I’m re-reading Köstenberger and Kruger’s 2010 book The Heresy of Orthodoxy, which disposes of the unaccountably popular views of Bart Ehrman et al. that orthodox Christianity was always just one of many diverse versions of Christianity that evolved by oral traditions until (very postmodernly) the brute power of the orthodox suppressed the rest.
A big part of their argument is to show how early the New Testament documents were in use – canonical use – compared to the second century Gnostic alternatives. One argument along the way is to debunk the prevalent idea (dominant since Walter Bauer) of “communities” of Christians gradually developing their exalted views of Jesus (by inventing stories, useful teachings and so on), which were eventually written down. To give time for that to happen much of the New Testament has to be dated well into the second century. It was a primitive oral culture, and all that.
Our authors point out the rather obvious truth that although popular literacy might have been relatively low in Roman Judaea, Jewish culture was entirely based on a corpus of written Scripture held to be the very words of God, in the Torah and the prophets. Not only were these writings preserved in the temple and every synagogue, but they were read in the synagogues every week, taught to the children, and sold in bookshops to pilgrims like the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8. This is confirmed by the hundreds of references and allusions to Old Testament Scripture in the NT, on the lips both of Jesus, his apostles and their opponents. You only bolster your argument from Scripture if your audience is already familiar with Scripture.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, too, show the proliferation of written commentary on these Scriptures. Additionally, there were official written genealogies, apparently of every Jewish person, to confirm their membership of the “people of the Book” and their right of access to the Temple. Hold on to that thought.
The authors don’t reference the work of Gary Habermas, but it’s relevant. Habermas (and others) use a “minimal facts” approach to give strong evidence that, from the very start, the Church held a high Christology, “divine, died and raised” in his parlance. His primary case begins with the scholarly consensus that Paul’s main epistles are genuine, and date for around a decade from AD 50. Habermas points out that they contain Paul’s account of his own conversion, within a year or two of the crucifixion, but more significantly of his two visits to Jerusalem, the first only about three years later, where the gospel he preached was confirmed by the apostles. His letters contain earlier information he received during those visits, notably the creed of 1 Corinthians 15:5-8.
This, and other evidence, makes it evident that the “DDR” gospel was what was preached from the very start of the Church, making the “legendary accretion” theories untenable. Either the apostles (and their growing congregations) had witnessed the events, or they were thoroughly deceptive cult-leaders. There’s not room here to refute the latter, though knowledge of how cults actually work makes it totally implausible. So let’s run with their being convinced, on good grounds, that Jesus was divine, that he died on the cross, and that he was raised from death and, not long afterwards, received visibly into heaven.
But there is a significant implication of this conclusion. We can no longer think of Jesus as a great teacher who gradually came to be worshipped. Instead, we realise that the disciples saw the miracle of the resurrection as confirmation of who Jesus was, which was a whole lot more than the idea that “Jesus is God.” For Jesus’s whole ministry had been about his revealing himself as the fulfilment of every significant promise to Israel in the (written) Scriptures.
And so Jesus was the promised Davidic ruler as in Ezekiel. He was the divine Son of Man, the ruler of God’s coming eternal world Kingdom in Daniel. Also in Daniel, he was the anointed one who would be cut off yet victorious. He was the suffering servant of Isaiah. He was the priest like Melchizedek (also divine, as Jesus himself showed) in Psalm 110. He was the Mediator of the New Covenant of Jeremiah. And he was the “prophet like Moses” of Deuteronomy, obedience to whom Moses made the final arbiter of membership of the Covenant people. The apostles, then, believed in Jesus Christ divine, died, raised and revealed.
All these were already believed by many in Israel as due for fulfilment. I leave aside other evidence the apostles had to hand, like the available genealogical records of Jesus’s descent from David, the correlation of his birth with the remarkable prophecy of Daniel both in the start of the fourth (Roman) Empire a few years before his birth and the dates of Daniel 9, and the astronomical phenomena surrounding his birth that were accorded significance by the Roman emperor, as well as by the Magi who sought out the infant Christ.
I want to focus, though, on the last two of the biblical figures which the disciples believed Jesus fulfilled, that is the prophet like Moses, and the Mediator of the New Covenant Jeremiah prophesied, to replace the abrogated Mosaic covenant that left Israel in spiritual exile even after the return from Babylon.
It is blindingly obvious, except to academic scholars following Bauer, that the Twelve would have concluded, as soon as they appreciated that Jesus was the New Moses for the New Covenant superseding Moses, that there would have to be a new Torah as well. It couldn’t conceivably be a question of the apostles preaching an oral gospel until they began to die off, when they decided something in writing might be necessary. Still less would they leave the task to anonymous second-century churches, competing with the Gnostic gospels.
No, it would instead be a question of seeking the earliest opportunity, and a suitable author, to do for the “exodus”(Luke 9:31) of Jesus, and the teaching he gave, what Moses had done for the journey from Egypt to the border of Canaan. Apart from the value such a Torah (teaching/law) would have for instructing the many new churches across Judaea, Samaria, Galilee and even Syria (eg Ananias in Damascus), it was just fitting that the New Covenant should have its documentation (a point that Köstenberger and Kruger make).
Who would write it? Were I an apostle, I would suggest that we should all contribute to the recollections to make them sufficient and correct, or at least should all have an editorial input. I would recommend that our most literate member should be the actual author, as books are not written by committees (contrary to the documentary hypothesis!). Former taxman Matthew would be the obvious choice as author. But one can imagine that leading preachers like Peter would have a significant input, which might, perhaps, help to explain the literary connection of Matthew with Mark. John Wenham suggests that the “many” in Luke 1:1 may refer to this joint-authorship, rather than to a multitude of unauthorised gospels. Makes sense to me.
What form would it take? in all likelihood, like the Pentateuch, it would be a mixture of instructive narrative and sections of “commandments.” Of course, there would be specific “new” elements such as the need to relate to the writings of the Tanach. But loose correspondence with the authoritative Mosaic writings would be an obvious editorial choice. And so Matthew begins with a toledot genealogy, analogous to the proto-history of Genesis 1-11. After its birth and commissioning narratives (parallel to the beginning of Exodus), the rest of the book includes, like the Torah, five main blocks of Jesus’s teaching, the first beginning with a succinct summary list (the beatitudes) rather like the Decalogue (though it’s actually a Nonalogue!). Just as Deuteronomy ends with Moses on a mountain surveying the promised land that he must leave to others to claim, so Matthew ends with Jesus’s Great Commission of the Kingdom, on a mountain in Galilee. Only whereas the Torah ends with the implication that, with Moses gone, they must await the prophesied “prophet like Moses,” Matthew ends with Jesus’s assurance that he will be with us until the end of the age.
What language would it be written in? Ideally, surely God’s New Covenant with Israel ought to be in Hebrew, which appears to have been more used in Judaen religious circles than was formerly admitted. The earliest witness, Papias (who met the apostle John), wrote:
“So Matthew composed the oracles in the Hebrew language and each person interpreted them as best he could.”
Modern scholars say that Greek Matthew doesn’t look like a translation from Hebrew (or Aramaic), and yet there are a few extant Hebrew versions of the gospel (one of which I wrote about here), which provide a few scraps of information that might very well have been lost in translation, and so suggest authenticity. The fact that we don’t possess a definitive Hebrew textual tradition is easily explained by the eclipse of Judaean Christianity after the Fall of Jerusalem, just as we have little or nothing else from that “prior to the time of the Gentiles” tradition.
When would the opportunity have arisen to write? Acts shows the months after Pentecost to be “So much to do and so little time” for the apostles. The desire to write a “New Torah” might well, as I have suggested, have been present from the start. Perhaps that foundational conceptual framing explains why we came to have a “New Testament (or Covenant)” rather than “The Story of the Incarnation,” or “A Chronicle of the Kingdom of God.” But it was more pressing to preach and teach the thousands responding to the gospel than to be shut away with rolls of papyrus.
Yet Acts 8 tells us that, after the stoning of Stephen, just a year or two later, a great persecution broke out, and “all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judaea and Samaria.” Since public appearance would have been impossible, and discovery and execution would have ended the Church, why did the apostles stay together, especially in deadly Jerusalem (Acts 8:14)? Might this not have been just the breather they needed to set the gospel down by the hand of Matthew? And if not, why not?
So I suggest the possibility of the original form of Matthew’s gospel dating from the earliest years of the Church. With Bauer’s evolutionary Christianity out of the way, it is theologically possible and, it seems to me, makes a lot more sense than an origin in Matthew’s old age.
Despite Papias’s description of ad hoc translations, it would seem that the high-quality Greek Matthew we have was made early enough to gain apostolic approval and so become universal. It would have become necessary for instructing non-Hebrew speaking diaspora Jews, as well as Gentiles, as soon as converts began to be made from those groups.
If there’s any truth in what I’ve suggested, then the world’s your oyster as regards early dating for the other gospels, however you see their literary relationship. Mark is traditionally Peter’s preaching recorded by his translator, Mark, perhaps in Rome. Traditions differ about it’s publication being before or after his death. It could have been at any time.
Luke’s gospel certainly has a character more historiographic than Matthew’s “new Torah,” and so may have been produced mainly for a Gentile readership. However, the hypothesis that Luke wrote for the Jewish ex-High Priest Theophilus, either as a convert or as part of the legal defence of Paul, rather appeals to me. To the non-sceptical reader, Acts’ date before the death of Paul may put the gospel back into the 50s.
The usual dating of John to the 90s AD is mainly based on his apparent dependence on the Synoptics, and the assumption that his high christology is late. But we’ve seen the second assumption is plain wrong, and with such an early Matthew as i have proposed, and a Luke perhaps in the 50s, John might well have written, in Ephesus or Alexandria, before the destruction of Jerusalem, of which he seems oblivious (John 5:2).
In fact, since there is no clear reference in our Bibles to a past fall of Jerusalem, and the destruction of the temple – such a crucial prophecy of the Lord – there is really nothing to deny the completion of the entire New Testament canon before that event in 69-70AD. Even Revelation could originate from around Nero’s time. In fact, that would provide another rather fitting parallel to the Torah, applied to the whole “New Covenant” rather than just to Matthew’s gospel, for it would match the interval from the Passover deliverance of Jesus to the hope of permanent blessing to the length of Israel’s journey from Egypt to the verge of Jordan.
