Redating the New Testament

Rating:
Summary: Eisenman extends Bishop Robinson's "Redating" Evidence
Review: In some ways Robinson's "Redating" is of the same genre as Eisenman's 1997 "James the Brother of Jesus." Unfortunately, Eisenman hardly mentions Redating and certainly fails to give the attention to John's Gospel that Bishop Robinson would have us give. Yet, through Eisenman's focus on James (and subordination of John and Peter) he achieves a higher level of connectivity with other sources (particularly Josephus) and perhaps makes some real progress as to the problem Bishop Robinson, too, thought very real: the surprising lack of contemporary references to Jesus and his colleagues. Robinson would have been pleased at the extension of his work, even if he might not have favored the redactionism of Eisenman.

Robinson argues that the gospels were oral traditions later reduced to writing. Eisenman does not say precisely this, but he would have us conclude that later "foreign" editors and redactors got the names wrong and mixed up, including the names of Joseph, Mary, Mary Salome, Simon and Judas and even Jesus, himself. He tells us what he thinks the real names were and makes connections that follow on from this analysis. One should reread Robinson and then go on to Eisenman.

In the latest reviews it is said that Eisenman does not take us beyond mere plausibility. The same, of course, was true for Robinson. The speculations they make, however, are charged with excitement and are remarkably well integrated and worked out so that the plausibility is worth noting. In the context of their works, they make it plausible that the next discoveries or rediscoveries will yield all the more.

Robert Gray

Rating:
Summary: The illusion of scholarship
Review: Started off as a sort of "joke" in Anglican Bishop J.A. T. Robinson's words, "Redating the New Testament" has been used since its publication in1976 to vindicate the conservative Christian attack on modern critical biblical scholarship. For the past two centuries critical scholars have argued that the only books of the New Testament that can claim apostolic authority are the seven genuine epistles of Paul. By contrast, while Mark may have been written during the siege of Jerusalem, the other three gospels must have been written afterwards. Robinson, however, argues that every work of the New Testament was written before the fall of Jerusalem in 70. Although authorship is not his main concern and he occasionally distances himself from fundamentalists, Robinson supports the traditional attributions of authorship as far as it can go, with the result that the biblical claims appear much more reliable.

On the face of it, "Redating the New Testament," seems like an impressive work of scholarship. It relies on the works of hundreds of scholars. It seems copiously documented, and it contains many complex discussions of the New Testament Greek. How have biblical scholars viewed this attack on the core of their practice? Most of them have looked politely at it, said "Nice try," and then gone about their work. They are right to do so. Under closer examination Robinson is much less impressive. For a start, Robinson simply assumes parts of his argument. He does not confront the case that II Thessalonians, Ephesians or the Pastoral Epistles were not written by Paul. He does not really confront John Knox's argument that Acts is not an accurate account of Paul's life. The whole synoptic problem is simply dismissed, because a few scholars criticize it, though clearly synoptic orthodoxy is alive and well in 2004. A tendency to build castles in the air occurs throughout the book. A questionable dating and place for Philippians is used to build an unlikely date for the pastoral epistles. The tendentious dating for Matthew and Luke is used to support John. The tendentious dating for II Peter is then used to support the dating of Revelation and John.

Robinson's core argument, by which his book stands or falls, is that the New Testament must have been written before 70, because there is no clear reference to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. But all four gospels have Jesus prophesying the temple's ruin. Now if Robinson believed that Jesus successfully prophesied this he would have to show that the gospels were written before 70, just like anyone else who claims to predict the future. So he has to provide other arguments. The gospel statements are supposedly too vague to be after the fact prophecy, although his comparisons with II Baruch and the Sybilline Oracles do not really support this. This may just show that the gospel authors were farther away. Robinson argues that the synoptic suggestion that those in Jerusalem should flee to the hills could not be an after the fact prophecy, because according to a somewhat apocryphal tradition the Jerusalem Church instead fled to the city of Pella. But this undercuts his argument, since the Jerusalem Church, of all people, would have access to Jesus' traditions and would therefore have followed his advice. It is all very well to argue that the prophecies have precedents in the Old Testament. But Robinson fails to ask why Christians would believe in the temple's destruction. It is one thing to believe that Jerusalem might be attacked, but given their apocalyptic world-view, why would they think that Rome would win? To the extent that scholars, such as E.P. Sanders, believe there is something genuine in Jesus' predictions, it is that Jesus believed that God would destroy the temple, as part of His ultimate triumph. Therefore the fact that the Gospels assign the task to Jerusalem's enemies must be a sign of post-70 editing.

Elsewhere Robinson engages in questionable assumptions. He tries to buck up his very weak arguments on II Peter by arguing against the very idea of pseudepigraphy. In doing so, he makes the questionable assumption that only heretics, and never the orthodox, would want to support their arguments by false attribution. He argues that Revelation must have been written under Nero and not, as the best church tradition states, Domitian. Since Domitian was clearly a less tyrannical ruler, it would not have been rational to respond with the Apocalypse. This assumes that Revelation's author was rational. Yet elsewhere, Robinson will support his arguments with patently legendary and questionable material, as well as make hypothetical arguments that he admits are unsupported (see his discussion of Hebrews, Matthew, Mark, James, II Peter, Revelation, John). And then there are the larger problems. Is it really likely that the Christian church would write almost nothing from 75 to 110, at a time when "heresy" was clearly increasing? Why would the small Christian community feel the need to write four gospels, all at the same time, and why is John so different from the other three? John's gospel has no exorcisms, no real parables, only the briefest mention of the Kingdom of God and is the only one where Jesus says "I am the way, the truth and the life." And why is everything written in Greek? Robinson could assume in 1976 that Judea was so Hellenized that it would be perfectly natural for everyone to speak Greek. But in the past few decades it has been clear in works by Freyne, Sanders, Meier and Dunn that this is much less likely. One still has to explain the gap from the rural world of Galilee to the urban world of the Greek diaspora, and Robinson doesn't.

Rating:
Summary: A Title That Deserves Reprinting
Review: What a pity that this pathbreaking work is out of print while publishers flood the bookstores with fantasy-as-history in an unending stream.

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.

His conclusion is that there is no compelling evidence - indeed, little evidence of any kind - that anything in the New Testament canon reflects knowledge of the Temple's destruction. Furthermore, other considerations point consistently toward early dates and away from the common assumption (a prejudice with a seriously circular foundation) that a majority of primitive Christian authors wrote in the very late First or early-to-middle Second Century under assumed names.

For want of data, absolute proof of Robinson's thesis is impossible, and the weight of his arguments varies - from overwhelming in the case of the Epistle to the Hebrews through powerful (the Gospels, Acts and the Epistles of John) to merely strong (the Pastoral Epistles, the non-Johannine Catholic Epistles and Revelation).

In a postscript, Robinson reconsiders the dates of several subapostolic works: The Clementine Epistles, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Didache, the accepted dates for which range from the 90's to the latter half of the Second Century. He shows that, freed of the "push" of late dating of the canon, the most natural dates for these writings are earlier and that all could well have been written by 85 A.D.

Whether or not one agrees with every word of Robinson's analysis, he makes his case well and should force all students of the New Testament to rethink seriously the presuppositions that underlie much of what is currently written about First Century Christianity. Of course, that's not likely to happen unless some publisher brings "Redating the New Testament" back into print.