Redating the New Testament

It isn't often that the liberal critics from the left of Biblical scholarship comfort and support the conservative right. Yet the Anglican cleric John A. T. Robinson, whose popular book Honest to God scandalized the religious world of two decades past, has turned the weapons of Biblical criticism against the positions of fellow liberals in his new book Redating the New Testament. ¹

His temerarious propositions assert that every book in the New Testament may well have reached its present form before A.D. 70. Robin son's backward march sometimes travels more than one hundred years from the positions commonly held in liberal circles.

Not that his journey began rashly or unplanned. He describes a developing dissatisfaction with current assumptions regarding the dating of the New Testament books. His intensive explorations in the Gospel of John first led him to believe that he was hearing the voice of Jesus, if not the actual words. If so, he argued, might not John's Gospel represent a separate, but contemporary, tradition of the teachings and life of Christ to that of the Synoptic Gospels?

Once he was convinced of this possibility, his questionings led him to-challenge the traditional datings of all the New Testament books. He surprised himself by coming out the other side of his studies not only with no absolute reasons for a late dating of any of the New Testament books but with evidences supporting early dates.

More than anything else, the puzzling lack of reference to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D, 70 left him convinced that such an event could not have gone unrecorded if New Testament books postdated that happening. Later noncanonical books refer frequently to the significance of the fall for both Jew and Christian. Robinson questioned how the trauma of this event could have escaped the authors of Hebrews, the pastoral Epistles, 2 Peter, and the Johannine writings if these books had been written at the dates many scholars assert. Books written to explain Christian thinking during the theological and doctrinal conflicts between Jew and Christian in the later decades of the first century and through the second century would surely have said something about the destruction of the Temple and its services. Even the statements of Christ regarding the destruction of the Temple lack the specific accuracy they surely would have assumed had the authors been drawing on the facts of past history.

In another hard look at history, Robinson considered the relation ship of the Neronic persecutions to the dating of certain New Testament books. Such considerations have led him to place the writing of 1 Peter in the spring of A.D. 65 when Christians were first coming under accusation for the fires that had destroyed Rome, but before Nero actually let loose his pogrom against the Christians. Similar reasoning has brought him to consider Peter as the most likely author of this Epistle, and Paul as the probable author of the pastoral Epistles, which he dates between A.D. 55 and 58 instead of a hundred years later as many Bible critics have done. Robinson's research produces a surprising collection of evidence that the traditional authorship of the New Testament books is correct, although he pro fesses some uncertainty on 2 Peter and will not assign Hebrews to Paul or Revelation to the disciple John.

In a fascinating reinterpretation of New Testament chronology Robin son dates The Revelation very specifically as late in A.D. 68. He regards the book as a violent blast against the recently self-murdered Nero. Robinson interprets Revelation 17:9-11 as a replay of history. Nero is the fifth king (emperor) who "'is alive no longer'" (verse 11, N.E.B.),² but who will live again as the eighth king, the Nero redivivus widely expected in the late A.D. six ties by the superstitious and the fearful.

In another piece of scholarly iconoclasm he demolishes the impact of the Domitian persecution, so often considered a reason for the writing of Revelation, calling it a "non event" and citing the failure of contemporary sources—including even Clement, bishop of Rome—during the persecution to mention even one Christian martyr killed by Domitian.

The net result of this research and rethinking reads almost like a conservative's battle line. Robinson sees James as the earliest written of the New Testament books, assigning it to A.D. 47 or 48. The other writings follow along through the next two decades, with the entire New Testament completed prior to A.D. 70. In reaching these conclusions Robin son observes: I. That very little internal evidence surfaces for dating the New Testament writings. 2. That there is a similar lack of external evidence. Citing a common maxim of liberal scholarship, he says repeatedly, "The external evidence is only as good as the internal and cannot prevail over it." 3. That literary dependency is still an open question for much of the New Testament. 4. That "prophecy after the event," a common liberal claim for certain New Testament predictions, must be demonstrated rather than assumed. 5. That very little hard evidence exists for the late dates confidently assigned by New Testament experts to the documents. 6. That much subjectivity comes into play in assessing the intervals required for the development of the New Testament to its present form.

Robinson assails the presumption that the writing down of traditions must begin only after a considerable stretch of oral tradition, and that once written down, oral traditions quickly cease. He suggests the possibility of Greek-speaking Christianity right in Jerusalem from the first conversions on the day of Pentecost, developing alongside, rather than postdating, Aramaic Christianity. He wonders at length whether the first century was really as full of pseudepigraphists, forgers, and easily duped church leaders as the critics often assume.

Robinson's Redating the New Testament is well-written, easy to read, and scholarly (1,331 footnotes and 450 modern research sources!). The jacket blurb claims it to be the first major reconsideration of the chronology of the New Testament writings in more than seventy-five years. As with his earlier book Honest to God, this book will no doubt provoke rebuttal and reevaluation. Conservatives will scoop large heaps of comfort from it, even though the comfort will melt somewhat from the glaringly liberal techniques by which he arrives at his conclusions.

The author summons the battle array of literary-critical scholarship to his aid, yet it is fascinating to see the presuppositions built up by form, source, and redaction criticism come under fire from these very weapons.

If Robinson's ideas gather sup port, it will mean the rewriting of introductions to the New Testament, the rethinking of entrenched theological positions, and a new respect for the authenticity of the New Testament. Yet, this book falls far short of what conservatives would wish for Biblical scholarship. For Bishop Robinson the New Testament is not the Word of God, but a first-century literary work to be analyzed, pulled apart, and put together as any other ancient book, but never to be thought of as the work of the Holy Spirit. The various authors were impelled, in his view, to write by circumstances, by historical events, by competing traditions, by heresies, by human conditions, but never be cause, "impelled by the Holy Spirit, they spoke the words of God" (2 Peter 1:21, N.E.B.).