Religion: The New Testament Dating Game

Exactly when the New Testament was written affects the interpretation of every aspect of Christian origins. Biblical scholars generally think that except for eight or nine of the letters attributed to St. Paul, the books were composed between A.D. 70 and the early 2nd century, with one or two even later. Fundamentalists believe every word in the Bible is literally true, but those who hold to “late” dating argue that much of the New Testament was not written by contemporary witnesses and tends to reflect later church views of Jesus and his Apostles.

According to the latest earth tremor in New Testament studies, the present scholarly consensus is wrong. John A.T. Robinson, 57, Anglican dean of chapel and lecturer in theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, declares that all 27 New Testament books were produced in approximately the two decades before A.D. 70, and that they are the work of the Apostles themselves or of contemporaries who worked with them. Since Jesus was crucified around A.D. 30, this would mean that the authors knew numerous eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life and early church events.

Up There. Robinson has long been one of England’s more distinguished New Testament critics, rather on the conservative side but no literalist on such matters as Christ’s miracles or the virgin birth. He became famous, however, through his 1963 bestseller, Honest to God, which set teacups rattling in many a rectory. Like America’s Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike, he scandalized the pious by belittling “our images of God as a Being ‘up there.’ ” His book also advocated what was called “the New Morality,” rejecting absolute rules of right and wrong. After he resigned as Bishop of Woolwich and returned to Cambridge in 1969, Robinson wrote The Human Face of God, which criticized traditional formulations of the deity of Christ, particularly the idea that he preexisted in the Godhead before his birth.

Robinson now brings that same independence of mind to his closely reasoned work on chronology, Redating the New Testament (Westminster; $15), and a forthcoming popular paperback, Can We Trust the New Testament? (Eerdmans; $1.95). What drew him into the dating game was the Gospel of John. In the 19th century newly liberated German Bible critics placed the fourth Gospel in the mid-2nd century because of its well-developed theology, but subsequent archaeological finds (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls and an early fragment of the Gospel) forced the date back to A.D. 90-100. Robinson, however, felt even that was “unbelievably late,” since the Gospel makes no mention of the sack of Jerusalem and destruction of the Jewish Temple in A.D. 70.

At that point Robinson accepted the consensus typified by German Critic Werner Kummel’s listing in 1963 (see chart). But, as “little more than a theological joke,” he decided to investigate the arguments on the dating of all the books, a field largely dormant since the turn of the century. The results stunned him. Owing to scholarly “sloth,” the “tyranny of unexamined assumptions” and “almost willful blindness” by previous authors, he decided, much of the past reasoning was untenable.

The evidence on dating is largely circumstantial, drawn from internal analysis of the books, but there are a few external dates to go by. Historians learned decades ago that Gallic was proconsul of Achaia in A.D. 51-52, and Paul stood trial before him (Acts 18), so much of the chronology of Paul’s career has fallen into place. A much larger event was the wave of terror against Christians that occurred between the burning of Rome (July 64) and the suicide of the Emperor Nero (June 68), during which both Peter and Paul probably died. Robinson thinks this is the logical context for New Testament books that deal with persecution, such as I Peter and Revelation. (A tantalizing detail: Revelation 17:10 says that five kings “have fallen.” The sixth Roman Emperor, Galba, was the one who succeeded Nero.) Many scholars relate these books to the persecution under the Emperor Domitian (A.D. 81-96), but Robinson says this later persecution has been much exaggerated.

By similar arguments, Robinson dates other books by what they omit. Because Acts breaks off without mentioning Nero’s purge and the deaths of Peter and Paul, Robinson thinks it must have been written around A.D. 62. Although the Letter of James has often been dated in the 2nd century, Robinson insists that it is the earliest book of all. Since it expresses no division between Christianity and Judaism, he figures that it must predate the first ecumenical council in A.D. 48, where the church worked out its policy toward Paul’s new mission to the Gentiles.

No Mark. Dating is intermingled with authorship, and here Robinson proves equally idiosyncratic. Rejecting his former views that many of the books were later reconstructions, he now thinks Peter and Paul, or aides following their instructions, wrote all 15 letters attributed to them, and that John wrote John, James, James, and Jude, Jude. Otherwise, Robinson writes, one must believe in the existence of “totally unrecorded and unremembered figures in early Christianity who have left absolutely no mark except as the supposed authors of much of its greatest literature.” Also, he finds it probable that the Apostles, though Aramaic-speaking peasants, would have been bilingual enough to have written in Greek.

Robinson is the first to grant that his theory is by no means “conclusive.” but he challenges his colleagues to try to prove him wrong. If scholars reopen the question, he is convinced, the results will force “the rewriting of many introductions to—and ultimately, theologies of—the New Testament.”