The first interview: Craig L. Blomberg, Ph.D
He received his doctorate in New Testament from Aberdeen University in Scotland, later serving as a senior research fellow at Tyndale House at Cambridge University in England. For the last dozen years he has been a professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary.
Authorship
The oldest and probably most significant testimony comes from Papias, who in about A.D. 125 specifically affirmed that Mark had recorded Peter’s eyewitness observations. Then Irenaeus, writing about A.D. 180, confirmed the traditional authorship of all the 4 gospels.
Dates
1. Standard scholarly dating, even in very liberal circles, is Mark in the 70s, Matthew and Luke in the 80s, John in the 90s. That’s still within the lifetimes of various eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus, including hostile eyewitnesses who would have served as a corrective if false teachings about Jesus were going around.
Comparison: 2 earliest biographies of Alexander the Great were written by Arrian and Plutarch more than 400 years after Alexander’s death in 323 B.C., yes historians consider them to be generally trustworthy.
Gospels being written within a generation of eyewitnesses; 60 years from actual events, are compared to biographies of Alexander the Great written 400 years after actual events. The gap is evidently too short for any mythology or legends to taint the reliability of the gospels.
2. Book of Acts (written by Luke) ended unfinished – Paul being under house arrest in Rome. The abrupt halt without further indication of Paul’s fate was most probably because the book was written before Paul was put to death. That means Acts cannot be dated any later than A.D. 62. Acts is the second of a 2-part work, so the first part; the gospel of Luke, must have been written earlier than that. Luke incorporated parts of the gospel of Mark, which means Mark is even earlier.
Hence, Mark might have been written no later than about A.D. 60, even the late 50s. If Jesus was put to death in A.D. 30 / 33, then the gospel of Mark is within a maximum gap of 30 years.
3. Perhaps the most important creed in terms of the historical Jesus is 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul uses technical language to indicate he was passing along this oral tradition in relatively fixed form.
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for
our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the
third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Peter, and then to
the Twelve. After that, He appeared to more than 500 of the brothers at the same
time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then He
appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
If crucifixion was A.D. 30, Paul’s conversion was about 32. Immediately he was ushered into Damascus, where he met with Ananias and some other disciples. His first meeting with the apostles in Jerusalem would have been about A.D. 35. At some point along there, Paul was given this creed, which had already been formulated and was being used in the early church. This creed may very well be dated back to within 2 to 5 years from the events.
A good case can be made for saying that Christian belief in the Resurrection, though not yet written down, can be dated up to within 2 years of that very event. And the event; Resurrection, is indeed the crowning confirmation of Jesus’ divinity and atonement for humanity.
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