Category: Bible History

It’s more challenging to figure of the date of Matthew’s Gospel than either Mark or Luke, but we’re finally within striking distance of doing so.

In previous posts, we’ve seen that Matthew was written after Mark, which means after about A.D. 55.

We’ve also seen that it was written before A.D. 70.

That gives us a range of about 15 years, but can we narrow it down further?

Let’s look at the evidence . . .

Matthew and Luke

We have a good date for the Gospel of Luke, which was written around A.D. 59, so if we can establish Matthew’s relationship to Luke, we could get a more precise date for his Gospel.

We thus need to consider some theories about how the two Gospels are related:

1. Matthew and Luke were written independently of each other
2. Luke used Matthew in composing his Gospel, so Matthew came first
3. Matthew used Luke, so Luke came first

The Independence Hypothesis

This is the most common view among scholars today. According to it, Matthew and Luke wrote their Gospels independently, seemingly without displaying any knowledge of each other’s work.

According to this hypothesis, both used Mark’s Gospel, but there also are over two hundred verses that they also share in common, and if they were truly independent of each other, they needed to get this material from some common source.

Scholars have given this source the name “Q,” from the German word Quelle, which just means “source.”

For this view to work, Matthew and Luke would have had to be written at about the same time.

Otherwise, whichever was written first would have had enough time to spread in the Christian community for the other to have read it, and we would expect to see it reflected in some way in the other Gospel.

I estimate that would have taken no more than five years, so let’s assume that if this view is true then Matthew would have been written within about five years of Luke.

That would put it between roughly A.D. 55 and 65.

This is consistent with our previous finding that it was likely written between 55 and 70, but is there a way we can test this hypothesis?

Testing the Independence Hypothesis

For the Independence Hypothesis to work, the hypothetical Q source needs to have existed.

The two strongest arguments for the existence of Q are the fact that Matthew and Luke diverge significantly at the beginnings and the ends of their Gospels. That is, Matthew and Luke read very differently in their accounts of Jesus’ birth and childhood (the “Infancy Narratives”) and in their accounts of his resurrection (the “Resurrection Narratives”).

To put the matter concisely: If one knew of the other’s Gospel, why are their Infancy and Resurrection Narratives so different?

I’ve looked at this matter before, and I’ve concluded that there actually are good reasons both for why their Infancy Narratives read differently and why their Resurrection Narratives read differently.

I thus don’t think the key arguments for Q are persuasive. In addition, there are significant arguments against Q:

1. Q is an entirely hypothetical source. We don’t have independent evidence for its existence, and thus we should only propose it if we have other, solid grounds for thinking neither Matthew nor Luke knew the other.
2. Q is billed by the scholars who advocate it as a “sayings source” that preserves the sayings of Jesus, but this does not reflect the facts (see also here).
3. If Q were a distinct source from Mark, we wouldn’t expect to see Matthew and Luke blending the two, and blending them in the same way, but we do. These places are known as “Mark-Q overlap” passages.
4. If Matthew and Luke used Mark independently of each other, we would expect to see them making minor modifications in the way Mark phrases things, but we wouldn’t expect to see them modifying Mark in exactly the same way. Yet we do. There are numerous instances where Matthew and Luke phrase things in a way that differs from Mark. These are known as the “minor agreements” against Mark.

The problems with the Q Hypothesis are more fully explored by the British scholar Mark Goodacre and his colleagues in the books Questioning Q and The Case Against Q.

If Luke Used Matthew

The idea that Luke used Matthew’s Gospel when writing his own is known as the Farrer Hypothesis.

It assumes that both Matthew and Luke used Mark’s Gospel, but it does away with the need for Q because Luke simply took the two-hundred-plus verses that he shares with Matthew directly from the latter’s Gospel.

This does away with the problems of Q’s hypothetical nature, its role as a “sayings source,” the Mark-Q overlaps, and the “minor agreements.”

Presently, the most forceful exponent of the Farrer Hypothesis is Marc Goodacre, who explores it (among other places) in his book The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze.

Based on the dates we have proposed, the Farrer Hypothesis would place the composition of Matthew’s Gospel in a very small window: between the composition of Mark, around A.D. 55, and Luke, in A.D. 59.

On this view, we could place Matthew confidently around A.D. 57.

But there’s another possibility we need to consider . . .

If Matthew Used Luke

The idea that Matthew used Luke’s Gospel when writing his own is known as the Wilke Hypothesis.

It also does away with the problems associated with the Q Hypothesis.

The Wilke Hypothesis has, rather inexplicably, been long neglected by scholars, but is presently receiving some much needed attention, and several books have appeared on the subject, such as Robert MacEwen’s overview Matthean Posteriority. Alan Garrow also has a helpful series of videos on the subject.

Based on the dates we have proposed, the Wilke Hypothesis would place the composition of Matthew’s Gospel in the A.D. 60s, between the publication of Luke in 59 and the destruction of the temple in 70.

So we need to ask a question . . .

Which Came First?

The issue of whether Matthew or Luke was written first—like the Synoptic Problem in general—can get very technical, very quickly, and we don’t have space to descend into the details here.

I will therefore look only at a few top level considerations.

The best argument for the idea that Matthew wrote first appears to be the argument from “editorial fatigue.” This is the idea that, in copying Matthew, Luke introduced certain changes but then unconsciously began to slip back into Matthew’s way of describing things, thus showing that Matthew was his source.

Goodacre explores this idea here.

I have evaluated the argument here, and ultimately I do not find it convincing.

By contrast, the basic argument I would make for the idea that Luke wrote first is that Matthew simply appears to be a more developed literary work.

This occurs on multiple levels, from the organization of Jesus’s sayings into Matthew’s five great discourses, to tiny tweaks, such as when Luke’s unqualified “Blessed are you poor” (Luke 6:20) becomes Matthew’s “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3) to bring out the significance of spiritual rather than merely material poverty.

Particularly striking is the fact that sayings of Jesus that are scattered all over the place in Luke are organized into obvious, topical blocks in Matthew.

This is easy to explain if Matthew wrote later: He was simply an organizer, and so he organized the sayings he found in Luke.

However, the reverse is harder to explain: If Luke used Matthew then he would have had to smash Matthew’s beautifully organized blocks and scatter the material around in a far less obviously organized way.

Defenders of the Farrer Hypothesis argue that Luke had reasons for doing this, but, if so, they are not obvious, whereas Matthew’s organizational scheme is clear.

At least on the level of appearances, it is hard to avoid Reginald Fuller’s rather brusque assessment that, if the Farrer Hypothesis were true, Luke would present us with “a case of unscrambling the egg with a vengeance!” (The New Testament in Current Study, 1963).

B. H. Streeter put the matter even more brusquely when he argued that the way Luke would have to treat the material he drew from Matthew, in comparison with what he drew from Mark, by saying that “a theory which would make an author capable of such a proceeding would only be tenable if, on other grounds, we had reason to believe he was a crank” (The Four Gospels, 183).

Streeter is too harsh, but given the problems with the Q Hypothesis and the fact that it’s easier to explain Matthew’s use of Luke rather than the reverse, I come to the tentative conclusion that Luke wrote before Matthew.

This would put the writing of Matthew in the decade between the publication of Luke and the destruction of the temple, say around A.D. 65.

External Evidence?

It’s always good to support deductions from evidence internal to the Gospels with evidence external to them, and it happens that in this case there is a piece of confirmatory, external evidence. Writing around 189, St. Irenaeus of Lyons states:

Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter (Against Heresies 3:1).

Note that Irenaeus states Matthew wrote his Gospel “while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome.” That would place its composition between Paul’s arrival in Rome, which I have dated to A.D. 58, and their martyrdoms, which occurred in the mid 60s (likely 65 or 66 in the case of Peter and 67 in the case of Paul).

Irenaeus thus confirms the general date I have proposed for Matthew.

However, we must not place too much weight on this fact, for Irenaeus appears to imply that Mark was written after Peter and Paul’s deaths, and thus after Matthew, which would not be correct. Also, he states that Matthew wrote among the Hebrews “in their own dialect” (Greek, tê idia dialektô), which could merely mean that he wrote in a Jewish style—which would be true—but which more naturally would mean that he wrote in the Aramaic language, which appears not to have been the case.

Despite these difficulties, it is possible that Irenaeus, writing about 125 years later, preserves an authentic memory of when Matthew’s Gospel was written.

Conclusion

Regardless of what one thinks of Irenaeus, we have the following approximate dates for the Synoptic Gospels:

• Mark: around 55
• Luke: around 59
• Matthew: around 65

But what about John? That’s what we’ll turn to next.

Recently we’ve been looking at the question of when the Gospel of Matthew was composed.

In our first post, we argued that Matthew was written sometime between A.D. 55 and 100, and since then we’ve been trying to narrow down the range.

A key event falling in the middle of this period was the conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of its temple in A.D. 70.

In our previous post, we looked at arguments that Matthew was written after this traumatic event and found that they lack force.

But do we have reasons to think that the Gospel was written before 70?

Let’s look at the evidence . . .

Authorship by the Apostle?

The external evidence found in the writings of the Church Fathers is strongly in favor of the Apostle Matthew as the author of the Gospel attributed to him.

Some have argued that it would be unlikely for Matthew to have written after A.D. 70, meaning it had an earlier date than this.

I’ve studied the likely ages of the apostles, and it can be reasonably estimated that Matthew was born sometime around A.D. 4. He thus would have been in his 60s when Jerusalem was destroyed, and that’s by no means an unreasonable age for an author in the ancient world.

While it’s true that the ancients had shorter lifespans than ours, this is primarily due to the high infant mortality rate. Anyone who survived to adulthood—like Matthew—would have a lifespan almost equal to our own. Thus Raymond Brown, SJ, comments:

Most who think that the apostle Matthew himself wrote the Gospel tend toward a pre-70 dating (although obviously the apostle could have lived till later in the century) (An Introduction to the New Testament, 216).

Similarly, D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo observe:

If the apostle Matthew is judged, on balance, to be the evangelist, a date before A.D. 70 is more plausible (though certainly not necessary—there is excellent evidence that the apostle John was active for at least two decades after 70) (An Introduction to the New Testament, 2^nd ed, 155).

The argument thus has some weight, but it is far from decisive.

Passages Presupposing the Temple?

Matthew contains a number of passages that envision the temple as still functioning:

If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift (Matt. 5:23-24).

Have you not read in the law how on the sabbath the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are guiltless? (Matt. 12:5).

He who swears by the altar, swears by it and by everything on it; and he who swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who dwells in it (Matt. 23:20-21).

It could be argued that Matthew is simply quoting things Jesus said during his ministry and that this has no further significance, but that is open to challenge.

We need to ask the question: Why did Matthew choose to record these things, of all the Jesus traditions he had at his disposal? Surely, he thought they were relevant to his audience, and they would be more relevant if the temple were still standing.

The first and the last, especially, would be more relevant to his audience of Jewish Christians if the temple were standing, because otherwise they could not go to Jerusalem and offer a gift at the altar—nor would they be tempted to swear by an altar or a temple that had been demolished as a result of God’s judgment.

These passages thus add weight to the case for a pre-70 date.

The Temple Tax

A passage deserving special note is the one dealing with the temple tax:

When they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the half-shekel tax went up to Peter and said, “Does not your teacher pay the tax?”

 He said, “Yes.” And when he came home, Jesus spoke to him first, saying, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tribute? From their sons or from others?”

And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel; take that and give it to them for me and for yourself” (Matt. 17:24-27).

Jesus thus implies that he and Peter do not need to pay the temple tax but should do so anyway to avoid giving offense.

The reason this is significant for our purposes is not just that Jewish Christians wouldn’t need to pay the temple tax once the structure was in ruins, it is that the Romans repurposed the tax so that it supported the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest—i.e., the Capitoline Temple in Rome! The Jewish historian Josephus reports:

He [Domitian] also laid a tribute upon the Jews wheresoever they were and enjoined every one of them to bring two drachmae every year into the Capitol, as they used to pay the same to the temple at Jerusalem (Jewish War 7:6:6[218]).

Similarly, the Roman historian Cassius Dio states:

From that time forth it was ordered that the Jews who continued to observe their ancestral customs should pay an annual tribute of two denarii to Jupiter Capitolinus (Roman History 65:7:2).

Some Jews tried to avoid paying this tax (which amounted to just two days’ wages), even by the expedient of posing as Gentiles. Yet payment was rigorously enforced, at times in humiliating ways. The Roman historian Suetonius reports:

Besides other taxes, that on the Jews was levied with the utmost rigor, and those were prosecuted who without publicly acknowledging that faith yet lived as Jews, as well as those who concealed their origin and did not pay the tribute levied upon their people. I recall being present in my youth when the person of a man ninety years old was examined before the procurator and a very crowded court, to see whether he was circumcised (The Twelve Caesars “Domitian” 12:2).

Diverting tax money that originally supported the temple in Jerusalem to support the key temple in Rome was an enormous insult to Jewish sensibilities, and the fact they were forced to pay it was a profound humiliation.

For Matthew—if he was writing after A.D. 70—to portray Jesus as condoning the payment of this tax would have risked confusing, alienating, or outraging members of his audience. Jesus could even be understood as financially supporting idolatry so as “not to give offense”!

The inclusion of the passage in his Gospel is far more understandable if Matthew were writing before 70, when Jewish Christians still needed to wrestle with the question of whether to support the temple whose officials had rejected and crucified Jesus and whose destruction he had prophesied. Carson and Moo state:

Even if for other reasons Matthew had wanted to preserve this pericope, it is hard to see how, if he was writing after 70, he could have permitted such an implication without comment (p. 156).

An Exhortation to Pray

Matthew 24 contains a major prophetic discourse dealing with the events leading up to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple.

During the course of the discourse, Jesus says that when the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel appears “standing in the holy place” that those in Judea are to “flee to the mountains” (Matt. 24:15-16). He warns them to flee immediately, not going back for anything, and then he says:

Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a sabbath (Matt. 24:20).

It is well known that the Christian community in Jerusalem did flee the Jewish War, taking up residence in the Jordanian settlement of Pella (Eusebius, Church History 3:5:3).

Like all ancient authors, Matthew was conscious of the need to save space in his book so that it would fit on a single scroll, and he regularly drops words and phrases from Mark for just this reason.

So why would he preserve this exhortation to Judean Christians to pray that their flight not take place in winter or on a sabbath (when travel would be difficult) if the flight had already occurred and the need to pray no longer existed?

No Fulfillment Notice

Another, even weightier aspect of Matthew 24 is the fact that it’s Jesus’ major prophetic discourse in the Gospel, and it’s focused on the destruction of the temple, which Jesus predicts at the very beginning of the chapter (Matt. 24:1-2).

Despite the fact this is Jesus’ longest prophecy, and thus of great importance to Matthew, he nowhere records that it has been fulfilled.

This requires explanation. The Evangelists regularly report it when Jesus made a prophecy that was later fulfilled, as it shows his credentials as a true prophet.

Thus when they record Jesus predicting his arrest, death, and resurrection, the Evangelists correspondingly report these prophecies being fulfilled.

Matthew, of all the Evangelists, is especially noted for including prophetic fulfillment notices in his Gospel (Matt. 1:23, 2:6, 17, 23, 3:3, 4:14-16, 13:14).

Similarly, Matthew breaks the flow of his narrative to report on conditions in his own day (Matt. 27:8, 28:15).

In view of these factors, we would expect Matthew in particular, of all the Evangelists, to comment on the fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecy concerning the temple. As the German scholar Theodor Zahn commented:

If “to this day” (27:8, 28:15) were after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, we would expect that an author who values so highly as does Matthew proof based upon the occurrence of prophecy and its fulfilment for the justification of Christ over against Judaism, would indicate somewhere and in some manner that the prophecy of Jesus had been fulfilled in this judgment (Introduction to the New Testament, 571).

Yet he does not do so. This puts the destruction of the temple in the same category as other yet-to-be-fulfilled prophecies, such as the Second Coming.

Particularly in light of the space Matthew devotes to the prophecy, the fact he does not give us a fulfillment notice strongly argues for a pre-70 date.

No Disentanglement

Even more striking, Matthew makes no attempt to disentangle the Second Coming from the events leading up to the temple.

Each of the Synoptic Gospels speaks of there being a “coming” of Jesus in the discourse about the temple’s destruction (Matt. 24:30, Mark 13:26, Luke 21:27).

In my view, this was not the Second Coming but a coming in judgment, as when the Old Testament describes God “riding the clouds” when he comes in judgment on a people (Ps. 104:3; Isa. 19:1-2; Jer. 4:13-14).

However, to the first Christians (and many since), it would have been easily confused with the Second Coming of Christ.

We would thus expect the Evangelists—if they were writing after 70—either to drop the references to this coming from the discourse or to somehow clarify for the audience that it wasn’t the Second Coming.

To fail to do this could scandalize the audience by making it look like Jesus predicted the Second Coming at a time when it failed to occur.

Yet they do not do so. Contemporary scholar Donald Hagner comments:

Matthew’s redaction of the Markan eschatological discourse makes no attempt to disentangle the references to the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the age (chap. 24). Luke very deliberately does so in his redaction of Mark 13, and we might expect Matthew to do the same had it been written after 70. Indeed, the evangelist aggravates the problem considerably by his insertion of eutheôs, “immediately,” in 24:29, which leaves the clear impression that he expected the parousia of the Son of Man to occur in close succession to the fall of Jerusalem (Word Biblical Commentary, Matthew 1-13, vol. 33A, lxxiv).

The fact that the Synoptic Evangelists neither drop the “coming” language nor clarify that it doesn’t refer to the Second Coming strongly implies that they—Matthew included—were writing before the destruction of the temple.

That would indicate that Matthew’s Gospel was written sometime between Mark—around A.D. 55—and the destruction of the temple in 70.

But can we be more specific? That’s what we’ll look at in our next and final post on Matthew’s date.

Many scholars hold that the Gospel of Matthew was written after the traumatic events of A.D. 70, when the Jewish War came to its climax and the Jerusalem temple was destroyed.

In a previous post, we argued that Matthew was written sometime between A.D. 55 and 100, but what are we to make of the arguments that it was composed after 70?

Let’s look at the evidence . . .

Presupposing the Destruction of the Temple?

Some have argued that Matthew was written after 70 because it depicts Jesus predicting the destruction of the temple (Matt. 24:1-2).

However, this is not a good argument, for it presupposes that Jesus could not have predicted such an event.

Indeed, one doesn’t even have to suppose that Jesus was a genuine prophet, just that he was a shrewd observer of “the signs of the times” (Matt. 16:3) and could deduce the likely outcome of Jewish anti-Roman passions and the war that they would produce.

The temple had already been destroyed once, and the fear it might happen again was real.

Jesus wasn’t even the only person to predict its destruction in advance. (More here.)

The weakness of the argument in this form is acknowledged by many scholars, and so a refinement has been proposed that argues Matthew’s Gospel contains passages which presuppose that the event has already happened. Raymond Brown, SJ, writes:

For instance, the omission in Matt. 21:13 of the description of the Jerusalem Temple as serving “for all the nations” (Mark 11:17) and the reference in Matt. 22:7 to the king burning the city may reflect the destruction at Jerusalem by the Roman armies in A.D. 70.

These arguments are both quite weak. Note that Brown only says the passages “may reflect” the events of 70.

“For All the Nations”

The first passage reads:

He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you make it a den of robbers” (Matt. 21:13).

It’s true that Mark adds “for all the nations” after “a house of prayer,” but one can’t argue that Matthew deleted this out of animus for Gentiles after the Romans destroyed the temple.

As we’ve seen, Matthew is far from being hostile to Gentiles, and the theme of their evangelization and salvation is a prominent one in his Gospel.

If we want an explanation for why he would delete this phrase, we need look no further than the fact Matthew incorporates 90% of the material in Mark and thus needs to shorten it so that he can fit in all of the additional material he wants to include in his Gospel.

Matthew thus regularly drops words and phrases from what he takes from Mark.

“And Burned Their City”

The second passage Brown cites occurs at the end of the parable of the wedding banquet, where we read this about the king who is snubbed:

The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city (Matt. 22:7).

This also proves nothing. As D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo observe:

The language of Matthew 22:7, including the reference to the burning of the city, is the standard language of both the Old Testament and the Roman world describing punitive military expeditions against rebellious cities. Granted that Jesus foresaw the destruction of Jerusalem (as did many prophets before him), the language he used does not in any detail depend on specific knowledge as to how things actually turned out in A.D. 70. In fact, [John A.T.] Robinson goes so far as to argue that the synoptic prophecies about the fall of Jerusalem, including Matthew 22:7, are so restrained that they must have been written before 70 (An Introduction to the New Testament, 2^nd ed., 153).

The last argument is that the prophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem are so general and in keeping with ordinary Roman practice that they don’t betray a knowledge of the details of what happened in 70, and so they were written before that event. Robinson was a liberal English scholar, and liberal German scholar Adolf von Harnack concurred, stating:

Chap. 22:7 and many other passages are rather in favor of composition before the catastrophe (The Date of the Acts and the Synoptic Gospels, 134, n. 2).

Fundamentally, if Jesus could foresee—supernaturally or otherwise—the conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of its temple, he could similarly foresee the burning of the city.

The Church

Matthew’s Gospel is unique in that it refers to his “church.” In Matthew 16:18, he says “I will build my church,” and in 18:17 he says “tell it to the church.”

It is argued that this reflects a developed understanding of the Church, but this hardly requires a date after A.D. 70.

St. Paul uses the Greek word for church—ekklesia—61 times in his epistles, all of which were written before A.D. 70.

St. Luke uses it a further 23 times in Acts, which was also written before A.D. 70 (specifically, in A.D. 60, as we discussed before).

The word “church” for the community of Jesus’ followers thus was well established long before the events of 70.

Separation from the Synagogue?

Sometimes it is argued that Matthew displays knowledge of the final separation of church and synagogue in passages like these:

Beware of men; for they will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues (Matt. 10:17).

Therefore, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town (Matt. 23:34).

The final separation of church and synagogue is then argued to have taken place around A.D. 85, when the Birkath ha-Minim (Hebrew, “blessing concerning the heretics”) is said to have been introduced into Jewish prayer and thus prevented Jewish Christians from participation in Jewish worship, since it was directed against them.

However, there are multiple problems with this argument.

First, the history and interpretation of the Birkath ha-Minim is highly debatable, making it too uncertain to use as a marker for dating.

Second, the alleged introduction of it around 85—if that even is when it was introduced—is a dividing line of convenience. The separation of church and synagogue was a lengthy process that cannot be assigned to a single date.

Third, the verses in question do not speak of Jewish Christians being excluded from the synagogue by the introduction of a prayer. They speak of them being beaten in synagogues.

Fourth, the verses actually speak of a time before the separation was complete. They envision a time when Jewish Christians were still attending the synagogue and thus could be subject to beatings there.

Fifth, the persecution of Christians attending synagogues, including beatings, is precisely what we see in the book of Acts (9:2, 20-23, 13:43-50, 14:1-6, 17:1-5, 10-13, 18:17, 22:19, 26:11), and the events it records took place between A.D. 33 and 60.

Sixth, this objection presupposes that Jesus could not have—supernaturally or otherwise—foreseen the consequences of the spread of the Christian message for his followers (despite the fact he foresaw his own death and undertook actions he knew would provoke the Jewish authorities).

“To This Day”

Matthew 27:8 refers to the fact that the field where Judas died has been called the field of blood “to this day,” and Matthew 28:15 reports that the idea the disciples stole Jesus’ body has been circulating among non-Christian Jews “to this day.”

Concerning such passages, Raymond Brown argues:

Two passages (27:8; 28:15) describe items in the Matthean passion narrative that are remembered “to this day,” using an OT phrase to explain place names from long ago (Gen. 26:33; 2 Sam. 6:8). Such a description would be very inappropriate if Matt was written only two or three decades after A.D. 30/33 (An Introduction to the New Testament, 216).

This is very weak. The phrase “to this day” may be used in the Old Testament to refer to things that started in the distant past, but this is far from a required condition.

Despite Brown’s reference to “two or three decades,” in context he is using this as an argument against Matthew having a pre-A.D. 70 date. The difference between A.D. 30 and 70 is four decades, and Brown himself places Matthew’s composition in “80-90, give or take a decade” (p. 172).

So . . . “two or three decades” would be a “very inappropriate” period to warrant the use of the phrase “to this day” but four or five would make it appropriate?

That’s hardly plausible. All that the phrase indicates is that some period of time which the author deems significant has passed, and a distance of 30 years—quite long in the lifetime of an ancient person—would be quite sufficient.

Conclusion

We haven’t found any good arguments for Matthew being written after A.D. 70.

Are there good arguments for it being written before 70?

That’s what we’ll turn to next . . .

The date of the Gospel of Matthew is commonly estimated by scholars to be in the late first century.

Raymond Brown, SJ, who places it “80-90, give or take a decade” (An Introduction to the New Testament, 172), states:

The majority view dates Matt to the period 70–100; but some significant conservative scholars argue for a pre-70 dating (p. 216).

Let’s look at what the evidence suggests . . .

Latest Possible Date

Scholars refer to the latest possible date that a document could have been written as its terminus ante quem (Latin, “limit before which”), and today scholars are agreed that Matthew was written before the beginning of the new century.

We will not review the evidence for this in detail, but it is generally held that St. Ignatius of Antioch, who wrote around A.D. 108, displays awareness of Matthew’s Gospel.

For example, he says that Jesus was “baptized by John in order that all righteousness might be fulfilled by him” (Ig.Smyr. 1:1). This specific motive for Jesus’ baptism is found in Matthew 3:15 and nowhere else in the New Testament.

Similarly, Ignatius warns against false brethren who “are not the Father’s planting” (Ig.Phil. 3:1). This appears to echo Matthew 15:13, where Jesus warns against “Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted”—a statement found only in his Gospel.

It is, of course, unlikely that Matthew would have been written and then immediately be referred to by Ignatius, making it likely that the Gospel would have been at least several years earlier, putting its composition sometime in the first century. (For additional factors pointing in this direction, see Brown, 216).

Earliest Possible Date

Scholars refer to the earliest possible date that a document could have been written as its terminus post quem (“limit after which”).

Since Matthew describes the death and resurrection of Jesus, this would put its composition after the events of A.D. 30 or 33, but we can show it was later than that.

Gentile Interest

Matthew is famous for being the most Jewish of the canonical Gospels, and it appears to have been written for an audience of Jewish Christians.

However, it displays a keen awareness of the mission to the Gentiles and the role they have in God’s plan. This awareness becomes apparent in its opening verses, when Matthew breaks the normal practice of biblical genealogies and includes Gentile women in Jesus’ genealogy (Matt. 1:3, 5, and possibly 6).

Interest in Gentiles is continued in the next chapter, when Matthew records the visit of the magi to honor the newborn king (Matt. 2:1-12).

We will not recount every passage in which Matthew displays interest in Gentiles and their role in God’s plan, but a number of passages are striking, as when Jesus declares:

Not even in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness (Matt. 8:10-12).

I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it (Matt. 21:43).

And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations (Matt. 24:14).

The theme of Gentile mission comes to a climax at the very end of the Gospel, in the Great Commission, where Jesus declares:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19).

The full significance of the last passage is often lost in translation, because English speakers are generally unaware that the word used for nations—ethnê—is the same word translated “Gentiles” in other contexts.

It is difficult not to conclude that—from the beginning of his Gospel to its end—Matthew is carefully building a case for his Jewish audience that it is appropriate to evangelize Gentiles and include them in the Christian community.

This case needed to be laid because this issue was controversial in first century Jewish Christian circles, and many held that Gentiles needed to be circumcised and become Jews to be saved as Christians (see Acts 10-11, 15, Galatians 1-2).

The controversy started when the Gospel began to be preached to Gentiles at Antioch (Acts 11:19-21), and it accelerated following the Gentile conversions that occurred during Paul’s First Missionary Journey (Acts 13-14), leading to the council in Acts 15.

Despite the council, the controversy continued for some years, as Paul continues to address it in Galatians, Romans, and Ephesians.

The council of Jerusalem took place in A.D. 49, so it would not have been appropriate for Matthew to quote from it in a biography of Jesus, but it appears that he did reach back into Jesus’ life and ministry for the facts needed to address the controversy.

That Matthew would feel the need to address the controversy—and to have so carefully built his case and made it so integral to the structure of his Gospel—suggests that he was writing after A.D. 49.

After Mark

For many centuries, it was commonly held that Matthew was the first Gospel to be written and that Mark then abbreviated it. This proposal, which was entertained by St. Augustine, is thus known as the Augustinian Hypothesis.

However, this view has fallen out of favor in recent centuries.

Although I’ve been sympathetic to the idea that Matthew wrote first, a detailed study of the evidence convinced me that the reverse was true, and that Matthew not only wrote after Mark, he used Mark as one of his principal sources.

This would place the composition of Matthew’s Gospel after that of Mark’s—and we can reasonably date that to the A.D. 50s. Two lines of evidence support this:

• Luke also used Mark as one of his sources, and Luke appears to have been written around A.D. 59, just before he composed the book of Acts, whose narrative cuts off suddenly in A.D. 60, when Paul is awaiting his first trial in Rome.
• Various factors indicate that Mark based his Gospel on the reminiscences of Peter, whose traveling companion he had become. However, Mark did not become Peter’s companion until after his partnership with Paul was severed following the Jerusalem Council of A.D. 49 (see Acts 15:36-39). Therefore, Mark became Peter’s companion sometime in the 50s.

For Mark to have time to write his Gospel, and for it to have come into Luke’s possession, it is thus likely that Mark wrote sometime in the mid-50s, say A.D. 55.

We can thus infer that Matthew wrote sometime between about 55 and 100.

But we can narrow this down further, as we will see next time.

The Gospel of Mark is widely regarded by scholars today as the first of the Gospels to be penned. But when, specifically, did that happen?

Let’s take a look at the evidence . . .

Was Mark First?

For many centuries, it was commonly held that Matthew was the first of the Gospels to be written, and that Mark then abridged Matthew to make it shorter. This view is known as the Augustinian Hypothesis, since St. Augustine proposed it.

As the author of a book on the Church Fathers, I take the views expressed in early centuries seriously.

However, after a careful study of the issue, I was forced to conclude that the Augustinian Hypothesis is incorrect, that Mark wrote first and then Matthew expanded it.

I explain the reasons for this here.

Mark’s Relationship to Luke

It is widely recognized that Luke—like Matthew—used Mark as one of his sources.

Luke even refers to prior written sources in his prologue, telling his patron Theophilus that “many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us” (Luke 1:1).

The fact that Mark was one of those narratives is confirmed by the fact that Luke uses about 55% of the material in Mark (B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels, 160).

This means that we can place the composition of Mark sometime before that of Luke.

In our previous post we saw that there are good reasons to hold that Luke was written around A.D. 59, which would then be the latest possible date for Mark.

However, it is probable that it was written some time before that.

How much before?

Mark’s Life Story

We first meet Mark in Acts 12:12, when Peter visits the house of his mother in Jerusalem.

In Acts 12:25, Barnabas and Paul take Mark with them when they return from Jerusalem to their home base in Antioch.

In the next chapter, the Holy Spirit calls Barnabas and Paul to embark on the First Missionary Journey (Acts 13:2), and they take Mark with them.

However, we later learn (Acts 15:38) that Mark had turned back early in the journey, when they reached Pamphylia on the southern coast of modern Turkey.

Thus when Paul and Barnabas were preparing to set out on the Second Missionary Journey, a dispute arose between them:

Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark. But Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia, and had not gone with them to the work. And there arose a sharp contention, so that they separated from each other; Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus (Acts 15:37-39).

A factor in this dispute was likely that Mark was Barnabas’s cousin (Col. 4:10).

Paul and Barnabas thus dissolved their longstanding partnership over the dispute concerning Mark, and Barnabas took him on an otherwise unrecorded journey to Barnabas’s native island of Cyprus (Acts 4:36).

We know from the New Testament that Mark later formed a close bond with Peter, who refers to him as his spiritual son and who was with him during his ministry in Rome (1 Pet. 5:13).

We also learn that Paul eventually reconciled with Mark (2 Tim. 4:11).

Putting Dates to Events

The part of Mark’s life story that is important for our purposes is the period he spent with Peter.

We do not know when this began, but the journey that Mark took with Barnabas would have occurred in A.D. 49, and it would have taken some time. Mark thus likely became a companion of Peter in the 50s.

This is significant because the first century source John the Presbyter reveals that Mark based his Gospel on Peter’s reminiscences. The Presbyter is reported to have said:

Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and not to state any of them falsely (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:15).

If we know that Mark didn’t become Peter’s traveling companion until the 50s, and if he had to have written before Luke was published in 59, then this means Mark must have written his Gospel sometime in that decade.

Although Mark likely heard Peter preach in Jerusalem, John the Presbyter ties the composition of his Gospel to the period when he was serving as Peter’s assistant. We should thus understand it to be based on not Mark’s memories of Peter’s preaching from years earlier, but on what he heard during their period of mutual ministry.

We should thus allow some time (1) for Mark to absorb (or re-absorb) Peter’s preaching and (2) some time for Mark’s Gospel to come into Luke’s hands and be absorbed by him.

We can therefore estimate that Mark’s Gospel was written sometime in the mid 50s, say around A.D. 55.

It might even be slightly earlier than this if Mark is the mysterious “brother whose praise is in the gospel” that Paul refers to in 2 Corinthians 8:18, since 2 Corinthians was written around A.D. 54-55.

In any event, we have good reason to place the dating of Luke in 59 and Mark a few years earlier than that, in the 50s.

What about Matthew? That’s the subject we will turn to next.

When were the four Gospels written?

Ultimately, from a faith perspective, the precise dates do not matter. What matters is that they are divinely inspired and thus authoritative for faith.

However, by showing that the Gospels were written in the first century, within a few decades of Jesus’ life, we strengthen their credibility even from a secular perspective.

Today virtually all scholars—whether skeptical or believing—acknowledge that the Gospels are first century documents.

The real question is how early in the first century they were written.

That’s what we’ll examine in this series.

The Importance of Acts

More than a century ago, the liberal German scholar Adolf von Harnack published a work titled The Date of the Acts and the Synoptic Gospels in which he considered this question.

As the title suggests, he considered the date of Acts first, the reason being that it’s easier to establish this date and then determine the dates of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) with respect to it.

Acts is important because it’s the sequel to the Gospel of Luke (Acts 1:1-2), so the date of Acts determines the latest possible date for Luke.

So . . . when was Acts written?

Its Sudden Ending

The first twelve chapters of Acts are concerned principally with St. Peter, and from chapter 13 onward, St. Paul becomes the focus of the narrative.

Beginning in chapter 21, Paul makes a fateful trip to Jerusalem, being prophetically warned along the way that if he goes there, he will be arrested. This indeed happens, and the rest of the book is taken up with the consequences of this event.

Paul spends years in custody, and in chapter 25 a turning point occurs when the new Roman governor, Porcius Festus, arrives. To avoid having the outcome of his trial affected by the hostile Jewish authorities, Paul invokes his Roman citizenship and the right to have his case tried before Caesar (the Caesar in question being Nero at this time). Festus then replies:

You have appealed to Caesar; to Caesar you shall go (Acts 25:12).

The rest of the book is taken up with the events leading up to Paul’s voyage to Rome and what happened on that trip. Acts ends in chapter 28 with Paul under house arrest in Rome, awaiting his trial. Luke simply says:

And he lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered (Acts 28:30-31).

That’s it! We get no resolution on what happened when Paul appeared before Nero.

The Significance of the Ending

Many scholars have pointed out that the book’s abrupt ending is highly significant for when it was written.

It makes no sense, if Luke knew the outcome of the trial, for him to cut off the narrative at this point. He has been building toward this climactic event for eight chapters, and yet he doesn’t tell us what happened!

This is all the more striking, because whatever happened to Paul would have suited Luke’s purposes:

• If Paul was acquitted at this trial then Luke could portray Paul and the gospel as gloriously vindicated.
• If Paul was imprisoned or martyred then Luke could portray Paul as gloriously and heroically suffering for the gospel, as he has done so often in the book.

We learn from later sources that the first is actually what happened, that Paul was released and conducted a further period of ministry, only to be re-arrested and martyred after Nero found it convenient to blame Christians for the Great Fire of Rome in A.D. 64.

Yet Luke gives us neither of these endings. The only reasonable conclusion is that he didn’t do this because he couldn’t: The trial had not yet happened.

Adolf von Harnack comments:

Throughout eight whole chapters St. Luke keeps his readers intensely interested in the progress of the trial of St. Paul, simply that he may in the end completely disappoint them—they learn nothing of the final result of the trial! . . .

The more clearly we see that the trial of St. Paul, and above all his appeal to Caesar, is the chief subject of the last quarter of the Acts, the more hopeless does it appear that we can explain why the narrative breaks off as it does, otherwise than by assuming that the trial had actually not yet reached its close. It is no use to struggle against this conclusion. If St. Luke, in the year 80, 90, or 100, wrote thus he was not simply a blundering but an absolutely incomprehensible historian! (pp. 95, 97).

Harnack also points out that Luke repeatedly records prophecies of future events in Acts, yet he makes no mention of Paul’s ultimate fate:

St. Luke allows Agabus to foretell a famine, to foretell St. Paul’s imprisonment in Jerusalem; he suffers St. Paul himself (on the voyage) to foretell, like a fortune-teller, the fate of the ship and all its passengers; he in many chapters of the book deals in all kinds of “spiritual” utterances and prophecies—but not one word is said concerning the final destiny of St. Paul (and of St. Peter)! Is this natural? There are prophecies concerning events of minor importance, while there is nothing about the greatest event of all! (pp. 97-98, emphasis in original).

This further reinforces the conclusion that Acts was written before the events to which it has been building were concluded.

The Date of Acts

So in what year was Acts written? When does its narrative break off?

This is disputed by scholars. The problem is that we do not know precisely when the governor Festus arrived in Judaea.

This is the key event for determining when Paul’s voyage to Rome began and thus when his two-year period of house arrest began.

Many estimate that Festus arrived in A.D. 59, and so Paul arrived in Rome early in 60, and his house arrest lasted from 60 to 62.

However, I have done a (currently unpublished) study of the issue, and I agree with scholars such as Jack Finegan and Andrew Steinmann that Festus arrived in 57. That would mean that Paul arrived in Rome in early 58, and his house arrest lasted from 58 to 60.

I thus conclude that Acts was written in 60.

The Date of Luke

The Gospel of Luke was written before Acts, but how much before? A careful study of the end of the Gospel suggests it was not long.

This can be seen by comparing its end with the end of one of Luke’s sources—the Gospel of Mark. The original ending of Mark may have been lost, but it concludes in a way that indicates what would have happened. An angel tells the women who have come to Jesus’ tomb:

But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you (Mark 16:7; cf. 14:28).

Mark thus envisions a post-Resurrection appearance of Jesus to the disciples in Galilee. This is also what happens in Matthew (see Matt. 28:7, 10, 16-20).

However, Luke omits this reference and focuses instead on post-Resurrection appearances that occurred in Jerusalem and its vicinity (Luke 24:13-53). He makes no mention of the disciples going to Galilee. Instead, Luke records Jesus telling the disciples:

Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high (Luke 24:46-49).

Notice: Repentance is to be preached to all nations “beginning from Jerusalem” and the disciples are to “stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high.”

Although this difference has led some to see Luke as contradicting Mark and Matthew, in reality there is no conflict. The truth is that Jesus appeared to the disciples both in the vicinity of Jerusalem (John 20:19-31) and in Galilee (John 21:1-23). Luke simply focuses on the first location, while Mark and Matthew focus on the latter.

For our purposes, the question is: Why did Luke choose to end his Gospel as he did?

The obvious answer is that he was already planning what he was going to write in Acts. Thus at the beginning of the latter, he records Jesus telling the disciples:

But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8).

This directly echoes the end of Luke’s Gospel:

• “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” refers to the events of Pentecost and corresponds to “stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49).
• “You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth” is the outline of the book of Acts and corresponds to “repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in [Christ’s] name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things” (Luke 24:47-48).

Other elements of the end of the Gospel are also recapitulated in Acts, including the Ascension (Luke 24:51// Acts 1:9-11), the disciples return to Jerusalem (Luke 24:52//Acts 1:12), and their regular worship in the temple (Luke 24:53//Acts 2:46, etc.).

The presence of these elements at the end of Luke, and particularly the way he diverges from Mark, indicates that he was already planning what he would write in Acts.

This indicates that no long period of time can have passed between the composition of Luke’s Gospel and its sequel. If years had elapsed then we wouldn’t find the Gospel ending the way it does.

I therefore estimate that Luke was finished immediately before Acts, likely in A.D. 59, and that Luke used the two-year period of Paul’s house arrest in Rome to finish gathering material for and to compose his two masterworks.

In fact, much of the material found in the first twelve chapters of Acts—which focus on Peter—as well as some of the material unique to Luke’s Gospel, likely came from interviews that Luke conducted with Peter in Rome during this period.

We thus find there are good reasons for thinking that Luke and Acts were both composed in Rome, around A.D. 59 and 60, respectively.

What can we say about the other Gospels? That’s what we will turn to next.