceptance of traditional authorship for even the most disputed NT Epistles. His discussion of the Epistles of James, Jude and Peter together is far longer than that of the entire Pauline corpus and twice as long as his discussion of all the Gospels and Acts combined. Finally, there is not a sentence that could run on long enough for this man, and constantly I found myself bogged down trying to figure out which clause referred to which.

The bottom line is this book makes a virtually ironclad argument for dating the Gospels and Acts before AD 70. If he had focused only on this aspect (and kept his sentences shorter) I would have given it five stars.

Robinson's basic thesis in this book is that all of the New Testament books can be dated to before 70 AD. In fact, he puts most of them at being much earlier than generally supposed: he concludes, for example, that the gospel of John went through several 'editions' between AD 40 and 65. In order to argue his position, Robinson discusses relevant scholarly contributions at great length, and examines the biblical data carefully.

Despite his somewhat conservative conclusions, (he generally rejects the assumption of pseudonymity in relation to New Testament writings), it is important to realise that Robinson has not changed his basic stance, and is still committed to critical methods. He takes issue, not with the critical apparatus, but with what he brilliantly describes as "the manifold tyranny of unexamined assumptions." This is one of the great contributions of this book: Robinson demonstrates clearly that unexamined assumptions lead to unwarranted conclusions. Robinson is not dogmatic about his findings, and most of his assertions are tentative, but his arguments are nevertheless quite convincing. By his own admission, the whole project started somewhat as a 'joke', but if that is the case, and if Robinson is correct in at least some of his assessments, then this book represents a most serendipitous stumbling on the truth.

This book advances the case that all of the Gospels and all of the books of the New Testament were written before 70 A.D.

Robinson's case is detailed, well-researched, and persuasive. The book is an excellent read. (It is not "light" reading, however. Consider the topic.)

This work is often considered THE book on the topic of early dating. It is cited in subsequent works by Jean Carmignac (The Birth of the Synoptics) and John Wenham (Redating Matthew, Mark, and Luke). It is also mentioned in the Foreword in The Hebrew Christ by Claude Tresmontant. (I highly recommend these other three as well.)

This book is highly recommended if you are looking for a book on the topic of the dating of the Gospels and the NT.