The Canon of the New Testament – Part 16: The Time of the Origin of the Scriptures

From Christian

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To your knowledge, when did the writings in the New Testament canon originate? Or more specifically: Which part of the New Testament canon was written first and which was it? Now this is not just an academic question or a trivia question. The answer to this question has a greater significance than you might think. It is important for the correct placement in the historical context. And also into the temporal development of the faith and life of the first followers of Jesus, the different currents that came then and important historical developments. Let’s think, for example, of the destruction of Jerusalem, the conversion of the Gentiles or the death of the apostles and the generation that had still known Jesus themselves – and also that the hope of a return of Christ had not been fulfilled in their lifetime.

The scriptures are usually arranged this way in the New Testament canon:

Because of the arrangement in the canon, we may have this chronological sequence in mind:

However, you may also think that the apostle John wrote the Gospel together with the Epistles and Revelation at the end of the first century.

But this representation would still contain an error, because the Acts of the Apostles – that is history of the deeds of the apostles – could have been written only after the apostles had accomplished these deeds. So maybe then rather like this?

But why puzzle around! Let’s just take the data of the transcript and everything is already clear. And there we have the problem: We do not know the data! „Yes, we do! Of course we do!“ I can already hear the dissenting voices. So let’s start – as before – to check the facts.

Let us first consider the four Gospels contained in the New Testament. We can at least narrow down the time of their origin:

The date of composition of the New Testament Gospels is between 30 or 33 CE (the year of Jesus‘ crucifixion) and about 120 CE (early 2nd century evidence: Papyrus 52 (⁵², a fragment of John’s Gospel from the time of Emperor Hadrian and Church Fathers‘ citations).

Wikipedia Evangelium (Literaturgattung)

As a side note, I use Wikipedia more often here because it’s easily accessible to everyone, free of charge, and is a good starting point for your own studies.

This results in this picture.

Can’t it be a little more precise? Unfortunately, only a little better, because there is simply no reliable, precise information. At that time there was no publication with ISBN number, year, author and entry in national registers or large libraries. Why should the first followers of Jesus do such a thing? They had no order to write anything down and there were still enough eyewitnesses who were alive.

Nevertheless, in Bibles also time indications can be found which agree with this estimation and are quite precise. For example this one from the Schlachter Bible (2000):

This list looks very tidy and precise. This becomes even clearer if you display it graphically. But first, the quiz question again: Which text of the New Testament canon was written first? And when? Maybe you’re thinking of the Gospels now? Sure, what Jesus did was written down first, wasn’t it? And which part was written last and when? Sure, it must be Revelation. Well, let’s see:

Perhaps you were surprised to find the letter of James first in this list. And then the letter of Paul to the Galatians. And then the Gospels of Matthew and Mark – but at the same time? Why is that? Wouldn’t one account have been enough? And then first come the other letters of Paul. All written until 70 AD when Jerusalem was destroyed. But still: Finally, towards the end of the century, the apostle John writes his letters, the Gospel and the Revelation.

But the question remains where this incredibly precise time information comes from, since it cannot be determined from the text itself.

Consider, for example, the Gospels. What was the conclusion of the scholars who tried to determine the time of origin of the Gospels based on the facts? The following account is based on the article Gospel (literary genre, in German) in Wikipedia:

None of these estimations corresponds to that in the Schlachter Bible! Are then the completely different chronological classifications based on the knowledge of different historical facts? Essentially not. What plays a major role is, for example, the question whether the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 was prophetically foretold, or subsequently it was presented that way in the text. Another important point is the similarity of the synoptic gospels not only in the reports but also in the text of whole sentences and passages. There are various theories about this. For example, that the Gospel of Mark formed the basis for Matthew and Luke, or what role served an even earlier template, which unfortunately has not been preserved. We will talk about this in the next part of the series.

And what about the letters that were or are attributed to Paul? (Source: Wikipedia Pauline Epistles, German)

That fits better. And indeed, for the letters that are most likely really by Paul, the time of writing can be better narrowed down based on the facts. At least better than for all other parts of the canon of the New Testament. But even with these letters, the following must be said:

The Pauline epistles do not name the places of their writing, nor do they give much indication of the time of their writing.

Wikipedia: Paulus von Tarsus

As you can see, there are, especially in the letters where Paul must be questioned as the author, partly considerably different indications. In these cases I have entered all the different indications.

For example, if you are surprised that the Epistle to the Hebrews is not supposed to be by Paul: It was assigned to Paul’s letters in the oldest manuscripts like Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. However, one must not forget that these codices date back to the 4th century. The Christian scholar Origines, who already taught at the beginning of the 3rd century, however, already noticed a considerable difference:

Origines assumed, because of the unusual style for Paul (such as a vocabulary of 1000 different words at 3000 words in length compared to Paul’s rather limited one), that the content of the letter was Pauline, but the author unclear.

Wikipedia: Brief an die Hebräer

Furthermore, the statement in Hebrews 2:3 doesn’t really fit with Paul’s statement that he received the gospel directly from Jesus.

But if we would still want to assume that the Letter to the Hebrews is from Paul, we must therefore somehow explain this contradiction. And explain the observation of Origines and later scholars. And explain why Paul uses different vocabulary and expressions in different letters – and this has been done. For example, it is attributed to the fact that the letter was dictated and the writer had a different vocabulary. Now this does not fit at all with the idea of verbal inspiration. Because then God would have inspired either in letters ‚of Paul‘ his thoughts with different vocabulary and expression literally. Or he would have inspired the writer with a different vocabulary besides Paul. Or … that’s kind of strangely complicated, don’t you think?

Let us move on to the Acts of the Apostles, the other epistles and the Revelation (of John):

„The great majority of historical-critical biblical research assumes the years around 90 AD as the time of the composition of Acts. … Evangelical commentators, on the other hand, usually defend an early dating of Acts to AD 62-65.“ (Wikipedia)

In the case of 1 and 2 Peter, it is debated whether this letter can actually have been written by Peter. Thus the writing must be assumed either before Peter’s death in 64 or very much later. I would say that one is pretty much in the dark here with regard to the time.

In the case of the Epistle of James no clear statement can be made: „Because the text itself contains only very few usable data, authorship and time of origin are disputed within biblical scholarship. Above all two opinions are represented“ (Wikipedia) And so I have entered the very early dating before the so-called council in Jerusalem as well as a time before the presumed death of James or a very later dating.

This becomes even clearer with the short Epistle of Jude: „Neither the time of origin nor the recipients of the Epistle of Jude can be determined with certainty.“ (Wikipedia)

For the Revelation of John, the year 68 or 69 was long assumed to be plausible as the time of origin, today it is more likely to be around the year 95 AD (Wikipedia).

So the answer to the question „When did the writings in the canon of the New Testament come into being?“ cannot be answered as simply and surely as we might have wished. Does this now make them per se untrustworthy? For the first followers of Jesus and the first Christians, this was rather irrelevant. Was it a question of whether the author was an apostle? We have only touched on the subject here. But in the part of the series about the canon it has become clear that this was not necessarily decisive either. A writing of an apostle, of another eyewitness or of someone who still knew it, was of course more highly estimated. But later, it was usually not so easy to determine who really was the author of a writing. Therefore, the quality of the content was more decisive.

One question remains: Why was the epochal event of the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the worship in the temple according to the Mosaic law not mentioned with one syllable in the writings of the New Testament as a fulfilled prophecy? Or maybe it is, but only indirectly? When Jesus‘ prophecy concerning Jerusalem, which we find in the Gospels, was fulfilled, then surely it was a triumph for Christians and an affirmation of their faith that this prophecy was fulfilled. Why is this not found in the scriptures at all? That is quite strange. That’s why some argue that Jesus‘ prophecy was actually written down afterwards. And date the texts after 70 A.D. But is that a strong argument? Well, the Christians who fled and survived were able to report this to everyone and had other concerns than writing this down. We would have liked to have it recorded by eyewitnesses, but that is just our view today and our wish.

Now one could argue that this is a good argument that the New Testament was written before 70 AD. But then, why are there no writings in the New Testament canon that were written after 70 AD that emphasize the fulfillment of prophecy and the consequences for the Christian faith (circumcision, food commandments…)? Well, at least the Gospel according to John, the three letters and the Apocalypse are dated by many to the end of the first century. But in them the event is not mentioned. Not even the prophecy of Jesus, which is found only in the synaptic gospels (Mat 24, Mar 13, Luk 21). The significance of the event was discussed in the centuries that followed, especially since the majority of the Jews did not join the Christians. But that is another subject.

Since the time of writing of many writings in the New Testament canon can hardly be determined, the historical context can also only be defined very roughly.

But perhaps more important for you is who the authors of the writings were. What do we know about them? We will deal with that in the next part of the series.