Christian Carnival CLXIX (169) is Up

The introduction from Mandi at Imago Dei:

Welcome to the 169th Christian Carnival! There are some great posts this week.

About Christian Carnival:

Contributing a Post to the Christian Carnival

The Christian Carnival is open to Christians of Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic convictions. One of the goals of this Carnival is to offer our readers to a broad range of Christian thought.

Posts need not be of a theological topic. Posts about home life, politics, or current events, for example, written from a Christian worldview are welcome.

Update: As the goal of this Carnival is to highlight Christian thought in the blogosphere, entries will be limited to blogs that share that goal. Blogs with content that is focused on a business, that has potentially offensive material Christians may not want to link to on their sites, or has no reference to distinctively Christian thought may not be included in this Carnival. There are other Carnivals that would be a more appropriate venue for that material. I realize that this will be a judgment call on the part of the Carnival administrator, and being human she may make mistakes. However, as the Christian Carnival is getting quite large, and it is sometimes questionable whether the entrants are seeking to promote Christian thought, I find this necessary.

Update: We also expect a level of discourse that is suitable for a Christian showcase. Thus entries may be refused if they engage in name-calling, ad hominem attacks, offensive language, or for any similar reason as judged by the administrator.

So, if you have a post in this framework - go here to find out more go to the Christian Carnival Google group.

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Christian Carnival CLXVIII (168) is Up

It has been a tough three weeks for the Carnival; and it is back: The introduction from Matt at Random Acts of Verbiage:

Welcome to the 168th edition of the Christian Carnival! For those that follow the Christian Carnival, you may have noticed that it hasn’t happened in a few weeks; Dory over at Wittenberg Gate has been out of contact as of late (please be praying that everything is ok with her!) so this is kind of a make-shift edition as we don’t have access to the normal Christian Carnival email. Because of this, posts for the last three weeks have been accepted and I will also be adding posts until Friday since many of you may not have known about the change

About Christian Carnival:

Contributing a Post to the Christian Carnival

The Christian Carnival is open to Christians of Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic convictions. One of the goals of this Carnival is to offer our readers to a broad range of Christian thought.

Posts need not be of a theological topic. Posts about home life, politics, or current events, for example, written from a Christian worldview are welcome.

Update: As the goal of this Carnival is to highlight Christian thought in the blogosphere, entries will be limited to blogs that share that goal. Blogs with content that is focused on a business, that has potentially offensive material Christians may not want to link to on their sites, or has no reference to distinctively Christian thought may not be included in this Carnival. There are other Carnivals that would be a more appropriate venue for that material. I realize that this will be a judgment call on the part of the Carnival administrator, and being human she may make mistakes. However, as the Christian Carnival is getting quite large, and it is sometimes questionable whether the entrants are seeking to promote Christian thought, I find this necessary.

Update: We also expect a level of discourse that is suitable for a Christian showcase. Thus entries may be refused if they engage in name-calling, ad hominem attacks, offensive language, or for any similar reason as judged by the administrator.

So, if you have a post in this framework - go here to find out more: Christian Carnival Participation Instructions.

It bears repeating one more time: do not send your submissions to any of the old submission email addresses -- send them to matt510 [att] gmail [dott] com

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John or The Fourth Evangelist: Part II

[The point of this post is to draw in both Critical and Conservative Bible scholars for, particularly, a discussion of The Gospel of John. I am not such a scholar, and I am posting my view on this - based on the work of others- to kick off that discussion. Certainly, it would be nice to have a good discussion of this here - or an "elsewhere" I am looking to create]

As the Catholic Encyclopedia points out:

The authenticity and authority of St. John's Gospel form the great battlefield of present N. T. criticism. They had been attacked as early as 1792 by a certain Evanson. The majority of contemporary critics incline to Harnack's view, which is that the Fourth Gospel was composed by John the Presbyter or the "elder" referred to in a fragment by Papias, and asserted by the Harnackians to be distinct from the Apostle and a disciple of the latter.

I think there are theological reasons for this assault on the authorship of John: as pointed out by the Catholic Encyclopedia article, John is mainly a theological work - not primarily an historical one - and it destroys the modern view that the divinity, and therefore the divine authority, of Jesus is a creation of the post-Apostolic church.

This part of the post will not be comprehensive - I would hope the reader will follow the links to the many much longer articles on the topic. However, I will try to at least deal with Ben's statement quoted in Part I:

I'm willing to concede more room than many of my colleagues for 'apostolic' authorship of many contested NT texts, but it is almost inconceivable (based on internal evidence alone) that, for instance, the Fourth Gospel was written by the Beloved Disciple who was John son of Zebedee.

To draw the distinction very sharply, I think it is almost inconceivable that scholars would discount the universal early church testimony to the authorship of the fourth Gospel by just that son of Zebedee based on the arguments I have seen presented. I offer the following resources for those wishing to investigate the Conservative arguments against the Critical view of John :

• The Introduction to the section on John in B.W. Johnson's New Testament Commentary Vol. III (1886):

  If, then, John did not write the Fourth Gospel, it must have been written about the time he died by a great Unknown, the mightiest mind of the Gospel historians and palmed off on the men who knew John personally and had been educated at his feet as the genuine composition of the last of the apostles. This must have been done so skillfully that no dissenting voice in the Church protested against the fraud!

  This expresses exactly why I hold Critical scholars to a high level of proof if they are going to say the Apostle John's authorship of John is "inconceivable".



• For a discussion of the difference between an anonymous work and a pseudoepigraphic one go here:

  "Until recently, most scholars tacitly assumed that the four gospels first circulated anonymously and that the present titles were first attached to them about A.D. 125 . . . Now, however, this consensus has been vigorously challenged by Martin Hengel. Hengel examines the practice of book distribution in the ancient world, where titles were necessary to identify a work to which any reference was made . . . Tertullian contends that "a work ought not to be recognized, which holds not its head erect ... which gives no promise of credibility from the fullness of its title and the just profession of its author." Hengel argues that as soon as two or more gospels were publicly read in any one church--a phenomenon that certainly occurred, he thinks, not later than A.D. 100--it would have been necessary to distinguish between them by some such device as a title. The unanimity of the attributions in the second century cannot be explained by anything other than the assumption that the titles were part of the works from the beginning. It is inconceivable, he argues, that the Gospels could circulate anonymously for up to sixty years, and then in the second century suddenly display unanimous attribution to certain authors . . . Hengel concludes that the four canonical gospels were never even formally anonymous.

• "Background to the Study of John":

  Views on the authorship, origin, and historicity of the Fourth Gospel have changed drastically over the last century and a half. One hundred fifty years ago, if one had asked a New Testament scholar which of the four gospels gave us the most information about the life and ministry of Jesus, the answer would almost invariably have been, “The Gospel of John.” Today if one asks a typical New Testament scholar the same question, the Gospel of John would be the last choice as a source of information about Jesus (if it was viewed as having anything to say about this topic at all) . . . This state of affairs held sway until only about two decades ago. Things have now begun to change again with regard to views on the Fourth Gospel as a legitimate source for information about Jesus’ life and ministry.

• "Major Differences Between John and the Synoptic Gospels"
• Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel of John
• "The Gospel of John: Introduction, Argument, Outline"

I will follow this last by Daniel Wallace, primarily, for sake of unity throughout the series: unless otherwise stated it is almost all a direct quote, paraphrase, and/or re-arrangement of Wallace's argument. Since Ben mentioned the internal evidence as adequate (and seemingly overwhelming) to prove the Apostle John was not the book's author, I will focus there (and leave the reader to look at the external evidence in the links on their own).

Internal Evidence of Authorship

Against John's authorship: Wallace traces three areas:

1. the identification of the “beloved disciple,”: Although the identification of the beloved disciple with the apostle John has been alleged as a proof of Johannine authorship, one problem plagues this certitude: would any writer be so arrogant as to identify himself in such a manner?
   • However, not only is ἀγαπάω rather than φιλέω used in this designation (suggesting more of a commendation of the subject than the object), but
   • John, in his old age, might well have adopted an affectionate term given to him by others in this self-description. “Far from it being an evidence of arrogance, as is so often suggested, it may perhaps be regarded as a sign of modesty" -- Guthrie


2. apparent contradictions with the synoptic material: Where John and the synoptics do overlap (only 8-10% of the time), there seem to be inherent contradictions, especially in three areas: the cleansing of the temple, the presentation of dominical sayings, and the chronology of the Lord’s supper.
   • Although John places the temple cleansing early in Jesus’ ministry, there is no necessary chronological indicator in John 2. Thus, John may have moved it forward for theological/motif reasons. Further, there is a good possibility that Jesus cleansed the temple twice
   • Although the Johannine Jesus speaks with a different voice than the synoptic Jesus, only if we assume both that (a) only ipsissima verba constitute authentic dominical sayings and (b) Jesus must speak the same way, regardless of his audience or locale (Galilee in the synoptics, Judea in John especially), does this criticism hold water. In our view, John has indeed hellenized the voice of Jesus for the sake of his largely Gentile audience. But this is not to deny his accuracy, for he basically gives us the ipsissima vox, not the ipsissima verba of Jesus.
   • The Lord’s Supper in John does pose major historical difficulties with the presentation in the first three gospels.
     • Wallace leaves it at saying that there are solutions available which, in the final analysis, may indeed show independence, but not contradiction; and suggests particularly reading H. W. Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ, 76-90; and I. H. Marshall, Last Supper and Lord’s Supper, 30-56.
     • Deffinbaugh also dismisses this while giving resourses:

       There are many technical questions involved in the timing of this meal, which are of much interest to scholars, but not of much profit to our exposition. Suffice it to say that John is not really interested in such matters, either. He must have read the Synoptic Gospels before he wrote this Gospel, and yet he did not see it profitable to clarify every apparent discrepancy. For a more careful look into these issues and possible solutions, see D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, pp. 455-458.

     • Johnson, however, says:

       To the same conclusions the Hebraic style of the book bears testimony. Dr. Ewald, the greatest Hebrew scholar of the nineteenth century, declares “The Greek language of our author bears the strongest marks of a genuine Hebrew who, born among the Jews of the Holy Land, and having grown up among them, had learned the Greek language in later life, but still exhibits in the midst of the whole the spirit and air of his native tongue.”

For John's authorship: Ben implied that the internal evidence runs against the Apostle John writing John; but there is positive internal evidence for his authorship to go with the rebuttals of the evidence against above.

1. Westcott's Concentric Proofs which according to Harris have never been refuted - only ignored.



2. Incidental Evidence:
   • The author uses the historical present more than any other gospel writer (161 times) and in such a way as to indicate vividness of portrayal. One should note the especially heavy use in chapter 4 and the passion narrative. This suggests the vivid recollections of an eyewitness.
   • In 19:35 and 21:24-25 the most natural reading of the text suggests that an eyewitness wrote the gospel. But this has been debated: “advocates of theories of authorship which deny an eyewitness author treat the clear testimony of this verse [21:24] as a redactional device.… By such a method any embarrassing evidence can be disposed of."
   • The beloved disciple shows up with Peter on several occasions; belongs to a group of seven in 21:2 (Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, the sons of Zebedee, and two others) — and here, he must be one of the last four unnamed disciples; and nowhere in this gospel does John the disciple appear by name (even though he is named twenty times in the synoptics). This strongly infers either that the author of this work was absolutely unaware of John the disciple—a possibility which seems quite remote—or he was John the disciple.
   • Independence from the synoptic tradition coupled with early and widespread acceptance by the church. The fact that over 90% of the material in this gospel is unique to itself, coupled with its early acceptance by the church, argues very strongly that it was authored by some authority. This, coupled with the further fact that John was widely employed in early gnostic circles yet was not thereby abandoned by the orthodox, argues quite compellingly that all quarters recognized its authority. A work not done by an apostle would hardly have met such a reception.

Going back to Johnson's statement quoted above: it will take far more proof than Critical scholars have presented up to now to overwhelm the external proof in the testimony of the early church; and the internal evidence which I think favors John as the author of John. Certainly, his authorship isn't "inconceivable".

Dating the Gospel of John

I am not going to go into this here. I will only state that I agree with John A.T. Robinson that John pre-dates the destruction of Jerusalem - I think it was written before 64 AD; and that John did not have access to the synoptics when he wrote it. There are many arguments on this in most of the quoted pieces and the reader can draw their own conclusion. The one conclusion, however, that I believe is impossible, based on manuscript evidence from 20th century archeology, is that John was written anywhere after the 90's.

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Interlude: Lewis on Critical Scholarship

I said I would pet my peeve Pooky at the end of Part II; but my peeve runs to the question of whether modern Criticism can even begin to accumulate proofs enough to overcome the external testimony to the authorship and veracity of the New Testament books. I found an essay that says what I have felt - not surprisingly by C.S. Lewis. First, as Lewis says in "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" (now "Fern-seed and Elephants"):

I think his idea was that you ought to know how a certain sort of theology strikes the outsider. Though I may have nothing but misunderstandings to lay before you, you ought to know that such misunderstandings exist. That sort of thing is easy to overlook inside one's own circle. The minds you daily meet have been conditioned by the same studies and prevalent opinions as your own. That may mislead you. For of course as priests it is the outsiders you will have to cope with. You exist in the long run for no other purpose. The proper study of shepherds is sheep, not (save accidentally) other shepherds. And woe to you if you do not evangelize. I am not trying to teach my grandmother. I am a sheep, telling shepherds what only a sheep can tell them. And now I begin my bleating.

There are two sorts of outsiders: the uneducated, and those you are educated in some way but not in your own way. How you are to deal with the first class, if you hold views like Loisy's or Schweitzer's or Bultmann's or Tillich's or even Alec Vidler's, I simply don't know . . . A theology which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia - which either denies the miraculous altogether or, more strangely, after swallowing the camel of the Resurrection strains at such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes - if offered to the uneducated man can produce only one or other of two effects. It will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist. What you offer him he will not recognize as Christianity. If he holds to what he calls Christianity he will leave a Church in which it is no longer taught and look for one where it is. If he agrees with your version he will no longer call himself a Christian and no longer come to church . . . I claim to belong to the second group of outsiders: educated, but not theologically educated. How one member of that group feels I must now try to tell you.

His four "bleats":

1. First then, whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading . . . These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.

   He goes on to discuss criticisms by Bultmann and others. The core for John is:

   In what is already a very old commentary I read that the Fourth Gospel is regarded by one school as a 'spiritual romance', 'a poem not a history', to be judged by the same canons as Nathan's parable, the Book of Jonah, Paradise Lost 'or, more exactly, Pilgrim's Progress '. After a man has said that, why need one attend to anything else he says about any book in the world? Note that he regards Pilgrim's Progress, a story which professes to be a dream and flaunts its allegorical nature by every single proper name it uses, as the closest parallel. Note that the whole epic panoply of Milton goes for nothing. But even if we leave out the grosser absurdities and keep to Jonah, the insensitiveness is crass -- Jonah, a tale with as few even pretended historical attachments as Job, grotesque in incident and surely not without a distinct, though of course edifying, vein of typically Jewish humour. Then turn to John. Read the dialogues: that with the Samaritan woman at the well, or that which follows the healing of the man born blind. Look at its pictures: Jesus (if I may use the word) doodling with his finger in the dust; the unforgettable δε νυξ (xiii, 30). I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage -- though it may no doubt contain errors -- pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read.

2. . . . the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by His followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars . . . The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous. There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance.

3. . . . I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur. Thus any statement put into Our Lord's mouth by the old texts, which, if He had really made it, would constitute a prediction of the future, is taken to have been put in after the occurrence which it seemed to predict. This is very sensible if we start by knowing that inspired prediction can never occur. Similarly in general, the rejection as unhistorical of all passages which narrate miracles is sensible if we start by knowing that the miraculous in general never occurs. Now I do not here want to discuss whether the miraculous is possible. I only want to point out that this is a purely philosophical question. Scholars, as scholars, speak on it with no more authority than anyone else. The canon 'If miraculous, unhistorical' is one they bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it. If one is speaking of authority, the united authority of all the Biblical critics in the world counts here for nothing. On this they speak simply as men; men obviously influenced by, and perhaps insufficiently critical of, the spirit of the age they grew up in.

4. All this sort of criticism attempts to reconstruct the genesis of the texts it studies; what vanished documents each author used, when and where he wrote, with what purposes, under what influences -- the whole Sitz im Leben of the text. This is done with immense erudition and great ingenuity. And at first sight it is very convincing. I think I should be convinced by it myself, but that I carry about with me a charm – the herb moly -- against it . . . Until you come to be reviewed yourself you would never believe how little of an ordinary review is taken up by criticism in the strict sense: by evaluation, praise, or censure, of the book actually written. Most of it is taken up with imaginary histories of the process by which you wrote it . . . Reviewers, both friendly and hostile, will dash you off such histories with great confidence; will tell you what public events had directed the author's mind to this or that, what other authors had influenced him, what his over-all intention was, what sort of audience he principally addressed, why -- and when -- he did everything . . . My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been right; that the method shows a record of 100 per cent failure . . . I can't remember a single hit. But as I have not kept a careful record my mere impression may be mistaken. What I think I can say with certainty is that they are usually wrong . . . Am I then venturing to compare every whipster who writes a review in a modern weekly with these great scholars who have devoted their whole lives to the detailed study of the New Testament? . . . consider with what overwhelming advantages the mere reviewers start. They reconstruct the history of a book written by someone whose mother-tongue is the same as theirs; a contemporary, educated like themselves, living in something like the same mental and spiritual climate. They have everything to help them. The superiority in judgment and diligence which you are going to attribute to the Biblical critics will have to be almost superhuman if it is to offset the fact that they are everywhere faced with customs, language, race-characteristics, a religious background, habits of composition, and basic assumptions, which no scholarship will ever enable any man now alive to know as surely and intimately and instinctively as the reviewer can know mine.

That has laid my precious pet peeve Pooky to bed. Now, on to John Part II.

[Comments are open here; but please limit them to Lewis's critique of Critical scholarship. Leave comments on the dating and authorship of the Gospels until the end of Part II]

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John or The Fourth Evangelist: Part I

[The point of this post is to draw in both Critical and Conservative Bible scholars for, particularly, a discussion of The Gospel of John. I am not such a scholar, and I am posting my view on this - based on the work of others- to kick off that discussion. Certainly, it would be nice to have a good discussion of this here - or an "elsewhere" I am looking to create]

I have a pet peeve towards folks who ascribe in some degree to Higher Critical views of the Bible. Let me define that as well as I can: I am not talking about textual, or lower, criticism, which is working hard at reconstructing, as much as possible, the original text of the Bible - very necessary and very good. I am talking about the "Higher" Criticism of the last two centuries:

Higher criticism, in particular, focuses on the sources of a document and tries to determine the authorship, date and place of composition of the text.

In particular:

Higher criticism originally referred to the work of German Biblical scholars. After the path-breaking work on the New Testament by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834), the next generation which included scholars such as David Friedrich Strauss (1808 – 1874) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872) in the mid-nineteenth century analyzed the historical records of the Middle East from Christian and Old Testament times in search of independent confirmation of events related in the Bible. These latter scholars built on the tradition of Enlightenment and Rationalist thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Lessing, Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Hegel and the French rationalists.

Let me make this clear: my pet peeve isn't that folks question the authorship and authority of the Bible: I expect that from materialists and rationalists. It isn't even that folks who consider themselves followers of Christ take up some of the materialist and rationalist pre-suppositions and arguments of Higher Criticism. My pet peeve (its name is Pooky) is about the arrogance/ assumptions of some of those Christian adherents (the non-Christian ones are not the issue here) who seem to believe true scholarship rests in the Critical camp; and that Conservative scholars aren't. Examine these recent comments in threads I have been involved in: First this

Given the currently presumed dates of composition of the canonical gospels, with Mark thought to have been written some 50 years after Jesus's death, and the others somewhat after that, there are many (including me) who feel that in the interest of verisimilitude, it might be more appropriate to refer to the gospels as written by the "Markan" community, the "Matthean" community, the "Lukan" community and (especially) the "Johannine" community, each of whom wrote - rhetorically, as was all current testamentary material of the time - to express their particular understanding of the events the gospels describe, as well as the doctrinal position taken by each of these communities toward those events.

and then this

I'm willing to concede more room than many of my colleagues for 'apostolic' authorship of many contested NT texts, but it is almost inconceivable (based on internal evidence alone) that, for instance, the Fourth Gospel was written by the Beloved Disciple who was John son of Zebedee.

These are only a taste. I have bumped into this same argument, and its variations, many times with assumptions by the makers that this is "just a known fact". The first quote presents these books being written by "communities of believers", or disciples, of these authors long after the event, and the fall of Jerusalem (a very critical event in this discussion). The second quote presents it as being "almost inconceivable based on internal evidence alone" that John was written by the Apostle John. Ben, in an unquoted part of this comment, also implies that all "scholarship" supports this conclusion. However, Conservative scholars find this Critical conception inadequate to overcome the universal, and early, belief in the Apostle John as the author of John. So, are the Critical scholars true scholars and the Conservative scholars some group of anti-intellectual apologists living on beachfront property on DeNile? That is the discussion I want to start.

Dating outside The Gospel of John

First, about that "Mark thought to have been written some 50 years after Jesus's death" comment above: this is important because Mark is generally thought, by both Critical and Conservative scholars, to have been a source available used in writing Matthew and Luke; and perhaps John. So, if Mark wasn't written until the 80's - that pushes everyone else farther back. However, certainly Conservative scholars do not push Mark back that far - the conclusion of this very good review, written by Daniel Wallace of the dating issue (as well as the internal and external evidences of authorship):

In sum, Mark should be dated before the production of Luke’s gospel which we date no later than 62 CE. Sometime in the mid-50s is most probable

So, first we have Mark in the 50's (25ish years after Jesus' death), while Peter (who Mark recorded) was still alive. In scientific support, a piece of Mark was found in Qumran cave #7 - 7q5 - and is dated as pre-70 AD.

Now, Luke is dated by Conservative scholars no later than 62 AD (29 years after Jesus' death); because otherwise its companion work (which it must have proceeded), Acts, would not have mentioned Paul's final imprisonment, but not his death that came as a result. Wallace (from the Acts link below) does not find the two Critical explanations of this satisfactory:

1. He did not want to mention the trial’s outcome. The opinions put forth for this refraine are very numerous—a telling argument against them. Some argue that it would put too much emphasis on the man rather than on his mission; that it would hint at a parallel with the death of Christ, which would be inappropriate; that the readers knew the rest of the story and hence Luke did not need to go on; etc. As Guthrie remarks, “It is not sufficient, on the other hand, to propose a theory of the author’s intention without supplying an adequate motive for the intention, and it may be questioned whether this condition has been fulfilled



2. Luke intended to write a third volume. This was the view of Spitta, Zahn, Ramsey, and W. L. Knox. It is based on the use of πρῶτος in Acts 1:1—a word which, in classical Greek, indicated “first of at least three.” That it does not do so in hellenistic Greek is quite evident from the data supplied in BAGD; further that Luke does not use the superlative as a true superlative is evident from his discussion of the first census of Quirinius in Luke 2:2: scholars have had enough trouble trying to locate two censuses of Quirinius, let alone three! Further, even if Luke did use πρῶτος as a true superlative on occasion, why would he break his three-volume work here? This explanation seems a quite desperate expedient.

All in all, that Acts ends where it does is a great embarrassment to those who do not maintain a pre-64 date. Robinson, who bases much of his Redating the New Testament

[Bishop Robinson, a theological modernist whose "Honest to God" made him controversial within the Anglican communion, began this book as what he labels "a theological joke": "I thought I would see how far one could get with the hypothesis that the whole of the New Testament was written before 70", the year in which the Roman army sacked and burned the Temple of Jerusalem. As it turned out, he got much further than he had ever expected, a journey made more impressive by his lack of any predisposition toward a "conservative" point of view. - commenter at Amazon

he wrote in his work . . . that past scholarship was based on a "tyranny of unexamined assumptions" and an "almost willful blindness".]

on an early (62) date of Acts, argues ably for this view. In particular, he points out that Adolph von Harnack, “whose massive scholarship and objectivity of judgment contrast with so many who have come after him,” is still worth quoting precisely because “on this subject he was forced slowly and painfully to change his mind.” Two snippets from Harnack’s The Date of Acts will have to suffice: “Throughout eight whole chapters St. Luke keeps his readers intensely interested in the progress of the trial of St. Paul, simply that he may in the end completely disappoint them—they learn nothing of the final result of the trial!” “The more clearly we see that the trial of St. Paul, and above all his appeal to Caesar, is the chief subject of the last quarter of Acts, the more hopeless does it appear that we can explain why the narrative breaks off as it does, otherwise than by assuming that the trial had actually not yet reached its close. It is no use to struggle against this conclusion.”

However, this flies, as does Matthew, in the face of the great underlying pre-supposition of German Higher Criticism: that miracles and prophecies are impossible and therefore Jesus could not have prophesied the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD in the Olivet Discourse. In fact, it is this rationalist anti-supernaturalist presupposition that marks Higher Criticism in general; and can be seen in the theology of many scholars of the school generally. Read both "Luke: Introduction, Outline, and Argument" and its Acts counterpart for a continued discussion of the authorship and dating of Luke and Acts

Of course, if Luke can get away with the Olivet Discourse as prediction, so can Matthew. If you are a Critical scholar who operates under the presupposition that prophecy is impossible, then Matthew cannot. Again, there is scientific support for a pre-temple destruction Matthew: The Magdalen Papyrus (P64) with a piece of Matthew 26 which has been re-dated by new scientific technologies and handwriting analysis to 30-70 AD. Also, the solution to the "Synoptic problem" favored by Wallace in his pieces quoted here is that, while both Matthew and Luke had access to Mark, Matthew and Luke wrote without seeing each other's work - and therefore they believe they were written in the same period of time.

The conclusion is that Mark, Matthew, Luke and Acts were written between 55 ish AD and 62 AD; or the authors intentionally wrote them that way in order to pass them off as pre-destruction texts. This dishonesty would really make them unworthy of authority or reading; but there is no real reason to believe this about them - and no indication that any 1st or 2nd century church father viewed any of them as written by anyone but the Apostle Matthew, the doctor Luke as a companion to Paul, and John Mark as a companion to Peter.

I have looked at the three synoptic Gospels to lay the groundwork for the real point of this post: John - I think the assumptions and mistakes of Critical scholarship are highlighted better in these works because John creates more difficult problems for Conservative scholars.

And, of course, to pet my peeve Pooky. At the end of Part II we will discuss that peeve a bit more.

[Comments, BTW, will be open at the end of Part II only]

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