Dating the Bible
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The Bible is a compilation of various texts or "books" of different ages. 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[citation needed].
With the exception an extensive manuscripts and fragments (found among the Dead Sea scrolls, discussed below), no Old Testament manuscript predates the 2nd century BC. The earliest manuscript of the New Testament is the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, a manuscript fragments of the Gospel of John dated to the first half of the 2nd century. The Chester Beatty Papyri P46, which contains most of the Pauline epistles, the Magdalen papyrus P64/67, and the Bodmer Papyri P66 are other noted early manusript, dated c. 200, over a century after the New Testament books were most likely composed. 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 various texts in Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) is an open topic of research. Therefore, assigning solid dates to any of the texts is difficult.
The range of dates assigned to the Torah (Pentateuch) is rather broad. It is certain to predate the 2nd century BC, but mainstream estimates of its oldest elements range from the 10th to the 6th centuries BC. The bulk of the Tanakh was likely complete by the end of the Babylonian captivity (537 BC) and had probably reached its fixed Masoretic form by the 4th century BC. The text had certainly become fixed by the 1st century BC and the completion of the Septuagint.
[edit] Manuscripts
The oldest known preserved fragment of a Torah text is a good luck charm inscribed with a text close to, although not identical with, Num 6:24–27, dated to approximately 600 BC (Dever, p. 180). The oldest complete or nearly complete texts are the Dead Sea Scrolls from the middle of the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD. The DSS contain almost all the books of the Tanakha, although not all are complete.
According to tradition the Torah was translated into Greek (the Septuagint, or 70, from the traditional number of translators) in the 3rd century BC. The oldest Greek manuscripts include 2nd century BC fragments of Leviticus and Deuteronomy[1] and 1st century BC fragments of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and the Minor Prophets.[2] Relatively complete manuscripts of the Septuagint include the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus of the 4th century and the Codex Alexandrinus of the 5th century—these are the oldest surviving nearly-complete manuscripts of the Old Testament in any language.
The Hebrew or Masoretic text of the Torah is held by tradition to have been assembled in the 4th century AD, but the oldest extant complete or near-complete manuscripts are the Aleppo Codex, ca. 920 CE, and the Westminster Leningrad Codex, dated to 1008 CE.
Additional manuscripts include the Samaritan Torah and the Peshitta, the latter a translation of the Christian Bible into Syriac, the earliest known copy of which dates to the 2nd century CE.
Differences between manuscripts can provide significantly different interpretations of the contemporary bible.
[edit] Dating texts
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 BCE, 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] Torah
Some critical scholars (the 'Biblical Minimalists") insist that the whole of the Torah shows evidence of its construction composed after 538 BCE, perhaps with material from an earlier oral tradition, as it were a "prequel" to the prophetic books.
Other people such as Israel Finkelstein, whose archeological studies tend to suggest that a substantial portion of the Pentateuch is a 7th century BCE construction, designed to promote the dynastic ambitions of King Josiah of Judah. The 6th century BCE 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 BCE, 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 BCE, 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 BCE). 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.
[edit] Nevi'im
The major Nevi'im ("Prophets").
The Books of Kings mentions the following sources:
- 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 BCE, the date of the last chapter (2 Kings 25), when Jehoiachin was released from captivity by Evil-merodach, and 538 BCE, 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. Very few scholars dispute these conclusions and argue for the unity of the composition of the book. When the Septuagint version was made (about 250 BCE), 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 BCE. However, 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 BCE) under the Syrian-Greek ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes (ruled 175–164 BCE); 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 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, on the other hand, finds it impossible for the "court tales" portion of Daniel to have been written in 2nd century BCE 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."
[edit] The New Testament
The most accepted historical understanding of how the Synoptic 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". Some, but not many, 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]
Mainstream views assume that the bulk of New Testament texts date to the century between AD 50 and AD 110, with the Pauline epistles among the earliest texts. The following table gives mainstream estimates. Minority views may pre- or post-date the individual books by several decades.
| Book | Approximate date |
|---|---|
| Gospel of Matthew | 60-105 CE |
| Gospel of Mark | 60-105 CE |
| Gospel of Luke | 60-105 CE |
| Gospel of John | 90-100 CE |
| Acts | 80-105 CE |
| Romans | 57–58 CE |
| Corinthians | 57 CE |
| Galatians | 45-55 CE |
| Ephesians | 65 CE |
| Philippians | 57–62 CE |
| Colossians | 60 CE+ |
| Thessalonians | 50 CE |
| Timothy | 60-100 CE |
| Titus | 60-100 CE |
| Philemon | 56 CE |
| Hebrews | 60-90 CE |
| James | 60-200 CE |
| First Peter | 90-96 CE |
| Second Peter | 100-140 CE |
| Epistles of John | 95-110 CE |
| Jude | 60-100 CE |
| Revelation | 81-96 CE |
[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 CE. They were written in Coptic and are generally dated to the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, though the Gospel of Thomas has ignited some debate, and scholars argue that it dates from 50 CE(Koester, HDS) to the late 2nd century CE(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. 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 BCE, 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 Isaiah 1:1), 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; this reliance on the supernatural 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 CE.
- The Gospel of John, John's Epistles, Jude, and Revelation were written between about 85–100 CE.
[edit] See also
- Torah
- Documentary hypothesis
- The Bible and history
- Synoptic problem
- Markan priority
- Dead Sea Scrolls
- Nag Hammadi library
- Wiseman hypothesis
[edit] Notes
[edit] Further reading
- 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.
