Justifiable Reasons to be Skeptical of The Resurrection Claims

[Windmillcharge]

The fact is that's how it was written after the fact, and it's how the prophetic works were written in the Old Testament as well which is why the historical events are thought to be illustrations of what will happen in the future

There you are showing your bias. The books of Luke and of Acts were written before the seige of Jerusalem. If you maintain otherwise you will have to produce better evidence than saying I believe that isa the case.

 

[shnarkle]

There you are showing your bias. The books of Luke and of Acts were written before the seige of Jerusalem. If you maintain otherwise you will have to produce better evidence than saying I believe that isa the case.

The descriptions in the gospels do not portray Jerusalem before AD 70. There is quite a bit of scholarship on the subject proving this to be the case. Mark is the only account that scholars think may have been written around 70 AD.

I have no bias. I don't have a dog in that fight to begin with. I couldn't care less when they wrote it. I'm just going by the evidence.

Mark was written in Greek, and contains explanations of Jewish traditions, implying that the audience was Gentile and not Jewish (which is not to say there weren't Greek-speaking Jews). This means that Mark was almost certainly written after there was an already large population of Gentile Christians, meaning that it couldn't have happened too early (i.e. it wasn't written when Christianity was still mostly a Jewish religion).

Paul started evangelizing the Gentiles around AD 50, and wrote letters up through around 60. He never mentions the Gospel of Mark (or any other Gospel, or some seemingly critical things mentioned in the Gospels like the virgin birth, empty tomb, etc), again providing some evidence that he wrote before the Gospels were written (or at least that he was unaware of them).

The earliest extant fragment we have of Mark is from roughly AD 250, which puts an absolute upper limit to how late it could be written.

The argument for a post-AD 70 dating for Mark is mostly based on discussions of things like persecution and war in Judea (implying that it was happening during or after the Roman-Jewish Wars (AD 66).


To summarize a number of arguments:

1. Mark 13:1-2 describes the destruction of the temple with far greater accuracy and specificity than generic discourse on the temple's fall (contrast, e.g., 1 Kgs 9:8; 1 En. 90.28-30; Josephus J.W. 6.300-309).
   

2) Mark 13:14 seems to refer to Vespasian, despite occasional arguments for the zealot Eleazar or the Emperor Gaius. The citation of the Danielic vision in Mark 13:14 parallels Josephus citation of Daniel's prophecy of the temple's fall in A.J. 10.276.

3) The fact that the various portents enumerated in Mark 13 are prompted by the question in Mark 13:1-2 as to WHEN the temple buildings will fall. In so doing, Mark explicitly encourages the reader to understand everything that follows in light of the temple's fall.

4) This is a more complex argument that isn't always easy to articulate. But Mark 14:57-58 and 15:29 slanderously attribute to Jesus the claim that he will destroy the temple and raise it again in three days. What is striking is that the controversy is over Jesus' role in bringing about the destruction -NOT whether or not the temple will actually fall. This assumes that the temple's fall was not a matter of controversy in Mark's context.

5) Another complex argument, but Eric Stewart has written a book arguing that Mark configures Jewish space away from the temple and synagogues and instead onto Jesus. Words that were normally used to describe activity related to those sites (e.g., language of gathering, ritualized activities) are relocated onto Jesus. Stewart contends that this is ultimately language of replacement. Though Stewart does not explicitly connect this with Markan dating, its relevance is obvious.

6) The Parable of the Wicked Tenants (Mark 12) is an obvious allegory regarding the punishment of Jews for their rejection of Jesus. What is interesting is that the parallel in the Gospel of Thomas 65 (which is much more primitive than Mark's) omits any reference to punishment. This suggest the allegorization is part of Markan redaction.

7) The cursing of the fig tree links the notion of an unproductive fig tree and its destruction to an unproductive temple and its (eventual) destruction.

8) The tearing of the temple veil upon Jesus' death assumes some kind of divine causality that portends the entire temple's eventual destruction.

9) There are a few references that only make sense after the Jewish War. For instance the language of legion in Mark 5:1-20 only works after the War, since before the War the military in Palestine and the Decapolis was not legionary. As an analogy, a story wherein a demon named “Spetsnaz” is exorcized from a Crimean denizen should strike the reader as anachronistic in its politics if depicted as occurring in 2010; one would assume the story had been written after the Russian annexation of Crimea in February 2014, in which the aforementioned special forces were active.

Mark wouldn't have been written before there was a sizable Gentile Jewish population (Paul started his Gentile mission in the 50's, perhaps slightly earlier)There are references to war and persecution in Judea, which implies that they were either ongoing or recently over; the Roman-Jewish War started in AD 66.


Let's construct a timeline of known, dated works from 30 CE to 120 CE or so.

Work Date
Undisputed Letters of Paul 49-58 CE
Pastoral Epistles ?
Catholic Epistles ?
Johaninne Epistles ?
1 Clement 95 CE
Epistles of Ignatius 110 CE
Didache 110 CE
Papias 120-140 CE
2. The undisputed letters of Paul do not reference or show knowledge of our Gospel tradition.
3. The Pastoral Epistles may reference Luke (1 Tim 5:8), but their date is obscure (they may also reference Romans). The majority of critical scholars would date them after the death of Paul, and they are missing from Marcion's canon (CA. 140 CE).
4. The Catholic and Johannine epistles have uncertain dates (although likely in the first century) and do not directly quote the gospels. That being said, James has some affinities to Q (cf. Hartin, James and the Q Sayings of Jesus) and 1 John contains many linguistic/conceptual links to the Gospel of John.
5. 1 Clement was written around 95 CE (cf. Ehrman in his LCL translation). It refers to "the words of the Lord Jesus," (13.1-2) but appears to be quoting oral tradition (or is he just conflating written tradition?)
6. The first clear external citation of any gospel (Matthew) have occurs in the Didache, written around 110 CE (per Niederwimmer in his Hermenia commentary) or Ignatius (also Matthew, also around 110 CE)
7. Papias refers to a Gospel of Mark, although his description appears confused, and he doesn't quote it, so we can't be sure that it is our Gospel of Mark.
8. Therefore, Matthew and Mark must be written before ca. 100 CE, and all the gospels must be written after ca. 60.
So based on the external evidence alone, it would be reasonable to guess that, say, Mark was written in 70 and Matthew 80-90. You could guess a little earlier or later, but if you find Paul's silence convincing, you can't date the gospels before 60 or so. And generally if you have to guess about the specific date of something in a range of dates (60-100 CE), you have a better chance of being correct guessing in the middle of the distribution (70-90), rather than at the ends (61 or 99).

Why should we find Paul's silence compelling?

1. Paul uses the word εὐαγγέλιον (gospel) differently than what Mark is. (cf. the discussion on εὐαγγέλιον in Nanos, The Irony of Galatians: Paul's Letter in First-century Context.) Paul's concept of "a gospel" is confusingly distinct from Mark's.
   
   
2. Paul is all sorts of disputes in his letters, some of which would benefit from quoting the Gospels (e.g. Gal 2:11-13 = Mark 2:16-17, Gal 4:6 = Mk 14:36). In these disputes, words from the Lord appear to be direct revelations from God, not the words recorded in the Gospels. Why is this?
   
   
3. διδασκαλία/νουθεσία (teaching/instruction/admonition) in Paul never refers to the Gospels, but to either general ethical teaching, or the contents of the Hebrew Scriptures (cf. Rosner, Paul and the Law: Keeping the Commandments of God). If Paul knew of the Gospels, why wouldn't he say something about including them in teaching?
   
   
4. Paul quotes the Hebrew Scriptures all the time. Why on earth wouldn't he quote Mark, which claims to have the very words of Jesus?
   

This is just the tip of the iceberg.