From: SL500000@brownvm.brown.edu (Robert Mathiesen)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Dates of the Gospels and Revelation
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1992 14:34:16 EDT
Organization: Brown University - Providence, Rhode Island  USA
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If anyone is interested, here are some of the scholarly considerations
relevant to the dating of the Gospels and Revelation.

Actually, weird as it may seem, Revelation may be older than some of the
four gospels.  Within the five New Testament writings transmitted over
the name of John there are such differences in Greek grammar and style
that even some of the church fathers thought they could not all be by the
same hand; and the attributions in the manuscripts differ somewhat.

The author of the Gospel and the three Epistles is simply John, and if they
are all by the same person (no linguistic or stylistic reason why they
shouldn't be), then he held the ecclesiastic title or rank of *presbyter-
-os* 'elder.'  John is a common name, and this John never calls himself
an apostle (indeed, he avoids so much as mentioning the term or title
"apostle" except in one ambiguous passage which may be read either as a
truism about messangers and those who send messages by them, or as a cri-
ticism of the pretensions of (some of?) those who call themselves apostles).
Although he represents himself as having been close to Jesus and even pre-
sent at the Last Supper, which would make many later Christian commentators
assume he must have been an apostle, the gospel according to Mark also in-
dicates that the Last Supper was not limited to the apostles; thus there is
no reason to assume that this John was one of the (twelve) apostles.  Nor
do any of the older manuscripts of the gospel or the epistles in Greek call
this John an apostle in their titles or colophons.  The picture which these
four writings present is thus one of a disciple of Jesus, present at the
Last Supper, and eventually an 'elder,' but not one of the apostles.
The last chapter of the Gospel of John (which even a hasty reader can see
was added after John's recent death, in order to deal with a theological
problem which that death had raised in some minds) seems to imply also that
this John died an old man and was believed to be the last living first-
generation disciple of Jesus, who had actually had any first-hand knowledge
of him.  All this is consistent with a date relatively soon after the year 100.
Moreover, the oldest preserved manuscript of John's Gospel was most probably
written sometime in the period 100-150.

With Revelation, the picture is different.  Its peculiar, even ungrammat-
ical language is best explained as the Greek of someone who had grown up
speaking a Semitic language and never really acquired a perfect knowledge
of Greek: it is a kind of fluent "broken" Greek, not unlike the fluent
"broken" English which an immigrant might speak after living here for
many decades, if he had never mastered the language.  In the earliest
manuscripts, this John is called "John the Theologian," and only a bit
later he gets called "John the Theologian and Apostle."  He seems never
to refer to himself as an 'elder' (presbyteros) or as an apostle.  There
is no easy way to see him as the same John who wrote the Gospel and the
Epistles.  If either of these Johns was an apostle, it is the latter;
but there is no absolutely compelling reason to think that he was one.
He may or may not have been; we can't be sure on the basis of the
available evidence.

On internal evidence, Revelation seems to have been written during a
persecution around the year 100, most likely during the presecution of
Domitian shortly before that emperor's death in the year 96.  Thus it may
have been written before the Gospel according to John.

One of the earliest Christian writers, a certain Papias, whose book is
now lost except for a few quotations by somewhat later writers, in one
passage seems to refer to a small number of people as first-hand sources
for what Jesus said: seven men whom he names and calls "elders" and
"disciples," but who are almost certainly the same men who elsewhere are
called apostles (for the names match), namely, Andrew, Peter, Philip,
Thomas, James, John and Matthew; and also two other men, Ariston and
John the Elder (presbyteros), who were also "disciples."  So for Papias
there were also two Johns, and one of them, John the Elder, was probably
not an apostle, although he seems to reckon the other with the apostles.
Papias is conjectured to have died around 135.

Robert Mathiesen, Brown University, SL5900000@BROWNVM
Newsgroups: alt.pagan