Boyne complimented Mutabaruka on the view, shared by some scholars that "the Gospels were written long after the events were reported, and that the oral traditions of the disciples could not be relied on for historical accuracy." Is this view really credible though?
The strategy of late-dating the Gospels has serious problems and even if the Gospels were in fact written long after the events reported that would not necessarily vitiate accuracy. It should be noted that if the late-dating of the New Testament documents is sufficient to raise questions on the accuracy of the content of these documents then our confidence about the accuracy of most pieces of classical literature has no basis because the New Testament documents are superior to most pieces of classical literature in terms of the gap between event and writing, and superior to every piece of classical literature in terms of both the gap between original writing and earliest copy and as well the number of manuscript copies. Take for instance Alexander the Great who lived from 356-323 BC, the more reliable records of his life by Plutarch and Arrian were done only in the 2nd century AD!
If Acts was written about AD 62 then Luke is earlier and at least Mark and Matthew are still earlier than Luke (see Lk. 1.1-4).The Gospel of John is regarded by many as the latest of the Gospels to be written yet one of the oldest copies of any portion of the New Testament available today contains a few verses from John's gospel and that papyrus (p52) found in Egypt (composed in Ephesus in Asia minor) has been reliably dated to the first half of the second century AD by leading paleographers like C.H. Roberts, Frederic Kenyon, Adolf Deissmann and Ulrich Wilcken. Textual critic, Bruce Metzger quipped, "Had this little fragment been known during the middle of the past century [19th century] that school of New Testament criticism which was inspired by the brilliant professor, Ferdinand Christian Baur, could not have argued that the Fourth Gospel was not composed until about the year 160." (The Text of the New Testament, 3rd edition, 1992, 39.)
NOT TRUE!
Dingwall says of the Gospels "we don't even know who wrote these books? It wasn't until some 150 years after Jesus' death [i.e. 180 or 188 AD] that some bright spark decided to assign the names 'Matthew', 'Mark', 'Luke', and 'John' to these books." This is flat out wrong. It is a pity that Dingwall did not name the bright spark. The traditional attributions of the Gospels were widely known, without significant variation by about 140 AD or earlier. Without such attributions of authorship it is difficult to imagine a plurality of gospels being read in any one Church and so widely received as authoritative.
Martin Hengel of Tubingen University advises, "[A]t the latest when the communities had two different copies of the Gospels, titles had to be used to distinguish them, in order to avoid confusion. Where the author was well-known to the community, a verbal reference would have been enough, but as soon as his work was copied, sent to other communities and put in an archive there, a title was absolutely necessary to distinguish it from other works." Cited in Carsten P. Thiede & Matthew D'Ancona, Eyewitness to Jesus: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence About the Origin of the Gospels, 1996, 15. Hengel had made this comment first in 1985 in his book Studies in the Gospel of Mark and he maintains the same position in his 2000 book The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is helpful for the modern reader to know that the standard practice in ancient times was that "scrolls with literary texts had tags glued to them. These were strips made of parchment, papyrus or leather, which were affixed to the handle or were in some other way attached to the back of the scroll so that they projected from the side which was facing the bookseller or reader. They fulfilled the same purpose as the spine of a modern book. Scroll users simply looked at the tag, called sillybos or sittybos in Greek." ( Thiede & Ancona, 15) - Boyne also mentioned some lady on Fame FM's 'Uncensored' suggesting that the Jesus story was adopted from Mithraism. Really now! Much diligent homework needs to be done on dating the documents from which evidence of such borrowing is drawn. There is a major dating problem for alleged influences of Mithraism on Christianity. Mithraism expanded into the West quite late. Historian EdwinYamauchi advises.
The only dated Mithraic inscriptions from the pre-Christian period are the texts of Antiochus I of Commagene (69-34 B.C.) in eastern Asia Minor. After that there is one text possibly from the first century A.D. from Cappadocia, one from Phrygia dated to A.D. 77-78, and one from Rome dated to Trajan's reign (A.D. 98-117). All other dated Mithraic inscriptions and monuments belong to the second century (after A.D. 140), the third, and the fourth century A.D.
PAPYROLOGICAL EVIDENCE
The burden of the book by Thiede and Ancona is the carefully argued thesis that the three small scraps of papyrus housed at Oxford University and called the Magdalen Papyrus, bearing the Greek text of sections of Matthew 26 provide papyrological evidence that Matthew "was written not long after the Crucifixion [c. AD 30/33] and certainly before the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70"
An ancillary argument in this book is that among the scrolls in cave seven of the Dead Sea Scrolls is a document, 7Q5, containing Mark 6.52-53. This document (7Q5) could not have been deposited at Qumran later than AD 68 because " [t]his was the year when the settlement, the khirbet of Qumran, and the nearby area of the caves were overrun by the Tenth Roman Legion 'Fretensis'." (30)
To be continued.
Rev. Clinton Chisholm now resides in Hollywood, Florida and can be contacted at clintchis@hotmail.com.
