Can We Trust the New Testament?

The title of this note is also the title of a 1977 book by Bishop John A.T. Robinson which I've reread a number of times. Most recently, I read it while facilitating sessions of the "Living the Questions" (LTQ) course in progress at Pilgrims'.

Several members of the "faculty" of LTQ are members of "the Jesus Seminar" which, like most post-World War II Christian scholarship hold that most of the New Testament (NT) books were written decades--generations--after the days of Jesus and the beginning of the Christian church. However, it is seldom pointed out that all of the bases for this "late" dating of the NT books are founded on untested, largely unexamined, and unverified assumptions. These assumptions, for the most part, were the product of the "German School" of theologians working in the late 1940's and '50's and, in my view, were based on the assumptions--not of First Century patterns of writing and authorship--but on their own 20th Century patterns of writing. It appears that their controlling hypothesis was, "This is how we do it, so that's how they must have done it."

From such assumptions come the hypotheses that Mark, the shortest gospel, was written first--because it's the shortest and scholars' first editions are always shorter than their later editions. And that, because Mark was thus first, then Luke and Matthew copied from Mark, adding their own material gathered from other sources.

As Robinson notes in his book, the arguments also try to explain away the "difficult sections" of the NT books by making them the work of second or third generation Christians, rather than eyewitnesses or companions of the eyewitnesses, and slotting their work in the 70's and later of the First Century CE, and into the early 2nd Century. Robinson also comments that the selection of target decades for the hypotheses is interesting because the 70's in particular are a decade we really know little about.

Robinson concludes that there is no hard evidence and no serious reason for the late dating of the texts, strongly suggesting that, both the early lore of the church (cf. Eusebius, et al) and the internal evidence of the texts (none mentions the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE--a cataclysm which would hardly have gone unnoted) may be yet more reliable. His timeline puts the authorship of the NT in the 45-69 CE range and also makes room still for development of proto-gospels prior to that.

His conclusion? The NT is probably more trustworthy than less, particularly when understood better in its own context.