Category: _Research

Luke, like Matthew and Mark, contains an extensive discourse about the destruction of the Jewish temple. You can read his version in Luke 21:5-36. The parallels are Matthew 24 and Mark 13.

Now here is the way Luke’s Gospel ends:

50 Then he [Jesus] led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. 51 While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven.

52 And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, 53 and were continually in the temple blessing God [Luke 24:50-53].

While it’s true, historically, that the disciples continued to worship in the temple for some time, Luke didn’t have to end his Gospel with a mention of the temple (the other Evangelists didn’t)–and it’s such a positive mention in view of Jesus’ prophecy of its destruction just a few chapters earlier.

If that prophecy had already been fulfilled when Luke wrote his Gospel, it would be a little odd for Luke to end with the image of the disciples happily worshipping in the temple.

After the temple was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, it was forcefully impressed on Christian consciousness that the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus spelt the end of the temple and its system of worship. That didn’t really sink in until the temple was destroyed, as Acts records the disciples (including Paul) continuing to worship in the temple for decades (until the mid-A.D. 50s, when Paul gets arrested and the story shifts away from Jerusalem for the last time).

Luke’s ending seems more like the way the temple and its services would be portrayed before it was destroyed–when Christians still frequented it and regarded it as the House of God.

This is not a decisive argument for when Luke was written, but it is “a straw in the wind” that points to it being composed before A.D. 70.

Fortunately, we have other, stronger reasons to suppose that. (It was most likely written around A.D. 59, since Acts stops suddenly in A.D. 60.)

There are places in the Gospel of Mark where he “gets ahead of himself,” telling us one part of the story and then going back to fill in what we need to understand it.

And example is when he exorcizes the Gerasene demoniac. He writes:

 6 And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshiped him; 7 and crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.”

8 For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” [Mark 5:6-9]

Notice how verse 8 provides the explanation for the material before it. Jesus had already begun to perform the exorcism when the demon cried out.

This is a characteristic of Mark’s style, which is a little breathless. He’s so excited to tell the story that he gets a little ahead and sometimes needs to fill the audience in on the back story. (He also uses the word “immediately” constantly, as well as joining many clauses with “and,” and describes past events in the present tense–all of which create a driving sense of forward momentum in the plot.)

Sometime I should try to catalog all of the places where Mark does this.