"Although individual introductions eschew taking positions on debated points (e.g., date of composition), the 'General Introduction' does take a position on 'when' that is heavily biased toward early dates and neglects to indicate the existence of substantive debate on the point."
- Michael W. Holmes,
Religious Studies Review 33 (2007)
"Others might also dispute the broad assertion (or assumption) that at least seven of these manuscripts preserve portions of texts 'which are widely believed to have been written before 130 CE.'"
-Chrstopher Tuckett, Review of Biblical Literature 9 (2008)
The one part of my book that has caused some scholars to question whether I successfully produced a "pure" sourcebook is the "General Introduction." Christopher Tuckett has pointed out that plenty of scholars would "dispute the broad assertion (or assumption) that" the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, and Egerton Gospel "are widely believed to have been written before 130 CE." Michael Holmes has described my opinion about when the various gospels not included in the New Testament were written as "heavily biased toward early dates."
I must acknowledge that these critiques have do have some validity. Although I correctly pointed out that some competent scholars assign these gospels to the first century of the Christian movement (ca. 30-130), I did not fully highlight the fact that other equally capable scholars assert that these gospels were written in the late second century. Were I to rewrite the book's introduction, I would prefer to put greater emphasis on my (much overlooked) statement that Thomas, Peter and Egerton "were most likely written during the first hundred years
or so of the Christian movement" (p. 3). That is, I think these three texts were probably written around 130, give or take roughly 50 years.
Dating ancient literary texts, such as the gospels, is a notoriously difficult endeavor. Unlike with many documentary writings (e.g., letters, tax records), literary texts seldom state precisely when (or where) they were written, and they often make no allusions to any known, datable historical events. Consequently, scholars studying early Christian gospels have to try to date the texts on the basis of complex theories of literary and theological development. Such theories are of necessity speculative, given the paucity of early Christian writings that have been preserved. These theories typically consist of a series of reasonable
but unverifiable conjectures built one upon the next. Of course, if one conjecture is incorrect, then a whole theory used for dating may collapse. Hence, significant disagreements persist in scholarly circles about precisely when many early Christian gospels (New Testament and other) were written. Different scholars advance rival theories, and it is simply impossible to prove or disprove whether any of them are actually correct.
My personal opinion is that we cannot now determine with the precision we would like when
any early Christian gospel was written (especially since some of them may have been written and revised over an extended period of time). Consequently, I would prefer to pursue less-chronologically dependent interpretive frameworks than have traditionally been used in modern scholarship. I endeavored to facilitate this in my book by stating only that the gospels were written sometime within what I thought was a fairly broad time period (the entire first century of the Christian movement). Evidently, this was not sufficient because some thought the time frame I suggested was still too narrow.
So, for the sake of simplicity in this blog, I choose only to assert that the "other early Christian gospels" listed in the sidebar (with the exceptions of the infancy gospels) were probably written sometime during the first two centuries.
And I will just leave it at that.
