Dating the Gospels (No, not that kind of dating)

I used to be surprised when I encountered educated people who declared with confidence that the Gospels were written centuries after Jesus’s life. I now realize that despite all evidence to the contrary, this is the prevailing thought in our culture. Many people even believe that the Gospels were created in the 300s by influential men at church councils in order to give themselves legitimacy and solidify their own importance. It seems more people have relied on Dan Brown’s 2003 fiction novel, The DaVinci Code, than on primary sources or scholarly writings to inform them about the Bible. So what evidence is there that the oldest accounts of Jesus’s life were written earlier? And how early were they written?

As discussed in my article, “Do We Have an Accurate Copy of the Bible Texts”, we have in existence today Gospel manuscripts that date to the first few centuries AD, well before the church councils which are falsely credited with writing the Gospels. Since we have fragments of the Gospels from the early 100s, complete New Testament books from ~200 A.D., and a near-complete New Testament, including all of the Gospels, from 250 A.D., it simply isn’t possible that these documents could have been written at the Council of Laodicea in 364, or at the Council of Nicaea in 325 (which didn’t even address the canon of Scripture!), as many have claimed.

But the existing manuscripts are not our only evidence for dating the Gospels. There are plenty of clues within the New Testament texts themselves that can inform us as well.

One such clue is the omission of some very significant events that were highly relevant to the Gospel accounts. For example, none of the Gospels mention the destruction of the temple that occurred in 70 AD. This is shocking for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Jesus had predicted the destruction of the temple, and the fulfillment of his prediction would have leant tremendous credibility to his claims.

Not only this, but the destruction of the temple was perhaps the most significant event in Jewish history since its construction 500 years earlier (the coming of the Messiah excluded). The temple was the center of religious, political, and social life for the Jews; it was everything to them! And its destruction meant the end of life as they knew it. Yet not only was there no mention of the destruction of the temple; there was nothing about the three-year Roman siege that preceded it! The only reasonable explanation is that these events had not yet occurred when the Gospels were being written.

Other glaring omissions include the death of James, the brother of Jesus, in 62 AD; the death of the apostle Paul around 64 AD; and the death of Peter around 65 AD. All three of these men were prominent figures throughout the book of Acts. One would expect that after writing so much about these men and their ministry, Luke would surely say something about their deaths had they occurred when he was writing. He described the death of Stephen, who we know little else about, and the death of James the brother of John, but not a word about the deaths of the two primary figures of Acts, or about the leader of the church in Jerusalem, whose work and position of prominence was featured in Acts 15.

Once again, there is a very obvious reason for this: these men had not yet been killed when Acts was being written. Since the Gospel of Luke predated Acts, and Acts appears to have been written just prior to James’s death in 62 AD, we know that the Gospel of Luke must have been written by 62 AD at the very latest, although likely much earlier. This is confirmed by Paul’s apparent quote of Luke 10:7 in his first letter to Timothy, which dates to 62-64 AD, and his assumption that his audience is already familiar with Luke’s gospel.

In addition, Luke in his gospel often repeated or quoted entire passages from the Gospel of Mark, inserting them as though Mark’s account was already recognized, accepted, and available to Luke before he wrote his own gospel. This isn’t surprising given that Luke began his gospel by referencing other accounts which had already been written, as well as his use of all available resources in writing his own account.

Furthermore, it is widely believed that the Gospel of Mark is the earliest of the four gospels to have been written. What is interesting for our purposes is that if Luke’s gospel was written around 60 AD or earlier, and Luke was already familiar with Mark’s gospel by the time he wrote, then Mark’s gospel must have been written in the 50s AD, less than thirty years after Jesus’s death. In fact, it is very reasonable that Mark may have written his gospel as early as the 40s.

If the evidence indicates that the Gospel of Mark was written around 50 AD and the Gospel of Luke by around 60 AD, then why do so many people claim later dates? It’s because of their bias against the supernatural. Many New Testament scholars preemptively exclude the possibility of anything supernatural, which then forces them to date the Gospels much later in order to give time for myths to develop and for the eye witnesses of Jesus’s life and ministry to die. However, the facts do not support their theories.

The Gospels were attributed to their traditional, first-century authors very early in history by people such as Papias (60-135), and were never attributed to anyone else throughout antiquity. They were widely and consistently held to have been written by their first-century namesakes, despite the fact that false gospels and forgeries which arose after the first century were quickly identified by early Christians as fictitious and dismissed as untrustworthy.

Additionally, nearly every New Testament book, including all four Gospels, was quoted or referenced by early church fathers Ignatius (35-117), Papias (60-135), Polycarp (69-155), and Irenaeus (120-202). In order for these men to have quoted the Gospels in the first and second centuries, they clearly must have been written in the first century, very close to the time of Jesus.

In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever, aside from the existence of supernatural elements within the gospel accounts, to support the late dating of the Gospels. And yet if God exists, then the supernatural is not only possible, but necessary. Does this guarantee that they are reliable accounts? No, but it sure is significant.