empiricalDeity

I am not a bible expert. But from what i been reading. We are very positive that the The Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70A.D.
And i also read that alot of bible scholars, date the gospels after 70 A.D. using other means.
From my understanding they don't mention the destruction of the temple, quite the opposite in Matthew that has Jesus understood by Christians to be still predicting the destruction. Would that have been a significant enough event to be mentioned in the Gospels if they were really written after 70 A.D?
Or since it was a jewish temple Christians didnt give a hoot anymore?

Toto

Bible scholars regard the "predictions" of the destruction of the Temple as written after the actual destruction, and use this to infer that the gospels were written after 70 CE.

Christians in 70 CE would probably have considered themselves a sect of Judaism. So the Temple would have been important.

spin

What do you think the rending of the curtain in the temple which unveiled the holy of the holies represented? This was the overthrow of the temple. The holy of holies was opened for all to see. The priests were now superfluous. The temple cultus was gone.

But Jesus lived before then, right? so the temple must have been standing when he was alive, right? However, apocryphal books such as Baruch deal with a temple standing at the narrative time when the text was written, even though they were written after the fall of the temple.

What we are dealing with is something technically known as vaticinium ex eventu, ie prophecy after the event. Consider, however, that Jesus reputedly dead around 30 CE, prophecies that the temple would be destroyed. Few of those who were around at the time of the reputed prophecy would have been around 40 years later when the temple was actually destroyed (life expectancy was generally much shorter than today), so what would the value of such a prophecy have been, when few, if any, who might have heard it ever saw it being fulfilled? It's material for the literary reader, reading after the event.


spin

Bboyneko

Romans kicked ass and took names

Clouseau

It's more convenient that way. You can avoid the embarrassment of Jesus making a documented, fulfilled prophecy, and have room for all sorts of stories about how the gospels got adulterated because written so late, as well.

Ray Moscow

It's not so much "convenient" as favoring an explanation that doesn't invoke magic.

Toto

If he had made a prophecy and it came true, it could have been a good guess, or a reasonable extrapolation from current trends. That would hardly be enough to convert a skeptic to Christianity.

But since we know of a lot of instances where prophecies were written after the fact, and we have no known instances of people able to actually see the future, the more reasonable interpretation is that the gospels were written after 70CE.

Besides which, a description of a fulfilled prophecy in religious literature is hardly "documented," especially when there is no record of that religious literature until well after the events.

There are other literary clues that place the gospels later. E.g., the round stone closing the tomb was characteristic of post-70 CE graves, not pre-70 CE.

Minimalist

Christians in 71 CE would have been highly motivated to distance themselves from Judaism. The Romans were still pulling the bodies off their spear points.

Clouseau

Let's re-write that, perhaps a little more objectively.

It's not so much convenient as favoring an explanation that doesn't invoke the supernatural.

Just as convincing?

Solo

I believe also that the references to the destruction of the Temple in Mark are likely prophecy ex eventu but I think people generally misread the full intent of the original narrative gospel. Mark was fully aware that the "prophetic" nature of the Spirit allegorized as Jesus is transient and illusory. When the Spirit is captured by "men" in Gethsemane, Jesus loses his supernatural gifts, and his captors know it (Mk 14:65). What Mark is alluding to, I suspect, are the psi phenomena of clairvoyance - the sudden envisioning of what the parapsychologists call "non-local reality". Here is a rather famous historical example of an empowered psycho:

Jiri