Dating the New Testament

It is still possible to find serious works of scholarship dating the entire New Testament before AD 70. (For example: John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament, 1976, and John W. Wenham,Redating Matthew, Mark & Luke: A Fresh Assault on the Synoptic Problem, 1991.) Equally serious works date much of the New Testament considerably later. Maybe the variety of views that are held illustrate the subjectivity that enters in when discussing material that is as personally challenging to one's life-style and one's world-view as is the New Testament!

Austin Farrer observed about the dating of the New Testament that the range of possible hypotheses was like a line of tipsy revellers with arms linked. They lurch this way and that, each piece kept in place by its neighbours, without encountering any solid object! Concerning today's efforts at deconstructing the New Testament, Tom Wright, one of Britain's leading New Testament scholars, uses an equally graphic metaphor. He says that it "is like finding yourself in the middle of a rugby field with 5 teams and 10 balls. There is all kinds of excitement: everybody is tackling everybody, and everyone thinks he's on the winning team."

Much of the focus of the debate is on the dating of the documents. However, is that the real issue? If the writers of the New Testament had reliable sources of information and if they were in some instances eye-witnesses of the events they describe, would it matter too much when they wrote them down? We read autobiographies of people who describe events that took place in their childhoods 50 years previously (or hear them on radio), without questioning the truth of those events. After all, they were there when it happened and they sound like honest people.

The questions I would ask are: Do we have in the New Testament material that is written by people directly involved in the events they record? Where this is not the case, did they get it from eyewitnesses? If this is true, then surely it must carry more weight than arguments about the date of the final composition.