IN A RECENT NEWSLETTER BISHOP SPONG listed the ages of the Gospels as:

Mark (70 to 72AD); Matthew (82-85AD); Luke (88 to 93AD); and John (95 to 100AD)

The dating of Mark is no doublt heavily enfluenced by the scholarship of S.G.F Brandon in his book Jesus and the Zealots (1967), which places the appearance of Mark at about 70AD in Rome.  Most scholars accept this.  70AD was the year of the victory parade by the Roman soldiers celebrating their recent conquest and destruction of Jerusalem.  As Brandon painstakingly elucidates how Mark deals with this painful subject, especially as Jesus had been executed by those same Romans some 30-40 years earlier.  

We prefer a later date for Luke of about 135 -150AD, consistant with it's formal dedication to Theophilus, who was Bishop of Antioch during that time period.  Luke and Acts both indicate that the author had access to the Christian archives at the "home" church of Antioch.  The dedication of both books is meant to indicate the appreciation of the author for having access to those archives.  (Christian scholars prefer a much earlier dating for Acts, and consequently Luke, so that its claim to have been written by a colleague of Paul's ("the doctor") is reinforced.  I accept that some of parts of the later chapters in Acts were copied from the letters of this doctor contained in those archives, but around the time of Theophilus.)

I date John's Gospel as sometime around 175 - 200 AD, since there is no firm patristic evidence for its appearance before then.   The fact that Justin Martyr, who came from Palestine, before settling in Rome, knows nothing about any gospel by John, and the gospels (then referred to as memoirs of the apostles) which were consildated into one document by ????, contains now contribution attributable to John's Gospel.   However, I admit that there was some resistance to the appearance of his Gospel as evidenced to the disheveled nature of the narrative (ie sections missing and out of order, etc.), and consequently the gospel may have taken some time to be accepted as an authentic "memoir".

And for good reason (not repeated here) I prefer a later dating of Mathew (around the time of the weakening of the reign of Domitian and the beginning of the rehabilitation of the Jews, say about 95 AD) and place of original use to be in Egypt.

TO BE CONTINUED

04/26/09; john@sciencevsreligion.org.