Dear Theophilus, 

In your last letter you raise the question of the reliability of the gospels and letters in the New Testament. Your question is a very important one because our main access to Christianity is through those documents recorded as the New Testament. The point is sometimes made that these documents are fictional writing bearing no connection to history. This kind of judgement of the documents is very damaging to Christianity and it is therefore important to look at this question with seriousness. I have read certain writers who state that it is not important whether there is historicity in the New Testament documents. What is important is the teaching; whether or not, what the documents claim to have happened did so, is unimportant. This is contrary to what Christianity teaches, which is, that the world and history are important and should not be neglected. These views formed part of the struggle between Christianity and Gnosticism, the latter claiming that it was the teaching that counted. Thus, for example, we have found the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic work, and in it, no actions of Christ are described; it simply catalogues Christ's sayings. But, if you were to look at the teaching of Christianity and compare it to religious teachings of other religions and other epochs, what we would find is that what distinguishes Christianity is not so much its teachings, as to what it claims to have taken place and therefore, it is crucial to support the historical basis of Christianity.

The position commonly declared by a lot of New Testament scholars is that the earliest parts of the New Testament consist of the letters written by Paul and other authors. This was followed by the Gospels in the sequence, first Mark's Gospel followed by Matthew and Luke-Acts, and finally the Gospels according to John and the Book of Revelation.

On what is this judgement based? It is important to point out that the dating is not based on archeological evidence or other forms of objective data. Instead, what is used are judgements based on certain presuppositions. Permit me to illustrate this with an example. In 70 AD, the Temple in Jerusalem was razed to the ground by invading Roman soldiers in response to a revolt by the Jews, who were trying to overthrow the occupying Roman power. Since it is claimed (and even this is debatable) that this event is described in the Gospel of Mark, and since prophecy is impossible, then the Gospel of Mark must have been written after the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem. When one looks at the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, there are definite similarities in some of the material in those Gospels when compared to the Gospel of Mark. It is therefore assumed that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written after the Gospel Mark. The Gospel of John is thought to have been written last because of the supposedly developed theology that is presented there with Jesus being elevated to the status of deity, as the first chapters of the Gospel show.

It is clear that if certain presuppositions are accepted, then all kinds of conclusions can be drawn, especially since there seems to be little objective evidence that can be used. What I would like to do is point out the assumptions that are made and to see what kind of basis they have and, to propose different interpretations of the data before us.

At the outset, I would like to say that the situation is definitely better in terms of evidence and in terms of what we know of the history of the region of the Middle East during the time of Christ. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was claimed that the Gospel according to John was a late composition dating to some time in the middle of the second century. Early in the twentieth century, a fragment of a papyrus was discovered bearing part of the Gospel of John and this fragment was dated to around 125 AD by radioactive carbon dating. Given that this fragment was found in Egypt, and given that it was a copy, it could be stated that the Gospel preceded the 125 AD date by a good number of years. This was solid, concrete evidence and it showed that all the previous assumptions and previous conjectures were just that and nothing more. You would be surprised how much is still at the level of guessing and therefore has to be taken with a considerable grain of salt.

It is claimed that the Gospels of the New Testament are contaminated by Hellenic influences, that is, affected by Greek thought. The recent discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls has shown this to be untrue and the Gospels accurately reflect the social conditions of Jews living in first century Palestine.

We must always beware of suppositions which various scholars bring to the discussion about the dating of the New Testament writings. If we go back to the destruction of the Temple, what is assumed is that any mention of this, places the writings in question after the fact, some time after 70 AD. It is claimed that the Temple destruction is mentioned in the Gospels and therefore they must have been written at least, later than 70 AD. But there are difficulties with this conclusion. If we look at the descriptions given in the Gospels, several things become quite clear. These descriptions are borrowed from the Old Testament account of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in the sixth century BC. In fact, in all of the Gospels, there is a lack of detail which would have been expected had they been written after the fact of the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. Moreover, there was an opportunity for Christians to gloat in that the treatment of Jesus brought repercussions of judgement and destruction to the city that had condemned him. Nowhere, in any of the writings is this evident.

The Gospel of John has come under the heaviest attack with respect to dating and reliability. This Gospel has often been portrayed as bearing little semblance to history. But there are internal clues in the Gospel that show it to be historically reliable and the evidence of recording actual events can be perceived. One very interesting example is that described in the eighth chapter about the woman taken in adultery. There is a section in the account where Jesus bends over and writes with his finger in the dirt. To us this may not seem as something unusual, but we are looking from the perspective of the twentieth century. The incident that is described in the Gospel has no theological significance and its inclusion points to what is called in literary analysis as realistic prose. But realistic prose does not exist in any of the writings of the ancient world and only starts to make an appearance in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries. What this strongly suggests is not fictional invention but the report of an eyewitness, recording what is observed.

There is another interesting item in John's Gospel. He mentions the five columns at Bethsaida, at a pool. But this was destroyed in 70 AD and was only unearthed in this century through archeological excavations. If John's Gospel were written after the fall of Jerusalem, his reference to the five columns makes little sense because they would be buried and out of sight. This suggests that John's Gospel was not written late but was probably written around the same time, pre 70 AD, as the other Gospels, referred to as the Synoptics.

John's Gospel also gives us information that expands and explains episodes in the Synoptics. I draw your attention to the feeding of the five thousand. In the Synoptic Gospels, it states that after the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, the crowd was so charged up that Christ had to flee. No further explanation is offered. It is John who puts this matter into perspective and tells us that Jesus had to flee from the crowd which wanted to make him into a king and to start an insurrection. Again, what this shows is that John's Gospel, far from being unhistorical and written late in the first century has marks about it that indicate the truth is opposite to this. This also strengthens the arguments that the Synoptic Gospels were written much earlier than is proposed by some New Testament scholars.

But, you will ask, what about the obviously legendary material such as the graves opening in the Gospel of Matthew? Doesn't this show that what we are dealing with here is legend and fiction?

You see, Theophilus, we must try to avoid what I would call absolutist positions. Either every single word is absolute historical truth, a position called fundamentalism, or every word is sheer fiction. The situation is not so simple and, as with a lot of things in life, a lot more complex and requiring of judgement and good common sense. With respect to the passage in Matthew about the graves opening and people resurrecting, I grant that this does not seem to be a historical, objective truth. In other words, if you were there, in Jerusalem, your eyes would not see these formerly dead people walking in the streets. Otherwise, we would have had other historical reports of this occurrence and we have not one. What Matthew is depicting through this passage is a theological message of the meaning of something that did happen historically and that is, the Resurrection of Christ. The belief in the resurrection was there, in Jewish theology, and therefore, the Resurrection of Christ would not be something completely foreign. What was so strange was when it happened. The resurrection was to take place not in the middle of history but at the consummation, at the end of history. And that is what the disciples found puzzling and that is what drove some of them to expect an imminent end to the world.

I will end here, Theophilus, and take up with this topic in the next letter. For now, goodbye.

Bar-Abbas

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