Dating the Bible
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The Bible is a compilation of various texts or "books" of different age. While the books of the New Testament may be dated with some confidence, the dates of many of the texts of the Hebrew Bible are difficult to establish. Textual criticism places all of them within the 1st millennium BC, while traditionalist schools assign the Pentateuch a 15th century BC date.
Historical criticism of the Bible, originating in the 18th century, is divided into two main schools of thought: "maximalists", who believe that much of the Bible may be historical, to "minimalists", who accept almost none of its content as based in history. Textual criticism of the Pentateuch in particular is known as the "documentary hypothesis".
With the exception of a couple of fragments (found among the Dead Sea scrolls, discussed below), no biblical manuscripts predate the 2nd century BC. The Chester Beatty papyri are dated between 80 AD ( nearly all Paul's writings, dated by Young Kyu Kim) and 200 AD. Various Gospel texts pre-date 200 AD (Rylands fragment dated to approx. 125 AD). For this reason, dating of the older texts cannot be done directly by dating manuscripts, but relies on textual criticism, philological and linguistic evidence, as well as direct references to historical events in the texts.
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[edit] The Hebrew Bible
The authorship of the Hebrew Bible is an open topic of research, and who and how many people contributed to the text is a vital and lively area of investigation to this date. Therefore, assigning solid dates to any of the texts is difficult. Since the dating of the authorship of these books depends on the particulars of the deconstruction of the texts, the range of dates assigned to the first five books is rather broad, ranging from the 10th to the 6th centuries BC.
As in the case of the Rigveda or the Iliad, it is difficult to date orally transmitted texts, since they are not in a fixed form. Individual portions may well predate the entire text by several centuries. The oldest known materially preserved fragment of a Torah text is a good luck charm, inscribed with Num 6:24–27, and dated to approximately 600 BC (Dever, p. 180). Though whole copies of the Bible were not found at Qumran, the documents of the Dead Sea scrolls contained versions of many books of the Hebrew Bible. The Scrolls have been dated from the 3rd century BC to 68 AD. It is largely undisputed that the text of the Torah had become fixed by 400 BC.
In terms of the dating of complete authoritative texts, there are three main versions of the Hebrew Bible. There is the Masoretic text of the Torah, thought to have been first assembled in the 4th century AD. The oldest known copy (the oldest is the Aleppo Codex; the oldest complete text is the Leningrad Codex) now dates to the tenth century AD. There is the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Torah, made under Ptolemy in the 3rd century BC. The oldest copy of the Septuagint is centuries older than the oldest complete Masoretic text, and fragments of the Septuagint date to the 2nd century BC. There is also the Samaritan Torah, which emerged after the Assyrian occupation of the northern kingdom of Israel. The Peshitta, a translation of the Christian Bible into Syriac, a variant of Aramaic, can be useful in determining authenticity of passages and hence help establish dates. The earliest known copy of the Peshitta dates to the 2nd century.
[edit] Torah
Some critical scholars (the biblical "minimalists") would insist that the whole of the Torah is a postexilic construction (after 538 BC), perhaps with material from an earlier oral tradition.
A middle ground is held by people such as Israel Finkelstein, whose archeological studies tend to suggest that a substantial portion of the Pentateuch is a 7th century BC construction, designed to promote the dynastic ambitions of King Josiah of Judah. The 6th century BC Books of Kings tells of the rediscovery of an old book by King Josiah, which would be the oldest part of the Torah, around which Josiah's scribes would have fabricated the remaining text:
- And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it. (2 Kings 22:8 KJV)
Under Josiah's rule there would then for the first time have been a unified and centralized state of Judah around the worship of Yahweh based at the Temple in Jerusalem, portraying King Josiah as the legitimate successor to the legendary David and thus the rightful ruler of Judah. According to this interpretation, neighboring countries that kept many written records, such as Egypt, Persia, etc., have no writings about the stories of the Bible or its main characters before 650 BC, and the archaeological record of pre-Josiac Israel does not support the existence of a unified state in the time of David. Such claims are detailed in Who Were the Early Israelites? by William G. Dever (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, 2003). Another such book is The Bible Unearthed by Neil A. Silberman and Israel Finkelstein (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001).
A traditional strain of scholarship (the "biblical maximalists") would assign portions of the Pentateuch (generally, the J author) to the period of the United Monarchy in the 10th century BC, would date Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic history to the time of King Josiah, and that the final form of the Torah was due to a redactor in exilic or postexilic times (6th century BC). This view is based on the account of the finding of the "book of law" in 2 Kings 22:8, which would correspond to the core of Deuteronomy, and the remaining parts of the Torah would have been composed to supply a background from traditional accounts to the rediscovered text.
One way to date an ancient text is to examine the text for places or events that were known to the author. If, for example, the text refers to a town or village that did not exist until the 3rd century BC, then that can be used as a reference to pin down the approximate date of authorship. Also used can be the style of writing and common facts known at a particular place and time. Loanwords from other languages can be important, as the period of contact between different cultures creates watermarks in time that allow for dating.
Documents, inscriptions, and objects that have portions of the Torah, or the whole of the text, allow researchers to place an upper bound on the date of a particular portion of text, or perhaps even the whole of it. If the portion of text is small, it can be argued that it simply is part of an oral tradition; for that reason whole books or substantially whole books are proportionately more meaningful in determining when the whole of the Bible was written. Also useful are documents, inscriptions, and objects that speak of the Hebrew Bible, or portions thereof, or of people, places and events that are in common with Biblical narrative.
[edit] Nevi'im
The major Nevi'im ("Prophets").
The Books of Kings consists of
- The "book of the acts of Solomon" (1 Kings 11:41)
- The "book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah" (14:29; 15:7, 23, etc.)
- The "book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel" (14:19; 15:31; 16:14, 20, 27, etc.).
The date of its composition was perhaps some time between 561 BC, the date of the last chapter (2 Kings 25), when Jehoiachin was released from captivity by Evil-merodach, and 538 BC, the date of the decree of deliverance by Cyrus the Great.
The Book of Isaiah, in its present form, is by most scholars considered the result of an extensive editing process, in which the promises of God's salvation are reinterpreted and claimed for the Judean people through the history of their exile and return to the land of Judah. Other scholars dispute these conclusions and argue for the unity of the composition of the book. When the Septuagint version was made (about 250 BC), the entire contents of the book were ascribed to Isaiah, the son of Amoz. In the time of Jesus, the book existed in its present form, with many prophecies in the disputed portions quoted in the New Testament as the words of Isaiah.
[edit] Ketuvim (Hagiographia)
Traditionally, the Book of Daniel was believed to have been written by its namesake during and shortly after the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC. While some conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews still hold this belief, most mainstream scholars find this view to be untenable in light of both archaeology and textual analysis. Scholarship on the dating of the Book of Daniel largely falls into two camps: one dates the book in its entirety to a single author during the desecration of the Jerusalem Temple (167–164 BC) under the Syrian-Greek ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes (ruled 175–164 BC); the other sees it as a collection of stories dating from different times throughout the Hellenistic period (with some of the material possibly going back to very late Persian period), with the visions in chapters 7–12 having been added during the desecration of Antiochus. For example, Hartman and Di Lella, 1978 suggest multiple authorship, with some material dating to the 3rd century, culminating with a 2nd-century editor and redactor.
The reasons for these dates include, according to proponents of this view, a use of Greek and Persian words in the Hebrew of the text unlikely to happen in the 6th century, that the style of the Hebrew and Aramaic was more like that of a later date, that the use of the word "Chaldean" occurs in a fashion unknown to the 6th century, and that repeated historical gaffes betray an ignorance of the facts of the 6th century that a high official in Babylon would not have, while the 2nd-century history was found to be far more accurate (see Ferrell Till's analysis).
John Collins finds it impossible for the "court tales" portion of Daniel to have been written in 2nd century BC because of textual analysis. In his 1992 Anchor Bible Dictionary entry for the Book of Daniel, he states, “it is clear that the court-tales in chapters 1–6 were ‘not written in Maccabean times”. It is not even possible to isolate a single verse which betrays an editorial insertion from that period." Some scholars disagree.
[edit] The New Testament
Dating and authorship of the New Testament is the subject of much study, and much controversy. The traditional view is that the works were completed within the lifetimes of the contemporaries of Jesus. Some scholars believe the dating to be much later. Some scholars believe the situation is further complicated by the Gospels being drawn from earlier sources.
[edit] Approximate dates
The most accepted historical understanding of how the Gospels developed is known as the two-source hypothesis. This theory holds that Mark is the oldest Gospel. Matthew and Luke are believed to come later, and draw on Mark and also on a source that is now believed to be lost, called the Q document, or just "Q". John is thought by many to be a later work. Some, but not most, conservative scholars reject the two-source hypothesis and say it suffers from a number of weaknesses in terms of historicity and textual issues. [1][2][3]
- Gospel of Mark: +70 AD (conservative dating may be as early as 50)
- Gospel of Matthew: +80-90 AD (conservative dating in the 60s although as early as the 40s)
- Gospel of Luke: +80–90 AD (conservative dating in the 60s)
- Gospel of John: +95–110 AD (conservative dating in the late 80s to early 90s)
- Acts: +80–90 AD (conservative dating in 60s)
- James: ca.70–200 AD (conservative dating ca.45–62 AD)
- Colossians: +60 AD+
- Corinthians: +57 AD
- Ephesians: +65 AD
- Hebrews: +60–90 AD
- Epistles of John: +95-110 AD
- Jude: +70–100 AD (conservative dating in the 60s or earlier)
- First Peter: ca. 90–96 AD (conservative dating ca.64 AD)
- Second Peter: 100–140 AD (conservative dating ca.64 AD)
- Philemon: +56 AD
- Philippians: +57–62 AD
- Romans: +57–58 AD
- Galatians: +54–55 AD (conservative dating in the late 40s)
- Thessalonians: +50 AD
- Timothy: +70–100 AD (conservative dating ca.60)
- Titus: +70–100 AD (conservative dating ca.60)
- Revelation: +81–96 AD (dating in the 60s as a minority view among conservatives)
[edit] The Gnostic Scriptures
The Nag Hammadi library, a collection of books found in 1945, some refer to as Gnostic Scriptures (which include the Gospel of Thomas), were not accepted as canonical by Jerome in the 4th century AD. They were written in Coptic and are generally dated to the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, though the Gospel of Thomas has ignited some debate, and scholars argue that it dates from 50 AD (Koester, HDS) to the late 2nd century AD (Miers).
[edit] Traditional school
- See also Biblical literalism.
In Late Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, neither Jewish nor Christian scholars questioned that the Tanakh, and for Christians the New Testament as well, were accurate historical renditions of the events portrayed, written by the traditionally-attributed authors. whose ere attribution is listed. The only errors acknowledged were minor ones attributable to copyists. Today, such views are largely confined to Orthodox Jewish scholars and evangelical and/or fundamentalist scholars such as Kenneth Kitchen, Gleason Archer, and Bryant G. Wood.
Many of the scholars who hold conservative views believe that Torah was written from the mid to late 15th century BC, on the basis of 1 Kings 6:1. Similarly, they say, the book of Isaiah in its entirety was written by Isaiah himself, as stated in the in chapter one, verse one, and that the book of Daniel was written by the court official who lived and worked from the time of Nebuchadnezzar to the first year of Cyrus. Where events and people are mentioned before they happened or were born, they are explained as evidences of God's ability to tell the future in his communication with mankind, which renders the approach essentially irrefutable.
These traditional views went unchallenged down to the emergence of rationalism in the 17th century (see documentary hypothesis).
In respect of the New Testament, scholars of the traditionalist school such as FF Bruce, Gary Habermas, Norman Geisler, Bruce Metzger, John Wenham, John Warwick Montgomery, and Edwin M. Yamauchi agree with the historically and traditionally recognized dates for the New Testament, such as
- The first three Gospels, Acts, Paul's Epistles, Hebrews, James, and Peter's Epistles were written in the period between about 50–65 AD.
- The Gospel of John, John's Epistles, Jude, and Revelation were written between about 85–100 AD.
[edit] See also
- Documentary hypothesis
- The Bible and history
- Synoptic problem
- Markan priority
- Dead Sea Scrolls
- Nag Hammadi
[edit] References
- Dever, William G. What Did The Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know It?, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, USA, 2001.
- Fox, Robin Lane The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, NY, 1992.
- Hartman, Louis Francis, and Di Lella, Alexander A. (Ed) The Book of Daniel (Anchor Bible, Vol. 23), Anchor Bible, 1978.
- Külling, Samuel Zur Datierung der Genesis "P" Stücke PhD dissertation, 1970
- Pagels, Elaine The Gnostic Gospels, Vintage, reissued 1989.
