One of the most common questions I am asked is why historians date the Gospels when they do. That is, why are the Gospels conventionally dated near or after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE?
One obvious answer is that the Gospels seem to know about the Temple’s destruction. In Mark, which is most likely our earliest Gospel, Jesus spends a lot of time predicting the downfall of the Temple, and the later Gospels also assume its demise.
But there is a natural follow-up question: Does this method not assume that Jesus could not have supernaturally predicted the Temple’s destruction? Does the fact that scholars don’t countenance this possibility betray an anti-supernaturalist bias?
While I understand these questions, I think they frame the issue in the wrong way.
The question is not whether Jesus could or could not have predicted the Temple’s destruction. Given that others predicted it too, many scholars think that Jesus could (and did) predict the Temple’s destruction, on purely naturalistic grounds.
The question is: when is a text which reflects knowledge of the Temple’s destruction more likely to have been written? Is it more likely that Mark, which devotes such considerable attention to the Temple’s destruction, was written before this remarkable event of world history, or was it more likely written after it? While not precluding the former, perhaps the majority of scholars claim it is the latter.
To repeat: this is not a question of scholars ‘ruling out’ an earlier date on the grounds that Jesus could not have predicted Jerusalem’s destruction. It is a question of assessing the probability of when one would be likely to write a text which includes – and indeed processes – this event.
If I pick up my copy of An Inspector Calls (1945), I will find in it a prediction of events which postdate the play’s 1912 setting, such as the First World War and the Great Depression. Thus, if all I had to go on was the script of the play, I could imagine that it was written in 1912 and accurately predicted the course of world history.
But this would be a mistake. It would be better to assume that it alludes to these events because they had already occurred. Just because a text contains an accurate prediction of later events does not guarantee that it was written before those events.
We have a similar situation in Mark, which is widely considered the first Gospel to be written. I don’t deny that Mark could have been written before the Temple’s destruction. I just think it is more likely that a text which reflects upon and processes the significance of that earth-shattering event was written post factum.
The are various ways to flesh out why this might be more likely.1 Consider the various motivations Mark could have had for recording this prophecy. If we assume that he wrote it well before the Temple’s destruction, then the most obvious purpose for including this prediction would be to preserve a tradition of Jesus.
Yet this does not seem like a terribly compelling motivation. After all, Mark is a terse book with a good deal of literary artistry. We should hardly imagine that the evangelist gave such attention to the Temple’s destruction simply for posterity’s sake, especially since there were many available traditions upon which he did not draw.
If we consider that the prophecy was included post factum, however, much stronger motivations to include this material emerge. Not only is Jesus’ prophetic power seen to be vindicated, any theological problems which arose from Jerusalem’s sacking are resolved. It is Jesus and Israel’s God, not Rome, which were behind the event.
There is another reason, however, to think that Jesus’ prophecy is being included post factum. Namely, that if Mark had recorded this prediction pre factum, then there was a risk associated with doing so: it may not turn out to be true. By contrast, if Mark is including the prophecy post factum, there is no Christological risk associated with it.
Such reasons as these convince me and others that Mark was indeed written very close or after the Temple’s destruction. Notice that none of these arguments rely upon the idea that Jesus could not have predicted the destruction, or an ‘anti-supernaturalist bias.’ On the contrary, many of the scholars who reason in the way I have outlined above think that Jesus did predict it and are themselves committed supernaturalists.
Coming into land, I want to pose another way of thinking about this question. Let us suppose that Jesus supernaturally predicted the Temple’s destruction, and that we somehow had a historical method which proved this to be the case. Would it therefore follow that the Gospels were written before 70 CE? Evidently not. It would open up the possibility, but other arguments would have to be invoked to support it.
It is therefore unclear what an alleged ‘supernaturalist’ approach to the Gospels –whatever that means – really does for us. It does not guarantee that the Gospels were written before 70 CE. At the most, it opens up the possibility that they were. But as I claimed above, historians are already committed to considering this very possibility!
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For a more rigorous defence of the argument I am outlining here, see Adam Winn, The Purpose of Mark’s Gospel. WUNT 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 56-67.