The New Testament was written long after the death of Jesus?
objection:
How can you believe the story of the life of Jesus, reported in the New Testament, whereas it was written long after his death?
![bible[1]](https://www.veritadellabibbia.net/wp-content/uploads/bible1-300x180.jpg)
Many repeat the accusation that the New Testament documents do not contain reliable information, as transcribed many years after the facts they describe. The fact to keep in mind, But, is that those who wrote about the life of Jesus, they were eyewitnesses of the events described, or they gathered the testimony of people who had experienced those events or had seen them happen.
The very content of the Gospel texts shows that they were written a few years after the facts. Take for example the book of Acts, written by Luke as a sequel to his Gospel. As an account of the missionary activity of the early church, the book of Acts was obviously written after the Gospel and ends with Paul's presence in Rome, without mentioning his death. This leads one to believe that the book was written before Paul's death, as is commonly accepted, it occurred during the persecution ordered by Nero in 64 D.C..
If therefore the book of Acts was written before 64 D.C., the Gospel of Luke, of which the book of Acts is the continuation, it must have been written before that date, probably around the end of the fifties or the beginning of the sixties of the first century. Whereas Christ died around the 30 dC., we can conclude that the gospel of Luke was written, at the latest, thirty years after the events described there had occurred.
It also appears that the early Church believed that the Gospel of Matthew was the first to be written, which would bring us even closer to the time of Christ's life. Based on all this, we can conclude that the first three Gospels were written within the thirty years immediately following the occurrence of the facts. During this period, eyewitnesses hostile to Christianity were still alive, that they would surely have contradicted the evangelists if their accounts were not accurate.
This type of evidence prompted the liberal scholar Jolm A.T. Robinson to date the completion of the entire New Testament to around 70 D.C., that is, many years before the dates proposed by other critics. In this context W.F Albright, the great biblical archaeologist, comment:
We can say with certainty that there is no longer a solid basis for dating any book of the New Testament after the year 80 dC..
The only possible exception to this date proposed by Albright are the writings of John. It is in fact probable that John wrote both his Gospel and the Apocalypse on the island of Patmos, during the empire of Domitian, around 95-96 D.C..
in this regard, I would like to point out the latest book by Antonio Socci: “The war against Jesus”, in which the Catholic writer and journalist stands up to face the attack of the modern “rationalism” to the figure of Jesus and to the reliability of the Gospel account; to those who claim to distinguish a historical Jesus from a “Christ of faith” and to those who insist that the New Testament was written several decades after the facts, perhaps from hypothetical communities of scribes they have “reworked” events to their liking, he opposes the biblical testimonies, extra-biblical and extra-Christian that time has preserved, reading them with the help of a healthy common sense(Incredible to say, among these detractors are included exegetes who sign comments accepted in Christian critical works: they prefer to defend their prejudices and their theories rather than objectively seek the truth). From this he draws the conclusion that the synoptic Gospels were drawn up a few years after the events narrated and that also the Gospel of John, the Acts and the Letters are however prior to the destruction of Jerusalem of 70; this of course is a truth “uncomfortable” why recognize that the Gospels are not the result of a later elaboration but the testimony of people who lived those events directly, ready to give their lives to defend it, makes them practically unassailable. So this book is to be commended because it takes the sides of the facts meritoriously against the ambitions of the theories.
ps Since Socci is Catholic (and I hope there is no one who avoids it just for that), dedicate 2 chapters in Lourdes e 1 to the French mystic Marthe Robin, that from 1928 until his death in 1981 remained paralyzed in bed feeding only on the Eucharist which was the only thing she could swallow and which presented “spring stigma BLOOD” (as declared under oath by two distinguished doctors who visited it), I would like to ask ChristianFaith what he thinks of these cases of mysticism and of course it is not worth resorting to the scam, these are arguments from atheists…
One thing baffled me: Socci reinterprets some passages of the work “The life of Jesus in the Aramaic text of the Gospels” by Josè Miguel Garcia of the Madrid exegetical school, which for decades has been dealing with “retranslation” of the Gospels in Aramaic; well, regarding the verse of Mark 8,30 that says “And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone this about him”, Garcia argues that reconstructed in the original Aramaic he says instead “And he sternly ordered them to always see in him[that is, in Peter] the Son of Man”. It would therefore be a question of the primacy of Peter made explicit…what do you think about it? I don't know Greek nor Aramaic, but it seems strange to me that a precise and severe order of Jesus himself of such importance could then have been disregarded in fact by the behavior of the apostles as reported in the Acts and Letters…