I'm not sure I follow you on when the gospels were written. You say that many people incorrectly believe it was centuries later, and note some evidence that they were likely written in the first century A.D. Which I understand. But then you say " Jesus clearly prophecies the destruction of the Second Temple and the accompanying sack of Jerusalem, and those events happened in 70 A.D. In other words, if you start from the assumption that the Lord could not have known of future events then you are stuck with a timeline that strains credulity in every other way." Which implies that all the evidence not only suggests the first century, but specifically prior to 70 A.D. But I didn't see evidence in your article about that spoke to A.D. 30-70 vs. A.D. 70-100?
For avoidance of doubt, I have no axe to grind here. I was just going along thinking "yup, the general consensus that the Gospels were written in 65-100 A.D. seems consistent with what this book is arguing" and then got confused in the last paragraph.
I agree with this. I have never really encountered the idea that the gospels were written in like the 4th century or something. The disagreement between more conservative scholars and more liberal scholars these days seems to revolve more around things like whether the gospels are direct journalistic eyewitness accounts or whether they're one or two generations removed and/or embellished in keeping with other genres that were popular at the time, or what kinds of things people could mean by a phrase like 'Son of God' ca. 100 AD and how those relate to later Christian orthodoxy.
This was my takeaway too. As an agnostic deeply interested in Christianity, my understanding was that these days, generally anyone who actually cares about the age of New Testament books (and is not a frothing-at-the-mouth "internet atheist") sets out dates between A.D. 55 and A.D. 150 depending on the book - often with theologically conservative Christian scholars arguing for dates a few decades earlier than more "secular" academics, and with general agreement that various written and oral versions of canonical and non-canonical texts were floating around at this time.
Also, is it really that crazy or outlandish of a prediction to make? Like If I prophesied right now that Israel will destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque, and then they do it, would the be proof that I had divine knowledge?
I studied this in university and no respectable, mainstream scholar that I ever heard of claimed the canonical gospels were put together centuries later, or that they do not contain accurate historical detail, or that there was not a historical figure the broad outline of whose life story would be broadly recognizable from the canonical gospels. This is all 101-level stuff!
Further, it’s entirely plausible that different accounts would get lots of historical details correct but disagree on the larger point. This is incredibly common in the study of history. For example, both popular and academic authors, working from the same primary sources, can come to different conclusions about, say, where the blame for the beginning of the Great War lies. In fact, we can look at the canonical gospels, and see how they each have a different emphasis, a different approach to the identity and importance of the story’s focus.
Secular histories of the ancient world (say, Suetonius or Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus) are also plumb full with combinations of uncontroversial information and stories that stretch credulity.
I’ve no wish to contradict your main argument about the Gospels’ integrity, but as a historian of culture and religion, I should note that Neoplatonism isn’t a tangential influence, and it never died out. It’s the metaphysical framework on which Christian theology is built (happy to provide sources; this is in part what I write about). The Dionysian writings adapt Proklos’ system directly, and that synthesis underlies everything from the doctrine of the celestial hierarchy to the liturgical structure still visible in Orthodoxy. And just for accuracy’s sake, Constantine legalised Christianity; Theodosius I made it the state religion in 380. These details shape how Christian thought and institutions evolved on the ground.
I'd like to know more about what you're saying here, who informed whom and so on.
My high schoolers and I just finished Meno, and I noticed something new: that Socrates is anticipating, however dimly, Christian anthropology. Would you claim that there is a straight line from the one to the other?
I think the non-crazy version of The atheist disputes with the Bible, doesn't dispute the timetable or that there was a rabbi named Yeshua. But if does say:
-A lot of the things attributed to Yeshua were from other famous rabbis at the time. So in a sense Jesus wasn't 'just one guy'
-The supernatural events were things that his followers made up about him. Either the stories about him became tall tales before being written down, or in the more extreme version, Jesus is a bit of a con man, who brings a lot of fish, pretends to bring two and calls it a miracle.
"Non-crazy" is perhaps a defensible description for these positions, but they're not particularly tenable, or anything, We can track the Jesus followers back much too far for the first one to be realistic, and the second one rather fails to explain why all these people started dying rather than recant having seen their favorite sleight-of-hand artist rise from the dead.
Not to be too flip back, but have you actually read what Rome was like? The patriarch of the family gets to year everyone on the family as a slave. When plagues happen the sick get abandoned.
This is actually one of the reasons they think Christianity took over in Rome. (Other than the emperor converting.) Christians were all about charity and loving your neighbor. When a plague hit, Christmas took care of each other and pagans... Didn't. Post plague, the Christmas mostly survived and a huge amount of pagans died. Some pagans got taken care of and converted. Being a Roman Christian was a huge leap forward morally AND it was the smart thing to do. The pagans are the marks.
Are you sure you would be above telling a few white lies (or just not thinking to critically about what you've been told) if it convinced people to stop killing you and become your friend instead. "Sure Jesus died, but he came back to life. My brother's, cousin's, roommate saw it, I swear!"
Remember that exaggerating things that make your side look good is totally normal human behavior that plenty of people do in the modern era when they aren't nearly as motivated to lie for their own safety.
If you don't believe in the supernatural, then the Bible certainly does seem to suggest that Jesus and the disciples did a certain amount of stage magic, legend\parable telling, and exaggeration, and those tales went through the natural pieces that ask good stories do. Notice how, the less wiggle room we have for things to get invented or exaggerated later, them more we converge on the competing hypotheses of 'it really happened' and 'somewhere somebody lied, at least a little'.
The shorter an even more glib reply is something like: Plenty of people claim supernatural power, but it seems to disappear upon close examination, almost as if the supernatural does not exist. Humans in every era have lied shamelessly and constantly, especially when religion and politics is involved. What makes this Jesus guy the exception? If I want to look for a mark, I look myself in the mirror...
I promise that I am less sure of this explanation than I was as a teenager, but I haven't ruled it out.
Re: destruction of the temple: I think you are misunderstanding this argument for a later authorship of the gospels. You don’t need to adopt a naturalistic reading of the gospels to view this as evidence for a later date. The gospels themselves say that they didn’t record everything Jesus said (obviously). And depending on the authors’ aim, it would make sense for them to write down specifically those prophecies that have already come true:
Now, if they want to inform their readers about future things, then obviously they will write down those prophecies that have not yet been fulfilled (for example the second coming of Christ). If their goal is to establish Christ’s authority as a reliable teacher and Messiah, however, then it would make a lot of sense to include especially those prophecies that have already been fulfilled.
To put it in Bayesian terms: P(recording of a prophecy | prophecy has already been fulfilled) > P(recording of a prophecy | prophecy has not yet been fulfilled), regardless of your prior on supernatural prophetic abilities.
If you’re not familiar with him, check out John Nelson‘s blog Behind The Gospels. Nelson is a believing Christian and historical Jesus scholar. Myself coming from an evangelical background, quite a few of his articles go against my biases, but I appreciate his input and his writing has done a lot to add nuance to my thinking.
Is it a prevalent belief among American atheists that the Gospels were written much later than the events they cover? This is surprising. I was raised a Catholic in Italy and I never considered the issue important, taking it for granted that the Gospels were mostly authentic even when I quit believing in my early teens. What seems to really matter is not whether the historical Jesus is real or not, but whether his miracles are. To believe those you obviously need more than a text (or four) that happens to be credible in its more mundane details.
As usual, your otherwise excellent insights are handicapped by your weird decision to genuinely believe in a god. But you will not succeed in making me unsubscribe; I shall tolerate your idiosyncrasies.
Great thought provoking article! Even if you prove that the gospels were written in the 1st century, how does that in any way prove the "divinity of Jesus”?
Not directly, but it drastically narrows the scope for arguing that all the supernatural stuff was the accretion of myth over time. With a realistic timeline of the Gospels, you have to admit that people were going around preaching the resurrection of the son of God in the face of intermittently intense persecution essentially immediately after Jesus's death, which is a lot harder to explain than a theory on which we would have had no clear record of Christian belief until centuries after the fact.
I was so pleasantly surprised to see McMahon topping this list. I remember digging into him after a podcast appearance and realizing he had worked for or managed 80+% of the people in the "startup community" that were actually worth a damn.
Timing issues for the composition of the three synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, were well resolved by Richard Bauckham in “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.” A date for Mark, the earliest, of around 70 AD is perfectly compatible with the evidence on names and other matters, if you follow him in understanding that the gospel authors had access to people who had either known Jesus and/or his brother James or people who had heard stories from eyewitnesses and transmitted them on.
"Note how the common names (Simon, James, Matthew, Judas) are disambiguated in some fashion, while the unusual names (Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas) are not, presumably because people knew who they were talking about. Or as Williams puts it, “not only are the names authentically Palestinian, but the disambiguation patterns are such as would be necessary in Palestine, but not elsewhere.”
This is really cool, just bought the book, thanks for sharing - Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter Williams
You might like the new book *Josephus and Jesus* by T. C. Schmidt. It is free online: https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/. You may have heard that Josephus's history of the Jews--*Antiquities*--mentions Jesus, and you probably also have heard that the consensus of historians is that this was a later insertion into the text.
Schmidt argues very convincingly that no, in fact, *Antiquities* included this mention of Jesus in the original. His first move is to retranslate the Testimonium Flavianum (TF) and basically shows that it does not flatter Jesus whatsoever. In other words, modern translators/historians play up the mention of Jesus, so it appears that the TF reverentially refers to Jesus, which it does not. He also argues that stylistically the TF resembles Josephus's style and makes other arguments.
Is it really the consensus that all of Josephus is an interpolation? *Some* of it, where josephus essentially confesses the core of the Christian faith, certainly is, but I thought the consensus was that it's largely authentic.
Schmidt's book even pushed back against the idea that *some* of it is interpolation. With regards to that, he basically says (in part) we have previously mistranslated the TF to make it seem like Josephus was confessing the core of the Christian faith, which Josephus does not do at all.
I learned about the TF at both my Protestant middle school and Roman Catholic high school. My memory of the TF was that it seemed to me to probably be an interpolation, based on the arguments presented by my Christian teachers (!). I now blame the mistranslation(s) of the TF for this mistake... Anyways, this is a roundabout way of saying that, after reflection, I actually have no idea about the consensus opinion here other than what Schmidt said about it, and maybe I misstated his opinion of it. If so, my apologies.
I'm not sure I follow you on when the gospels were written. You say that many people incorrectly believe it was centuries later, and note some evidence that they were likely written in the first century A.D. Which I understand. But then you say " Jesus clearly prophecies the destruction of the Second Temple and the accompanying sack of Jerusalem, and those events happened in 70 A.D. In other words, if you start from the assumption that the Lord could not have known of future events then you are stuck with a timeline that strains credulity in every other way." Which implies that all the evidence not only suggests the first century, but specifically prior to 70 A.D. But I didn't see evidence in your article about that spoke to A.D. 30-70 vs. A.D. 70-100?
For avoidance of doubt, I have no axe to grind here. I was just going along thinking "yup, the general consensus that the Gospels were written in 65-100 A.D. seems consistent with what this book is arguing" and then got confused in the last paragraph.
I agree with this. I have never really encountered the idea that the gospels were written in like the 4th century or something. The disagreement between more conservative scholars and more liberal scholars these days seems to revolve more around things like whether the gospels are direct journalistic eyewitness accounts or whether they're one or two generations removed and/or embellished in keeping with other genres that were popular at the time, or what kinds of things people could mean by a phrase like 'Son of God' ca. 100 AD and how those relate to later Christian orthodoxy.
This was my takeaway too. As an agnostic deeply interested in Christianity, my understanding was that these days, generally anyone who actually cares about the age of New Testament books (and is not a frothing-at-the-mouth "internet atheist") sets out dates between A.D. 55 and A.D. 150 depending on the book - often with theologically conservative Christian scholars arguing for dates a few decades earlier than more "secular" academics, and with general agreement that various written and oral versions of canonical and non-canonical texts were floating around at this time.
Also, is it really that crazy or outlandish of a prediction to make? Like If I prophesied right now that Israel will destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque, and then they do it, would the be proof that I had divine knowledge?
I studied this in university and no respectable, mainstream scholar that I ever heard of claimed the canonical gospels were put together centuries later, or that they do not contain accurate historical detail, or that there was not a historical figure the broad outline of whose life story would be broadly recognizable from the canonical gospels. This is all 101-level stuff!
Further, it’s entirely plausible that different accounts would get lots of historical details correct but disagree on the larger point. This is incredibly common in the study of history. For example, both popular and academic authors, working from the same primary sources, can come to different conclusions about, say, where the blame for the beginning of the Great War lies. In fact, we can look at the canonical gospels, and see how they each have a different emphasis, a different approach to the identity and importance of the story’s focus.
Secular histories of the ancient world (say, Suetonius or Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus) are also plumb full with combinations of uncontroversial information and stories that stretch credulity.
I’ve no wish to contradict your main argument about the Gospels’ integrity, but as a historian of culture and religion, I should note that Neoplatonism isn’t a tangential influence, and it never died out. It’s the metaphysical framework on which Christian theology is built (happy to provide sources; this is in part what I write about). The Dionysian writings adapt Proklos’ system directly, and that synthesis underlies everything from the doctrine of the celestial hierarchy to the liturgical structure still visible in Orthodoxy. And just for accuracy’s sake, Constantine legalised Christianity; Theodosius I made it the state religion in 380. These details shape how Christian thought and institutions evolved on the ground.
I'd like to know more about what you're saying here, who informed whom and so on.
My high schoolers and I just finished Meno, and I noticed something new: that Socrates is anticipating, however dimly, Christian anthropology. Would you claim that there is a straight line from the one to the other?
A straight line no, there are no straight lines in human history! But there is no rupture as is so often claimed in some cases; there is no ongoing evolution of thought and ideas, shaped by the pressures and needs of each era. This is largely what I write about overall, but I specifically focus on providing the evidence for this. This piece: https://open.substack.com/pub/thyrathen/p/the-many-and-the-one-what-we-get?r=1rahin&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false provides a detailed overview, with a closer focus on Neoplatonism here: https://open.substack.com/pub/thyrathen/p/damaskios-and-platonic-orthodoxy?r=1rahin&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false . I tend to focus more closely on late antiquity than classical antiquity because that is when so much change occurs, but if there’s something specific I haven’t covered I’m happy to try and expand.
I think the non-crazy version of The atheist disputes with the Bible, doesn't dispute the timetable or that there was a rabbi named Yeshua. But if does say:
-A lot of the things attributed to Yeshua were from other famous rabbis at the time. So in a sense Jesus wasn't 'just one guy'
-The supernatural events were things that his followers made up about him. Either the stories about him became tall tales before being written down, or in the more extreme version, Jesus is a bit of a con man, who brings a lot of fish, pretends to bring two and calls it a miracle.
"Non-crazy" is perhaps a defensible description for these positions, but they're not particularly tenable, or anything, We can track the Jesus followers back much too far for the first one to be realistic, and the second one rather fails to explain why all these people started dying rather than recant having seen their favorite sleight-of-hand artist rise from the dead.
Not to be flippant, but don't you have to have some benefit from your con jobs? Who was the mark?
Not to be too flip back, but have you actually read what Rome was like? The patriarch of the family gets to year everyone on the family as a slave. When plagues happen the sick get abandoned.
This is actually one of the reasons they think Christianity took over in Rome. (Other than the emperor converting.) Christians were all about charity and loving your neighbor. When a plague hit, Christmas took care of each other and pagans... Didn't. Post plague, the Christmas mostly survived and a huge amount of pagans died. Some pagans got taken care of and converted. Being a Roman Christian was a huge leap forward morally AND it was the smart thing to do. The pagans are the marks.
Are you sure you would be above telling a few white lies (or just not thinking to critically about what you've been told) if it convinced people to stop killing you and become your friend instead. "Sure Jesus died, but he came back to life. My brother's, cousin's, roommate saw it, I swear!"
Remember that exaggerating things that make your side look good is totally normal human behavior that plenty of people do in the modern era when they aren't nearly as motivated to lie for their own safety.
If you don't believe in the supernatural, then the Bible certainly does seem to suggest that Jesus and the disciples did a certain amount of stage magic, legend\parable telling, and exaggeration, and those tales went through the natural pieces that ask good stories do. Notice how, the less wiggle room we have for things to get invented or exaggerated later, them more we converge on the competing hypotheses of 'it really happened' and 'somewhere somebody lied, at least a little'.
The shorter an even more glib reply is something like: Plenty of people claim supernatural power, but it seems to disappear upon close examination, almost as if the supernatural does not exist. Humans in every era have lied shamelessly and constantly, especially when religion and politics is involved. What makes this Jesus guy the exception? If I want to look for a mark, I look myself in the mirror...
I promise that I am less sure of this explanation than I was as a teenager, but I haven't ruled it out.
Re: destruction of the temple: I think you are misunderstanding this argument for a later authorship of the gospels. You don’t need to adopt a naturalistic reading of the gospels to view this as evidence for a later date. The gospels themselves say that they didn’t record everything Jesus said (obviously). And depending on the authors’ aim, it would make sense for them to write down specifically those prophecies that have already come true:
Now, if they want to inform their readers about future things, then obviously they will write down those prophecies that have not yet been fulfilled (for example the second coming of Christ). If their goal is to establish Christ’s authority as a reliable teacher and Messiah, however, then it would make a lot of sense to include especially those prophecies that have already been fulfilled.
To put it in Bayesian terms: P(recording of a prophecy | prophecy has already been fulfilled) > P(recording of a prophecy | prophecy has not yet been fulfilled), regardless of your prior on supernatural prophetic abilities.
If you’re not familiar with him, check out John Nelson‘s blog Behind The Gospels. Nelson is a believing Christian and historical Jesus scholar. Myself coming from an evangelical background, quite a few of his articles go against my biases, but I appreciate his input and his writing has done a lot to add nuance to my thinking.
Is it a prevalent belief among American atheists that the Gospels were written much later than the events they cover? This is surprising. I was raised a Catholic in Italy and I never considered the issue important, taking it for granted that the Gospels were mostly authentic even when I quit believing in my early teens. What seems to really matter is not whether the historical Jesus is real or not, but whether his miracles are. To believe those you obviously need more than a text (or four) that happens to be credible in its more mundane details.
"Is it a prevalent belief among American atheists that the Gospels were written much later than the events they cover?"
Very few of the American atheists I know of concern themselves with such details.
As usual, your otherwise excellent insights are handicapped by your weird decision to genuinely believe in a god. But you will not succeed in making me unsubscribe; I shall tolerate your idiosyncrasies.
One question, where do you find the books you read? How do you choose them?
Great thought provoking article! Even if you prove that the gospels were written in the 1st century, how does that in any way prove the "divinity of Jesus”?
Not directly, but it drastically narrows the scope for arguing that all the supernatural stuff was the accretion of myth over time. With a realistic timeline of the Gospels, you have to admit that people were going around preaching the resurrection of the son of God in the face of intermittently intense persecution essentially immediately after Jesus's death, which is a lot harder to explain than a theory on which we would have had no clear record of Christian belief until centuries after the fact.
I was so pleasantly surprised to see McMahon topping this list. I remember digging into him after a podcast appearance and realizing he had worked for or managed 80+% of the people in the "startup community" that were actually worth a damn.
Timing issues for the composition of the three synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, were well resolved by Richard Bauckham in “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.” A date for Mark, the earliest, of around 70 AD is perfectly compatible with the evidence on names and other matters, if you follow him in understanding that the gospel authors had access to people who had either known Jesus and/or his brother James or people who had heard stories from eyewitnesses and transmitted them on.
"Note how the common names (Simon, James, Matthew, Judas) are disambiguated in some fashion, while the unusual names (Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas) are not, presumably because people knew who they were talking about. Or as Williams puts it, “not only are the names authentically Palestinian, but the disambiguation patterns are such as would be necessary in Palestine, but not elsewhere.”
This is really cool, just bought the book, thanks for sharing - Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter Williams
The section on neoplatonism reminded me of this blog post on a similar topic (maybe it's the same one, actually?): https://branemrys.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-philosophical-topic-that-most.html
BJJ Heroes lists the lineages of all the major BJJ athletes. My instructor who gave me my blue belt got his black belt from this guy: https://www.bjjheroes.com/bjj-fighters/pedro-sauer
tbf plotinus has a very mystical and aesthetic bent to his manner of description so esp on a younger contemporary demo i feel like he would play well
We actually use the phrase "hoshana v'hoshia-na" at one point in the liturgy.
I'll have to get back to you after the holiday when we actually say it, because I don't remember exactly where it is.
You might like the new book *Josephus and Jesus* by T. C. Schmidt. It is free online: https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/. You may have heard that Josephus's history of the Jews--*Antiquities*--mentions Jesus, and you probably also have heard that the consensus of historians is that this was a later insertion into the text.
Schmidt argues very convincingly that no, in fact, *Antiquities* included this mention of Jesus in the original. His first move is to retranslate the Testimonium Flavianum (TF) and basically shows that it does not flatter Jesus whatsoever. In other words, modern translators/historians play up the mention of Jesus, so it appears that the TF reverentially refers to Jesus, which it does not. He also argues that stylistically the TF resembles Josephus's style and makes other arguments.
Is it really the consensus that all of Josephus is an interpolation? *Some* of it, where josephus essentially confesses the core of the Christian faith, certainly is, but I thought the consensus was that it's largely authentic.
Schmidt's book even pushed back against the idea that *some* of it is interpolation. With regards to that, he basically says (in part) we have previously mistranslated the TF to make it seem like Josephus was confessing the core of the Christian faith, which Josephus does not do at all.
I learned about the TF at both my Protestant middle school and Roman Catholic high school. My memory of the TF was that it seemed to me to probably be an interpolation, based on the arguments presented by my Christian teachers (!). I now blame the mistranslation(s) of the TF for this mistake... Anyways, this is a roundabout way of saying that, after reflection, I actually have no idea about the consensus opinion here other than what Schmidt said about it, and maybe I misstated his opinion of it. If so, my apologies.