Dating the Gospels after 70 AD

A Primer on the Gospels' Dating (Part Two)

Why are the gospels commonly dated after 70 AD?

Given the importance of this question, I thought it would be useful to put together a primer on the Gospels’ dating. In part one, I surveyed arguments for thinking that the gospels were dated before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

As I tried to show there, the case that the Gospels were written early is not without substance. Some scholars take this view. But I think that the position that all of the Gospels post-date 70 is better supported. In this piece, I unpack the reasons why.

1. Dating Mark

The dating of Mark is pivotal to dating the canonical Gospels, for most scholars believe that Matthew and Luke relied upon Mark, and many leading scholars have come to see John as dependent upon one (or more) of the Synoptic Gospels.¹ What reason is there then to date Mark after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD?

If you plug this question into your search engine, you will find many sites suggesting that the reason why scholars date Mark after 70 AD is because Mark seems to be aware of the Temple’s destruction, and scholars cannot countenance the possibility that Jesus actually supernaturally predicted the fall of Jerusalem. The post 70-AD dating is thus chalked up to an anti-supernaturalist bias of gospel scholars.

This line of reasoning is highly misleading. Many scholars do think that Jesus could have predicted the Temple’s destruction, on purely naturalistic grounds, since other figures also seem to have predicted it.² The question is not: could Jesus have predicted the Temple’s destruction? It is, when is a text which refers and processes the Temple’s destruction more likely to have been written: before or after it?

I don’t doubt that some people might have predicted the fall of the Twin Towers, the rise of Trump, or other world events. But when are all of the books which reflected on these prophecies written? Correct me if I am wrong; they are always after the event!

So it is with Mark. The better part of Mark’s passion narrative is concerned with the fact that the Temple will be destroyed. This is seen in Jesus’ explicit statement to that effect, his Temple protest and parable of the vineyard, as well as in the peculiar omens at his death, which have been read to portend the omens at Jerusalem’s destruction.³

It appears then that Mark has dedicated several chapters to the question of the Temple’s destruction. This is better explained if it was written after the event.

When one assumes this post-70 lens, which I have defended in more detail here, it is remarkable how other puzzling features of the Gospel begin to fall into place. To take just one example, a number of scholars have thought that Mark might be responding to the imperial propaganda of Vespasian, the Emperor who used the Temple’s destruction to consolidate his rise to Princeps around 70 AD.

As I have documented here and here, there are a number of potential nods to the Emperor Vespasian in Mark. My favourite is that Vespasian put out propaganda that he had healed a blind man with spittle. If Mark was written in the shadow of this propaganda, we could easily explain why King Jesus performs the same action.

Responses to an Early Dating

If the gospel was written after the destruction of the Temple, how might we account for points in favour of an earlier dating? Let us look at three we explored earlier.

One common idea is that Mark cannot not be dated after 70 AD, because Jesus’ prophecy – ‘not one stone shall be left standing on another’ – did not take place. Yet in my view, this is only a problem if we take Jesus’ words completely literally. The image Jesus is painting with his words is one of total devastation, and this certainly did come to pass (regardless of whether some actual stones were left standing or not.)

It is also sometimes proposed that elements of the mini-apocalpyse are best placed earlier on. We have no evidence, for example, that the Church ‘fled to the mountains.’ Moreover, the ‘abomination of desolation’ could refer to an earlier event, such as the the earlier intention of Caligula to place his statue in the Temple in 39/40 AD.

Yet neither of these arguments strikes me as particularly forceful. We do have some evidence that the Jesus movement fled from Jerusalem when it was destroyed, even if the details are somewhat sketchy.⁴ Moreover, the ‘abomination of desolation’ might just as plausibly refer to the idolatrous Roman standards erected in the Temple upon its conquest. This is one of the most common attempt to understand it.

Finally, it is sometimes argued that Mark’s assumption of the Jewish law fits better with an early context of the gospel. Yet it is difficult to see what exactly this establishes. It is almost undeniable that Mark draws upon some early material in composing his gospel. The question is when the gospel in toto was written.

2. Dating Matthew

Matthew is often dated between 75-100 AD. The strongest reason for this is that Matthew depends on Mark. Around 600 of Mark’s 660 verses are included in Matthew, many of them verbatim. The fact that Matthew improves Mark is one strong clue that Matthew came later, rather than the other way around. Allowing some time for dissemination and copying, this might give us an earliest date around 75 AD.

Yet there are other reasons to support a post 70 dating. One is that Matthew shows an even more careful knowledge of the Temple’s destruction than Mark. In an insertion to the middle of Mark’s parable of the great supper, Matthew states: ‘The king was furious, and sending his troops he killed those murderers and burned their city' (22.7). Rather than a coincidence, this is best seen as an allusion to Jerusalem in flames.

It is sometimes said that Matthew’s focus on the law fits an early setting better than a later one. Yet this gets things the wrong way round. Rather, Matthew’s legal focus fits a context after the Temple’s destruction, in which rabbinic Judaism and the study of the law, rather than the Temple, was emerging as the new focal point of Judaism. It is in this context which Matthew presents Jesus firmly as the New Moses.

Some facts may help us to appreciate this setting. For instance, Matthew twice inserts – ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ – a verse which was naturally pivotal for the rabbis in the period after the Temple. Moreover, we might also see Jesus’ rebuke of those who loved to be called ‘rabbi’ as a subtle dig on the expression, which became an official title only in the late first-century.⁵ The evidence for a post 70 Matthew is clear.

3. Dating Luke-Acts

Some of the key reasons for dating Luke-Acts after the Temple’s destruction follow a similar course to Matthew. Like Matthew, Luke has relied upon and ‘improved’ Mark. Luke also displays a more specific knowledge of the Temple’s destruction (21:20-24). This leaves us only to ask: are the reasons for dating Luke early persuasive?

The most important reason to date Luke early is that it ends, seemingly abruptly, with the arrival of Paul in Rome. If the author did not know of Paul’s death, it was written at the latest in the early 60s AD – with the gospel dating even earlier than that.

It is easy to see that this is an argument from silence, and not a particularly good one. It relies on a simple assumption: that Luke would have written about Paul’s death if he knew about it. Yet are there any good reasons for thinking that this is true?

The argument works on the premise that Acts is concerned with the biography of Paul, in much the same way as Luke was with Jesus. But even if Acts should be considered biographical, it doesn’t follow that Acts should narrate the death of Paul.

This point is well made by Sean Adams, who has argued that Acts is a ‘collected biography’, describing a series of the lives of Jesus’ most important followers.⁶ In this comparison, Adams observes that “recounting the death of a follower was not a requisite feature in collected biographies.”⁷ It was thus “unproblematically omitted.”⁸

An Even Later Luke…

From these considerations, the earliest that Luke-Acts might have been written was in the last quarter of the first century. Yet some scholars would argue that Luke might be even later than this. Let us inspect three factors which may point in this direction.

First, a growing minority of scholars believe that Luke was reliant not only upon Mark but on Matthew. Finding no need for a hypothetical ‘Q’ source, they posit that the material Luke shares with Matthew was derived from him. If Matthew makes best sense towards the end of the first century, Luke may be placed in the early second.

Second, the idea that Luke relied upon Josephus has persuaded a number of scholars. Since Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews was written around 93 AD, this would place Acts (and its prequel?) sometime after that period, perhaps in the early second century.

Third, a number of elements may support an early second-century context. This includes Luke’s style, which might be associated with the ‘second sophistic’, a style of Greek literature aping classical Greek which bloomed in the second century; his highly rhetorical portrayal of Paul; as well as his more developed ecclesiology.

One question currently under discussion is Luke’s terminus ad quem – the latest the gospel could have been written. It is notable that Ignatius quotes a passage which might be from Luke,⁹ and by the early-mid second century the arch-heretic Marcion seems to have had a truncated copy of Luke, with certain passages left out.

Yet here we might give an honourable mention to the view that Marcion’s version of Luke is in fact an earlier version than our current version of Luke.¹⁰ Though certainly a minority view, this would place ‘our’ Luke in the middle of the second century. It would contend that certain portions of the text, like the gospel’s infancy narratives, were added after Marcion, to reinforce the Jewishness of the gospel.

4. Dating John

Finally, we turn to John. Traditionally, John is thought to have been the last gospel. While it is now unclear whether John or Luke should be considered our fourth gospel, there are some good reasons to think that John was at least later than Mark.

As a growing number of scholars have begun to argue, there is some evidence that John has relied on and reworked Mark, as well as portions of Matthew and Luke. Mark Goodacre has gone so far to call John a ‘fourth synoptic gospel’, since there are a number of lengthy passages in John which can be set alongside the Synoptics.¹¹

That John belongs somewhere in the late first-century is supported by other factors. One is that the gospel reflects a more developed split between Judaism and parts of the Jesus movement. The expression ‘out of the synagogue’ (aposynagōgos) first appears in the Fourth Gospel, and is typically taken to reflect a moment late in the first-century when a more distinct Christian identity had begun to emerge.

Another reason for a later dating of John is that it strongly tempers the imminent expectation of the end reflected in the Synoptic gospels. This is seen in its substitution of ‘kingdom of God’ language, so prominent in the earlier gospels, with ‘eternal life’ lexis. It is also reflected in its epilogue, which seems to deal with the disappointment that the beloved disciple had passed away before Jesus’ return (21:22).

Yet we have seen that an early dating of John is not without cause. Recently, George Van Kooten has proposed that John 5:2 is a linchpin of an earlier dating. Since this passage assumes that ‘there is in Jerusalem’ a pool with five porticoes – a site ruined during the destruction of Jerusalem – this verse is taken as evidence of a pre-70 date.

Can this verse bear the weight of a pre-70 dating? It might be more convincing if there were no other instances in which eimi (the verb ‘to be’) was used a historic present – a present tense referring to a past action. Yet as Andreas Köstenberger has suggested, there are a few plausible occurrences within John itself (10:8; 19:40).¹² On the balance of evidence, it looks to me like this verse doesn’t take us before 70 AD.

Why Does it Matter?

We might end this primer with a short reflection on the question.. So what? What might it tell us about the gospels if they written after 70 AD?

One way of answering this question is in relation to the gospels’ purpose. If the gospels were written post-70, we can gain better insight into why they were written. Motives may have included codifying the memory of the first generation, now dying out; processing the theological trauma of the Temple’s destruction; and plotting new directories for the Church and its theology in view of the parousia’ delay.

Yet the implications are not only literary – they are also historical. These documents were not written by Jesus’ earliest followers just after his death. They are more substantially the product of later authors, whose identities are more difficult for us to uncover. These gospels therefore reflect the development of the Jesus tradition in varied contexts in the later first (and potentially early second) centuries.

This is not to say that the gospels are simply unreliable as products of the Church. As ancient biographies go, it is exciting that we have four bíoi written within around a century of their subject. Yet it is to say that we have a good deal of time for the story to develop, for deeper reflection on the ministry of Jesus to have occurred, and for ‘gaps’ to be filled in ways that challenge the historian to parse fact from fiction.

Historically, it is surely painful that we do not have even earlier lives of Jesus. Yet we must also be reminded that earlier is not always better. Many critics have called Andrew Roberts’ biography of Winston Churchill the best among a thousand written. Yet it was published in 2018. Over fifty years after Churchill’s death, Roberts could see not only the facts of Churchill’s life, but the meaning of his ongoing significance.

In writing after a generation had passed, the evangelists were not simply chronicling their anecdotes of Jesus. They developed and enshrined a reception of the Jesus tradition at a dynamic point in sacred history. To put it simply, they were asking not only: who was that Jesus of Nazareth? But, who is this Jesus in our own lives today?

1. See Catrin H. Williams, Eve-Marie Becker, Helen K. Bond (eds.) John’s Transformation of Mark (London: T&T Clark, 2021).

2. See the story of Jesus ben Ananias told in Josephus, Jewish War, 6.5.3.

3. See Nathanael Vette, “The omens at Jesus’s Death (Mark 15:33–39) and the divine abandonment of the temple before its destruction in 70 CE,” JBL 142 n.4 (2023): 657-675.

4. For example, Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.5.

5. See W.D. Davies, D.C. Allison, Jr., Matthew 1-7, vol. 1 ICC (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 133-135

6. Sean A. Adams, The Genre of Acts as Collected Biography, SNTSMS 156 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

7. Adams, Collected Biography, 195.

8. Adams, Collected Biography, 243.

9. To the Smyrnaeans, 3.2; cf. Lk. 24:39.

10. See, for example, Joseph B. Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2014).

11. See Mark Goodacre, “The Fourth Synoptic Gospel: John’s Knowledge of Matthew, Mark and Luke” (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2025).

12. See Andreas Köstenberger, “Was John’s Gospel Written Prior to AD 70?” https://biblicalfoundations.org/was-johns-gospel-written-prior-to-ad-70/