Yellum Notnef

Really? The whole world? Even that outside of the Roman empire like China?
I suspect the destruction of the temple had about as much impact on China et al as me eating that ham sandwich yesterday.

arnoldo

Obviously, the Gospel were all written before the destruction of the temple, unless the Gospel writers were trying to fool the people it was written afterwards. It's amazing all of the gospels and early church writing from the 1st & 2nd century are internally consistent within each other. It would be statistically impossible if all of this early church writing were actually faked and written in the 3 century AD and retain the same level of internal consistency. Note the following wealth of early church writing from the 1st and 2nd century

Early Christian Writings

This non christian writer uses statistical analysis to determine that the earliest church writings are from the 1st century.

The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Toto

No one in this thread is arguing for a third century date for the writing of the gospels. Where did you get this? The only question here is before or after 70 C.E.

Otherwise, this is just non-sequitur piled on baseless assertion. Do you have any evidence that the gospel writers could not have written of events happening some time before they wrote unless they were trying to fool people? Have you ever heard of historical writing?

And isn't it easy to make things internally consistent by copying directly?

Please note that Early Christian Writings dates the gospels to around 70- 100 C.E., and there is no wealth of earlier church writing.

Why describe Dominic Crossan as a non-Christian? That is not how he describes himself.

chrisengland

Arnaldo I don't know when the Gospels were written but I know some scholars(possibly most) date them after the destruction of the Jewish Temple.
The point is if you don't know alot about a subject' but you think something' but you know alot of scholars dissagree with you' use a bit of common sence and think' well maybe its possible I,m wrong because I don't know alot about it really and some scholars don't agree with me.
I,m sorry Arnaldo but I,ve watched you do that loads of times and I had to say something.
Chris

arnoldo

[QUOTE=Toto;5152647]Sorry, it was apparently a reviewer at the Amazon.com website. A later reviewer in the amazon website then states that Crossman identified himself as a christian in a NPR radio program.

Professor John Dominic Crossan

RussianM3_dude

So why no mention of the destruction? Should have been a pretty cataclysmic event. Sort of like a first century 9/11.

Toto

It has been pointed out that there was a mention of the destruction. Do you dispute this, RussianMp3 Dude?

Darklighter

Absolutely. But if you're trying to give a document the impression of a certain time period (and little divine inspiration), you write as if the Temple were still there, and throw in a few "prophecies" about it's destruction. What's so hard about that?

Arnoldo...

:rolling: Obviously... That was almost the truest statement you've ever posted. Except for that fact that even christian tradition states that NOT ALL gospels were written before 70 CE (Gospel of John). Jeez, where do you get this stuff?

JayW

It's quite posible that the Christian writers didn't care if a Jewish temple was destroyed. It wouldn't have been a cataclysmic event to a Christian.

neilgodfrey

It's not obvious why a story about an event in 30 c.e. should make reference to another event 40 years later, unless the author decided it was important enough to include as a prophecy -- and hey, that is exactly what we find. Simple logic tells me the story was written after the prophesied event.

I don't know anyone who argues that "all the early church writing" was composed in the third century. And the only consistency in the canonical writings is in the head of a believer who creates a lot of imaginary scenarios to imagine how they "could" be consistent with each other if we "humbly accept" this belief. This means of course that we cannot read them the way we read the noncanonical gospels or any other literature where we accept contradictions for what they are. We only apply overly imaginative faith-based excuses to the canonical books, and in this way "prove" they are different from all other writings.

As for the the "wealth of early church writing from the 1st and 2nd century" at Early Christian Writings , there are only some letters of Paul that are listed there, and one hypothetical text postulated by some scholars, that are assigned squarely before 70. All the others are given the date ranges commonly assigned by most scholars. The only gospel that is given the possibility of a pre-70 starting point is the Gospel of Mark, but the date range 65-80 means most scholars think it was somewhere within this range. A few think it's earlier than 65, and some think it's much later than 80 too. So you can see from that list that most scholars do not believe the gospels were written before 70 c.e.

The "wealth of [internally consistent] Christian writings" listed here in the possibility of a pre-70 date include the Gospel of Thomas and Sophia of Jesus Christ. They are not consistent with Paul or canonical gospels.

Crossan applies his statistical analysis to the Gospel of Thomas and Q. Other scholars (e.g. Perrin) have applied statistical analysis to the Gospel of Thomas to "prove" it was written instead in the mid second century. Arguments over statistics applied to Q and the gospels are used to "prove" Q was very early or that it did not exist at all. Statistics are merely raw data. What matters is the assumptions and interpretations that someone applies to them to make them useful for a particular argument.