If we want to know anything about the dates of the gospels, we are going to have to say good-bye to the rumors circulating among Christian bishops in the second century and look instead at the internal evidence. What can we deduce from what these four texts actually say?
The Gospel of Mark is usually dated at around 70 CE. Some even place it as early as 40 CE. As far as I, your humble correspondent, am concerned, this is wishful thinking pure and simple, motivated by nothing other than apologetics. Those who prefer these dates are just trying to shrink the distance in time between Jesus and the gospels, as if that would make them historically accurate. Even the commonly held notion of a process of oral tradition connecting the historical Jesus to the written gospels may be principally an apologetical device aimed at dragging the gospels’ contents back to a historical Jesus. The alternative is to recognize the largely literary, that is, fictive, character of the gospels.
The most important indicator of Mark's date of writing is the way(s) he deals with the delay of the Parousia, the second advent of Jesus. Mark presupposes the same crisis that actuated John 21:20–23 and 2 Peter 3:3–4, the death of the first generation of the disciples. Mark contains what appears to be an earlier document, which Timothée Colani dubbed “the Little Apocalypse”1 (Mark chap. 13), just as the Book of Revelation appears to have assimilated an earlier apocalypse, the “little scroll” into Revelation chapter 11. The Little Apocalypse is usually thought to date from around 70 CE, as it is thought to reflect the events of the fall of Jerusalem. But Hermann Detering has shown that the Little Apocalypse more likely refers to the Roman recapture of Jerusalem at the end of the bar-Kokhba revolt in 136 CE.2 While it is possible that, as Colani thought, this document was subsequently interpolated into Mark, it seems far more likely that it is earlier because other passages in Mark seem to presuppose it. If this is true, then obviously, Mark gets catapulted into the second century, not very long before Irenaeus mentions it.
The Little Apocalypse sets a deadline for the imminent end of the world: “I tell you truly, this generation shall not pass away before these things come to pass” (Mark 13:30). But nothing happened. That generation passed into history, and history went on. This was quite the embarrassment, just as it was to the authors of John chapter 21 and 2 Peter chapter 3 (not the actual apostle Peter, as the complex Greek and many other considerations demonstrate). The backpedaling commenced. The first strategy, when some few oldsters remained, was to restrict the scope of this promise, so that now it was only “some standing here” who “will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God coming with power” (Mark 9:1). But then it became too late for that: the whole generation passed away (“the fathers fell asleep” as 2 Peter 3:3 puts it).
Next, someone went back and added to the text of Mark 13 a condition for the Parousia coming: world evangelization (Mark 13:10). Presumably, if Christians failed to accomplish this assignment, the Parousia could be delayed. And so it happened. But eventually, some decided that the evangelistic penetration of the Roman Empire was sufficient to satisfy that condition (Col. 1:6).
So next Jesus was made to disavow the very knowledge he professed to reveal in Mark 13:30. As soon as Jesus has given the deadline of the contemporary generation, he is made to correct himself: “But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (and note the late, theological sound of “the Son”).
And then someone sought to defuse the embarrassment of the Mark 9:1 promise that at least “some” of that “greatest generation” would endure to the end. The passage was too well-known to simply omit, so it was reinterpreted, making it seem to refer to something else that did transpire back in that generation. How about the Transfiguration? But if the prediction referred to something that happened back then, there is a new problem: why didn't everybody, at least all of the disciples, see it? Well, Jesus must have chosen an inner circle of just three disciples to see it, for some reason excluding the other nine. So “some” of those standing there with Jesus in 9:1, but not all, saw the “predicted” Transfiguration, as if this were a plausible fulfillment of a prediction of the coming of the kingdom of God. It is, as harmonizations usually are, very strained.
For people to come to recognize there is a problem with the Parousia being long overdue means they have been waiting and hoping so long that they can no longer tell themselves it still might happen on schedule. Therefore, the rewrites and reinterpretations we have charted in Mark function like tree rings, each one marking a delay of many years. There is no way such a document can have been written by 70 CE, even if Detering is wrong about the 136 date for the Little Apocalypse.
Matthew has used Mark, so scholars tend to allow a decade between Mark and Matthew. But we may have to allow more time than this simply because of evidence of stratification not only in the new portions of Matthew but also even in those rewritten from Mark (or from Q). Matthew based the Sermon on the Mount on the Q sermon from which Luke's Sermon on the Plain also derives. Within the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew has grouped sayings topically. For example, the section about the piety of the hypocrites (6:1–18) falls neatly into segments about almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. They look balanced and symmetrical, but suddenly we find that someone has interrupted the flow, adding into the prayer section the Lord's Prayer and a comment about forgiveness (vv. 9–15). This is a sign of another layer being added to an earlier draft of Matthew. Likewise, Matthew based his mission charge on Mark 6:8–11, but he added his “not-so-great commission,” restricting evangelism only to Jews and excluding Samaritans and Gentiles, in 10:5. But someone has superseded this, adding the Great Commission in chapter 28.
And, as Arlo J. Nau shows, the treatment of Peter in Matthew's Gospel presupposes at least two stages on the path between Mark and our canonical Matthew.3 Mark had been pretty hard on the twelve disciples, apparently reflecting that evangelist's distaste for the Christian faction that made them their figureheads. Jesus is forever rebuking their stupid remarks and their inability to understand him. In Matthew we find a pronounced attempt to rehabilitate them and to mitigate Jesus’ disapproval. This, obviously, is because the Matthean church community, unlike Mark, venerated the Twelve. Peter in particular is praised and honored. But alongside these edits we notice attempts to take Peter back down a peg. Jesus congratulates Peter on his confession of faith at Caesarea Philippi, but then calls him “Satan” (restoring Mark's “Get thee behind me, Satan,” which the first Matthean redactor had probably chopped because it made Peter look so bad). Jesus gives Peter the “keys” of halakhic authority (Matt. 16:19) but then redistributes them to the Twelve as a whole (18:18). Peter joins Jesus walking on the water (14:28–29), like Robin with Batman, but then he sinks (14:30–31). And so on. This means that we have to allow some years between the publication of Mark's Gospel and the first round of “Matthean” rewriting and expansion, which still did not give us our present Matthew, and then more years before a second “Matthean” editor reworked the whole thing. There must, then, be a longer interval between Mark and our canonical version of Matthew than most would like to think. Again, we can read the tree rings.
Matthew swarms with legendary embellishments. Think of all the seismic activity on Easter weekend, earthquakes somehow missed not only by the Weather Channel but by all three other gospels as well. Then there is the enormity of the mass wave of resurrections coincident with the crucifixion of Jesus. “The earth shook, and the rocks were split; the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many” (Matt. 27:51a–53). Even apologists won't defend that one.
Matthew was not satisfied with Mark's empty tomb story, in which the women discover the tomb already open with a young man dressed in white waiting for them. So he changed it, leaving the tomb closed until the women arrive, then having a glowing angel swoop down from heaven and roll the stone away. Not too shabby. And then there is the business, reflected in no other gospel, about the Sanhedrin prevailing upon Pilate to post armed guards at the tomb. This sort of legendary embellishment does not exactly inspire confidence, and it implies a later stage than we find in Mark, even at his latest.
Luke's Gospel is not mentioned until Irenaeus includes it among the four gospels he is willing to accept in ca. 180 CE. Justin Martyr (150?) may refer to the Book of Acts (the sequel to Luke), but we are not sure because there is only a single phrase common to both. Scholars have proposed three different approximate dates for the Gospel of Luke. Adolf Harnack believed it was written, along with the Book of Acts, by or around 60 CE, before the traditional date of Paul's execution.4 Harnack decided that there was no other way to explain the lack of any mention in Acts of Paul's death, or at least of the outcome of his trial, unless we suppose that Luke wrote during the period of Paul's house arrest in Rome. If Luke knew Paul had been martyred, can we imagine that he would not have made much of it?
Though conservative apologists like W. Ward Gasque5 now delight in invoking Harnack in favor of an early date so they may argue for the historical accuracy of Luke and Acts, Harnack himself admitted that Acts was untrustworthy and simply fabulous at many points, that Luke was habitually inaccurate, and that early dating was by no means incompatible with any of these phenomena. Unlike his latter-day fans, Harnack was no apologist for biblical inerrancy.
Harnack accepted the theory of Luke's dependence upon Mark, and he knew his early dating had to take that into account: Mark and Q must have been early, too. This, however, brought up another problem, in that most scholars regard Luke as having taken the Markan “abomination of desolation” prophecy (Mark 13:14ff.) and historicized it in light of the actual events of 70 CE (Luke 21:20, cf. 19:43). Luke seems to have taken the trouble to re-narrate the apocalypse in terms of a literal description. What was Harnack's answer to this? He said that both Mark and Luke were written before the Roman siege, and that Mark's “abomination of desolation” passage was a genuine before-the-fact prediction. Luke, Harnack said, could see that Mark's version of the prophecy denoted a Roman conquest and simply reworded the prediction in terms of typical Roman tactics. This seems to me a harmonization, an attempt to get out of a tight spot. There are, however, more serious objections to dating Luke-Acts before the death of Paul.
Is Luke ignorant of the martyr death of Paul? Most scholars today do not think so. Note that, at the end of Acts, Luke refers to Paul's two-year imprisonment as a thing completed, a rounded-off episode. “The imprisonment lasted two years.” And then what happened? It is indeed puzzling that he does not tell us, but it also seems that he is assuming something else happened, in other words, the story went on. It may be that he intended to continue the story in a third volume of narrative that would have depicted an acquittal and further travels, and finally the death of Paul; or perhaps Paul's death and the ministry of Aristarchus, Barnabas, and so on. On the other hand, it may be that the fact of Paul's death was so well-known that it would have been superfluous to state it. “This is how he came to his famous death. You know the rest.” As if a biography of Lincoln ended with: “And thus he entered Ford's Theatre for the 2:15 p.m. performance, the same one attended by John Wilkes Booth.”
It may be that Luke, sensitive to the disapproval of the Romans in a politically charged climate, where Christians were viewed as subversive and liable to persecution, wanted to gloss over the execution of Paul by Rome. He certainly evidences an apologetic sensitivity elsewhere in both the gospel and Acts.
In any case, Luke has Paul predict his martyrdom in pretty explicit terms in Acts 20:25 (verse 22 notwithstanding). “You shall see my face no more”—a prediction he could make only if he knew he would be dead. In fact, the passage as a whole, the farewell speech to the Ephesian elders, is an easily recognizable “Last Testament” piece, a common device to put “famous last words” into the mouth of a famous man (as in Plato's Crito, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, of Abraham, Moses, Job, and others). Specifically, the “prediction” of Gnostic heretics emerging later to forage among the churches of Asia Minor seems to be a much later, post-Pauline way of dissociating Paul from the floodtide of “heresy” that overtook the area by the second century. Luke seeks here to absolve Paul of the blame of it, contrary to the heretics themselves who claimed him as their patron saint.6
Luke draws a large-scale series of parallels between the Passion of Jesus and that of Paul. Both undertake itinerant preaching journeys, culminating in a last, long journey to Jerusalem, where each is arrested in connection with a disturbance in the Temple. Each is acquitted by a Herodian monarch as well as by Roman procurators. Each makes, as we have seen, Passion predictions. Is it likely that Luke wrote this in ignorance of what finally happened to Paul?
The majority of current scholars gravitate to a date of 80–90 CE. I think this is simply an attempt to push Luke as far back as possible while admitting that neither Mark nor Luke were written before the death of Paul (62 CE) or the fall of Jerusalem (70 CE), and this in order to keep it within the possible lifetime of a companion of Paul, which is what tradition made Luke.
The Tübingen critics7 of the nineteenth century, which include Franz Overbeck, F. C. Baur, and Edward Zeller,8 dated Luke-Acts in the second century, 100–130 CE. More recently Walter Schmithals, Helmut Koester, John C. O’Neill,9 and Richard I. Pervo10 have maintained the second-century date.
Ferdinand Christian Baur placed Luke-Acts late on the historical timeline because of its “catholicizing” tendency. That is, he showed how there was a conflict in early Christianity between nationalist Torah-observant Jewish Christianity on the one hand, and more open, Torah-free Hellenistic/Gentile Christianity on the other. The first was led by James, Peter, and the Twelve, while the latter was led by Paul, the Seven Deacons, Apollos, Priscilla, Aquila, and others. Baur showed how most of the New Testament documents could be placed on either side of this great divide. On the Jewish side were Matthew, James, and Revelation. On the Gentile side were the four authentic Pauline Epistles, Hebrews, John, the Johannine Epistles, and Mark.
Later there arose the catholicizing tendency, that is, the tendency to reconcile the two parties. The pseudonymous 1 and 2 Peter either give Pauline thought under Peter's name or have Peter speak favorably of Paul while denigrating those who quote Paul against the memory of Peter. Interpolations into the Pauline Epistles, as well as pseudonymous epistles attributed to Paul, make him friendlier to Judaism and the Law. Acts attempts to bring together the Petrine and Pauline factions by a series of clever moves. First, Peter and Paul are paralleled, each raising someone from the dead (Acts 9:36–40, 20:9–12), each healing a paralytic (3:1–8, 14:8–10), each healing by extraordinary, magical means (5:15, 19:11–12), each besting a sorcerer (8:18–23, 13:6–11), each miraculously escaping prison (12:6–10, 16:25–26). If one praises God for the work of Peter, then one can scarcely deny God was at work in Paul, too (and vice versa).
Second, Luke makes Peter a universalizing preacher to the Gentiles, as witness the Cornelius story (Acts 10–11) and especially the speech of Peter in Acts 15, which echoes that of Paul in Galatians 2, aimed at Peter! At the same time, he makes Paul still an observant Jew, claiming still to be a Pharisee (23:6), piously taking vows and paying for those of others (21:20–24), attending Jerusalem worship on holy days. He makes it clear that there is no truth to the prevalent “rumors” that Paul had abandoned legal observance (Acts 21:24).
Having vindicated Paul as a true and divinely chosen preacher of the gospel, and this conspicuously in the teeth of Jewish Christian opponents, Luke seems to deny him the dignity of the apostolate itself, redefining the office in an anachronistic fashion that would have excluded even the Twelve (Acts 1:21–22)! Paul is subordinated to the Twelve as their dutiful servant. He makes a beeline to report to them after his conversion, in direct contradiction to Galatians 1:15–19. He does nothing without their approval and preaches of their witness to the risen Christ (13:30–31), not his own. In short, Luke has Petrinized Paul and Paulinized Peter, so as to bring their respective factions closer together. All this bespeaks a time well after Paul himself.
Hans Conzelmann also argued for a date for Luke-Acts significantly after Paul and presupposing the passage of sufficient time to make it apparent that history had entered a new era. I think his observations imply a second-century date for Luke-Acts, though he did not place Luke-Acts quite so late. The apocalyptic enthusiasm of the earliest Christians was premature; the world would keep on going, and a new era of salvation history had commenced. And this is why Luke wrote Acts: The story of salvation was not yet over. Jesus was the decisive “center” of it but not the culmination of it. Conzelmann says that Luke rewrote the story of Jesus to “de-eschatologize” it and to make it fit into an ongoing world in which the Church had more of a role than merely awaiting the end.11
Conzelmann envisioned Luke's salvation history as consisting of three great eras. The first was that of Israel. In Luke it would be represented by the first two chapters of the gospel with Zechariah, Elizabeth, Miriam (Mary), Simeon, and Anna as quintessential Old Testament characters (actually modeled on characters in the stories of the infancy of Samuel: Simeon = Eli, Elizabeth = Hannah, etc.)12
The second period was that of Jesus. It forms the middle of time, the strategic pivotal zone of history. It brings to an end the time of Israel and commences that of the Church. John the Baptist is the pivotal figure, marking the shift of the eons (Luke 16:16) from the time when the Law is preached to the time when the kingdom of God is preached. Within the period of Jesus there is a further breakdown: in the center of it lies the public ministry of Jesus, when the full blaze of heavenly light dispels the shadows. Wherever Jesus goes, evil flees, like the Canaanites before the advancing Israelites. This Conzelmann called the “Satan-free” period. It begins with Jesus warding off Satan by successfully withstanding his temptations. At the end of this story Luke says Satan “departed from him until an opportune time (kairos)” (Luke 4:13). That time comes at the betrayal story when, as in John, Luke says that Satan entered into Judas Iscariot to engineer Jesus’ betrayal. Between these two events we see either an editorial elimination of Satan's activity or a continual banishing of his forces from the field.
In the first case, notice that Luke has omitted the rebuke of Jesus to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” from Mark's scene of Peter's confession. Why? The period must have been Satan-free! In the second case, note that Jesus rides roughshod over the forces of evil, witnessing Satan falling precipitously (Luke 10:18–19) from his position of power in one of the lower heavens (“the powers of the heavens shall be shaken” Luke 21:26b) and freeing those oppressed by the devil (Luke 13:16; Acts 10:38) apparently without resistance. Some see these two motifs as contradictory: how can the period of the ministry be free of the machinations of Satan and yet be the time of unceasing battle between Jesus and Satan? But I think they misunderstand the idea that Satan seems completely unable to reinforce his vanquished troops. Where is he?
Once the Satan-free period is over (and Jesus knows it is over as of the Last Supper) he warns the disciples that it will no longer be so easy as it has been up to this point. Whereas they could travel preaching the gospel unmolested thus far, now they had best carry weapons to protect themselves (22:35–36). It is only now that we learn of Satan's demand to thresh the Twelve like wheat (22:31). If Conzelmann is right about this, we can detect for the first time the perspective, much like our own, of a distinctly later period, one from which the time of Jesus already looks something like a never-never-land. It is unlike the mundane and difficult time in which we live, but a pristine “once upon a time” of origins. It is, from the standpoint of the reader and the writer, long over. We are now in the third period, that of the Church, when the gospel is to be preached and tribulation is to be endured. This is not a work of the apostolic age, it seems to me.
Conzelmann's Luke also tends to push the eschatological fulfillment off into the future. At first this is not obvious, since he retains the passage from the Markan apocalypse in which we are told that this generation will not pass before all these things are fulfilled (Luke 21:32 matches Mark 13:30). But we dare not ignore the many subtle changes Luke makes in his sources elsewhere. In Luke's version of the Little Apocalypse, the false prophets announce not only that “I am he,” but also that “The time is at hand!” (21:8, cf. 2 Thess. 2:1–3). Now the events Jesus predicts lead up only to the historical destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Roman troops (21:20), not to the very end of all things, as Mark 13:10 had expected.
The fall of Jerusalem will usher in a new period, “the times of the Gentiles,” an era of Gentile dominion over Israel, as in the visions of Daniel 7. Thus there is a distancing buffer between the events of 70 CE and the end, and Luke sees himself standing right in the middle.
At the story of Peter's confession, Jesus predicts that some there will see the kingdom of God coming, but not “in power” as Mark had it (cf. Luke 9:27 and Mark 9:1). He wants to avoid the embarrassment that the Twelve all died and there was still no second coming (cf. 2 Peter 3:4; John 21:23). At the Trial scene Jesus no longer tells his contemporaries that they will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power (as in Mark 14:62, “you will see”), but rather simply that from now on he will be seated there (Luke 22:69). He wants to avoid the embarrassment that the Sanhedrin members are dead and that the coming of the Son of man and the kingdom of God has not transpired.
Luke introduces the three impatient questions. In Luke 17:20–21 Jesus is asked about signs whereby the arrival of the kingdom may be counted down. His answer is that there will be no such anticipation. It is not the kind of thing that even could come that way, since it is an inner spiritual reality.
In Luke 19:11ff., Luke has very heavily redacted the parable of the Talents (which survives in something more like its original Q form in Matthew 25:14ff.) in order to make the point that, before the kingdom comes, the Son of man is going to have to go very far away (i.e., heaven—cf. Acts 1:10–11) and thus be absent a long time before he can return as king.
In Acts 1:6–7ff., even after forty days of “inside teaching” from the risen Christ himself, the Twelve are still so dense that they expect an immediate theocratic denouement. He rebukes them as he did so often in the days of his ministry. The artificiality of the scene is plain to see. How bad a teacher could Jesus have been? How damn stupid can the disciples have been? Hence it is redactional. The point is to urge readers not to trouble themselves about matters of eschatology but to get busy spreading the gospel.
Then there is Luke's replacement of horizontal with vertical eschatology. Luke alone among the gospel writers speaks of people going to heaven or hell as soon as they die. The parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man (17:19–31) and the thief on the cross story (23:43) both have such a picture. Also see Luke 20:38b, where Luke adds the idea of present immortality, “for all live unto him,” just as in 4 Maccabees 7:19 (“to God they do not die, as our patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob died not, but live to God”). Earlier Christians thought of attaining the end-times kingdom or not. One thinks of going up to heaven only when the prospect of an imminent end has faded (1 Thess. 4:13–14; 2 Cor. 5:1–4; Phil. 1:23).
The attempt of Luke to point up the innocence of Jesus and Paul at every opportunity surely leans in the direction of a later date. Luke wants to find an accord between Church and Empire. All in all, we get a view very much like that of the late first-, early second-century Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus).
Charles H. Talbert, though again without actually holding to a second-century date, showed how Luke shares the agenda and the views of the second-century Apologists Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian.13 These men faced the challenge of “heresies” (competing forms of Christianity), which they sought to refute by claiming an exclusive copyright on the “apostolic tradition.” The Apologists relied heavily, in their polemics against the Gnostics, on the idea of “apostolic succession” of bishops. That is, the twelve apostles had been the apprentices of the Son of God. They alone saw the whole of his ministry and thus were in no danger of taking things he said out of context as, for example, Irenaeus accused the Valentinians of doing. In the Pseudo-Clementines Peter takes Simon Magus to task precisely over this issue: how can the Magus hope to have a correct understanding of Christ and his teachings derived, as he claims, from occasional visions of him? If he were really taught by Christ, he ought to agree with Peter, who saw and heard everything the Messiah did and said.
Luke seems already to be setting up the twelve apostles as a college of guarantors of the orthodox tradition of Jesus. As Talbert notes, Luke makes explicit in Acts 1:21–22 that he views as apostles only those who have seen and thus can verify all the events of the Jesus story as they are preached elsewhere in Acts, namely the baptism on through the ascension. The artificiality of this is evident from the simple fact that the Twelve cannot all have been present at these events even on Luke's own showing! But he does make the effort, as Talbert shows, to have the disciples miss nothing, at least as of the point when they join Jesus. For instance, while they are away on their preaching tour there is nothing recorded of Jesus—otherwise the witnesses could not attest it. Jesus would have been a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear the sound.14
Günther Klein has gone one step further and argued that, whereas we hear from Paul about “the Twelve” and “the apostles,” and from Mark and Matthew about “the disciples,” the notion of a group of “the twelve apostles” is a Lukan creation to restrict the office of apostle, originally much wider, to the narrow confines of the Twelve.15 The one reference to the twelve apostles in Mark (3:14, occurring in only some manuscripts) would make sense as a harmonizing interpolation. In Mark 6:30 and Matthew 10:2, the term “apostles” seems to be used in a non-technical sense (“The ones sent out returned”; “the names of the twelve sent out are these”), since apostoloi means “sent ones.”
Note that Luke has every step of the fledgling Church carefully overseen by the vigilant eye of the Twelve, who stay magically untouched in Jerusalem even when the whole Church is otherwise scattered by persecution (Acts 8:1): They authenticate the conversion of the Samaritans, the ordination of the Seven, the conversion of Cornelius, the ministry of Paul. In the same way, the Apologists held that it was the bishops of the Catholic congregations who were appointed by the apostles to continue their work, teaching what they themselves had been taught, as it were, from the horse's mouth. Luke has Paul tell the Ephesian elders that he taught them everything he knew (Acts 20:20—against Gnostic claims that he had taught the advanced stuff only to the illuminati, as he pointedly says that he did in 1 Corinthians 2:6–7). In Acts 20:28 Paul even calls them “bishops,” though translations hide it (cf. 2 Tim. 2:2).
Tertullian denied the right of “heretics” even to quote scripture in their own defense (much as Justin did Jews), claiming that the scripture was meaningless unless interpreted in accordance with the tradition of the apostles. And what was that? Well, whatever the current Catholic interpretation happened to be. Even so, Luke is careful to have the Twelve appear as recipients of the risen Christ's own scriptural interpretation (Luke 24:25, 43–44), which, however, Luke refrains from giving in any detail—writing himself a blank check.
Tertullian fought against the Gnostic idea of a spiritually resurrected Christ, as opposed to a physically resurrected one. Is it any accident that Luke has the same concern, as opposed to the presumably earlier view of 1 Corinthians 15:49–50 and 1 Peter 3:18?
J. C. O’Neill argued that Acts belongs in the second century because its theology has the most in common with the writings of that time (again, including the Apologists).16 The view that Jews have forfeited their claim on God and have been shunted aside is surely impossible before the second century. Had it become clear earlier than this that Jews in toto had completely rejected the Christian message? Hardly. Yet in Acts, not only is this a fait accompli, but (as Jack T. Sanders also shows17) Luke seems to view the Jews of the Diaspora, the only ones he knows as historical entities (as opposed to the Sunday school lesson Jews of Jerusalem) as horned caricatures who oppose the gospel out of base envy—a motivation retrojected from a later period in which Christianity has begun to overwhelm Judaism in numbers, surely too late for the lifetime of Paul or one of his companions.
The theology of the supersession of the Temple seen in Stephen's speech (Acts chapter 7) is borrowed from post–70 CE Hellenistic Judaism, where, as we see in Justin's Dialogue with Trypho and the Sibylline Oracles, Jews had begun to make virtue of necessity and to spiritualize Temple worship.
The Apostolic Decree (Acts 15), proclaiming that Jewish Christians have every right to observe the ancestral Law of Moses, and the stress on James securing Paul's public endorsement of the idea, seem to reflect a later period attested in Justin Martyr, where Jewish Christians were on the defensive against their more numerous Gentile Christian brethren, many of whom deemed them heretical for keeping the law at all. Justin himself allowed their right to do so if they did not try to get Gentiles to keep it. This dispute seems to provide the natural context for Acts 21:20–25, making Luke a contemporary of Justin. Had these questions really been decided back in the days of Peter and Paul, why would Christians still be debating them some eighty years later?
Similarly, the Decree as set forth in Acts 15 seeks to provide (long after the fact) apostolic legitimization for the cultic provisions attested in second-century sources, but not earlier for the most part. Minucius Felix, the Pseudo-Clementines, Biblis (quoted in Eusebius), the Syriac Apology of Aristides, and Tertullian all mention that Christians do not consume the blood of animals or the meat of strangled animals. Revelation and a late section of 1 Corinthians (10:14–22) ban eating meat offered to idols. Matthew forbids consanguineous marriages (porneia) to Gentile converts, forbidden in Acts 15:20 at about the same time. The strange thing about this is that in none of these documents is the prohibition traced back to the Apostolic Decree of Jerusalem, which, if genuine, must have been treasured as the first ecumenical conciliar decision in the Church. Conversely, when Paul's epistles deal with the issues, they never mention the Decree, which would seemingly have been an authoritative way of dealing with the questions. It looks like Luke has simply collected these various second-century Christian mores and retrojected them into the Golden Age of the apostles to give them added weight.
The titles of Jesus in Acts are those used of him in the second century, particularly “Servant of God” (Acts 3:13, 4:27). Despite the desperate desire of Joachim Jeremias18 and others to trace this back to an imaginary “Suffering Servant of Yahweh” theology of the earliest Church, there is no evidence that such a specter ever existed. But the title does occur in later documents like the Didache, 1 Clement, and the Martyrdom of Polycarp. It is late Christology, not early.
Likewise, the natural theology of Acts chapter 17, the Areopagus Speech, reflects that of the second-century Apologists, who sought to make common ground with their pagan audience, for example, Justin Martyr's theory that Socrates and Plato should be viewed as “Christians before Christ” inspired by the divine Logos.
Many scholars have detected striking parallels between Acts and the ancient Hellenistic novels.19 These were popular picaresque fictions produced for several centuries, reaching the height of popularity in the second century CE. They were most often romances but also sometimes chronicled the travels and miracles of teachers like Apollonius of Tyana. Rosa Söder notes five features shared by the novels and the Apocryphal Acts of the second century (more on these in a moment).20 They are also shared with the canonical Acts. First, they feature travel (cf. the apostolic journeys of Peter and Paul). Second come tales of miracles and oddities. The apostles do numerous miracles, some quite fanciful, like Peter's healing shadow, Paul's healing hankies, Peter striking Ananias and Sapphira dead with a word. Third is the depiction of fabulous and exotic peoples (like the bull-sacrificing pagans of Lycaonia, Acts 14:8–19; the superstitious natives of Malta, 28:1–6; and the philosophical dilettantes of Athens in Acts chap. 17). Fourth, the novels have some sort of religious propaganda function. Fifth, they feature chaste eroticism between separated lovers who resist all temptations during their separation. (I believe such a narrative underlies the mentions of Joanna and the female entourage of Jesus in Luke).21
Rosa Söder adds five more important traits less often found in the Apocryphal Acts but common to the novels—and the canonical Acts. First, the sale of the hero into slavery (like the imprisonments of Paul, Peter, Silas, Acts 12:6, 16:26, 21:33, 26:29). Second, persecution. Third, crowd scenes (e.g., in Ephesus, the Artemis riot in Acts chap. 19:23–41). Fourth, divine help in time of great need, and fifth, oracles, dreams, and divine commands.22
If the heyday of the novel genre was the second century, it also seems the best period to locate Luke-Acts. It was also the heyday of the various Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, novelistic fantasies about the missionary exploits of the apostles Paul, Peter, John, Andrew, Matthias, and Thomas. As many scholars note, the similarities between the ancient novels and the Apocryphal Acts imply that the latter represent a Christian adaptation of the former. There are, however, two prominent features of the Apocryphal Acts that are either not shared with the novels or else are significantly reworked from the novel genre. The first is that an apostle (the star of the particular Acts) in effect takes the place of Christ, becoming virtually a second Christ, preaching, healing, traveling, even repeating Jesus’ martyrdom in significant respects. The line between them is quite thin. In every major Acts, Christ sooner or later appears to someone in the physical guise of the apostle, so it goes both ways. Secondly, the Apocryphal Acts employ stories apparently borrowed from female storytellers in the communities of “widows”—consecrated, charismatic, celibate women. These stories depict the conversion of young noblewomen or matrons to encratism (the “good news” of celibacy as a requirement for baptism).23 Upon chancing to hear the preaching of the starring apostle, the woman dumps her husband or fiancé, then becomes an inseparable follower of her preacher, infuriating her “ex,” who uses his connections with the pagan governor to have the apostle arrested, even martyred. Luke-Acts has both features, though in the case of the second, it has broken up the story (of Joanna) and redistributed the fragments elsewhere. The core is Luke 8:1–3.
Also, the canonical Book of Acts shares with the Pseudo-Clementines and the Acts of Peter the legend of the miracle-contest between Simon Peter and Simon Magus. As Gerd Lüdemann has pointed out, the appearance in Acts 8:22 of the rare word epinoia must be a reference to the doctrine of the Simonian sect, attested in patristic and heresiological writers (i.e., later writers), to the effect that Simon's consort Helen, a former prostitute, was the incarnation of the Epinoia, the archetypal First Thought.24 I believe that Luke's Acts was not necessarily the first in the genre, though it is quite likely the earliest one we have. Luke's innovation was not to continue the story after Jesus by writing an Acts, but rather to write both a gospel and an Acts, both already established genres. This makes a second-century date more likely.
Finally, Luke seems to have a lot in common with our friend Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, who wrote about 140–150. Luke and Papias are strikingly similar at five points. Both mention extant written gospels, but both prefer their own research, derived from those who heard the first apostles, something both Papias and Luke came on the scene too late to do. Both mention the prophesying daughters of Philip. Papias is said to actually have met them. Both know the grotesque legend of the ghastly death of Judas by swelling up and exploding. Both wrote their own “gospels.” Papias’ was called An Exposition of the Oracles of our Lord, which Eusebius said contained “certain strange parables” of an apocalyptic nature. Significantly, Papias does not mention Luke's Gospel in his discussion of previous gospels, presumably because it did not yet exist. I suggest he and Luke were contemporaries, both men of antiquarian tastes and the same interests.
The Gospel of John must be the very latest of the canonical gospels, stemming from the middle of the second century, as implied by the fact that its author made use of the other gospels. It is now customary for scholars to pooh-pooh a second-century date due to that assigned the earliest surviving papyrus fragment of it, P52 (the John Rylands Papyrus), namely ca. 125–175 CE. Supposedly, the handwriting is typical of that period. But that dating is arbitrary and circular. There are too few samples of relevant penmanship from the period for comparison, and some scholars have recently rejected any certainty about the date of P52.25 So, as usual, we must get along on the basis of internal evidence.
C. H. Dodd26 has amply demonstrated close Johannine affinities with the Hermetic literature, a variety of Egyptian, non-Christian Gnosticism. Rudolf Bultmann27 has made the Gnostic and Mandaean character of many passages equally clear. True, as Raymond E. Brown maintained, John has similarities to the sectarian Judaism of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Brown thought these similarities were adequate as an excuse to rule out Gnosticism and to interpret John safely within the Jewish tradition.28 But not so fast! Bultmann was surely correct in understanding the religion of the Scrolls as a kind of Gnosticizing Judaism. There also looks to be a significant dose of Marcionite theology in John's Gospel. Would all these influences make it necessary for us to imagine one single author influenced by all these doctrines? While that would be by no means implausible, given the fantastic syncretism of the Hellenistic environment, the text of John abounds in contradictions suggesting a composite text that has been edited and adapted by several Johannine factions and splinter groups.
Second, there is the matter of the sources underlying John. I regard Bultmann's theory as still the best. He posited that the fourth evangelist employed a Synoptic-style narrative of numbered miracles of Jesus, the so-called Signs Source.29 Second, John employed a Gnostic-Mandaean Revelation Discourse Source, monologues of the heavenly revealer, probably originally John the Baptist but subsequently changed to Jesus. Third, the evangelist incorporated a Passion narrative (though he may instead have reworked Mark's). At several points, it looks like John is correcting the Synoptics, though Dodd made a good case that John did not know the other gospels but just used some of the same or similar fragments of oral traditions.30
Third, there is the narrative discontinuity in the gospel. Bultmann and others take this to imply that, very early, the text was accidentally disassembled, then clumsily put back together, like 2 Corinthians.31 As an alternative, Brown and others have divided the present text into successive stages of expansion.32 Such a process would also explain the inconsistencies. But that still leaves us wondering why there was apparently so little effort taken to smooth out the result. As it is, we see Jesus suddenly placed in a location we just saw him leave, or appearing someplace new with no notice of his having gone there, and so on. So it makes the best sense, as far as I am concerned, to stick with Bultmann.
He showed that much of the editing must have been the work of an “Ecclesiastical Redactor,” whom David Trobisch very plausibly identifies as Polycarp, second-century bishop of Smyrna.33 His self-appointed task was to “sanitize” an original text that he and others deemed heretical, too Gnostic-sounding, though hardly without spiritual merit. Even after he retooled it, however, the book still smacked of Gnosticism,34 and some thought it was the work of the Gnostic Cerinthus.
The community from which the Gospel of John emerged had fragmented (see 1 John 2:18–19), especially over Christological doctrines, some holding that Jesus Christ had appeared on Earth in a body of real, material flesh and blood, while others claimed it was merely the likeness of sinful flesh. Both groups used the same gospel, but each scribe began to “correct” his sect's copy, to bring it into line with his group's theology. Polycarp (or whoever the Ecclesiastical Redactor was) must have gathered copies representing both (or more?) versions of John and combined them as best he could, with the result that our gospel points in various directions, sometimes swinging back and forth from one sentence to another. Finally, someone has added chapter 21 onto the end of the book, which had already seemed to conclude with 20:30–31.
But who wrote it? That is a difficult question to answer, because in a sense it is the wrong question. Who shall we name as “the” author of Matthew, with its conflicting stages of writing and rewriting? Which redactor or corrector or interpolator of the fourth gospel is to be considered “John”? In any case, the apostle John, son of Zebedee, had nothing to do with it. Granted, John 19:34–35 claims to rest on the testimony of an eyewitness to the crucifixion, but, as we have seen, the passage contradicts its context and also seems to protest too much. John 21:24 ascribes the previous twenty chapters to some one of the original disciples, but chapter 21 is a later addition to the gospel. This means that this writer's claim that chapters 1–20 are the work of an eyewitness disciple is no different from or more reliable than Irenaeus vouching for the apostolic authorship of Matthew, and is equally as dubious.
One must also distinguish the author from the narrator of the gospel. Perhaps, like the authors of many gospels that did not make it into the official canon, the author of John had nothing to do with any historical Jesus but created a fictive narrator who is supposed to be one of the Twelve. There is no reason to exempt the fourth evangelist from using the same device as others who ascribed their work to Matthias, Thomas, Clement, Peter, and so on.