When were the New Testament Gospels ("Gospels") written, and how do
we know that the gospels we have today are the originally written gospels?
Let's start with when the Gospels were written.
Recent history can be used to help us understand when the Gospels were written.
If a history book about New York City mentions the World Trade Center twin
towers still standing, it most likely was written before September 11, 2001, right?
AD 70 was when Titus sacked Jerusalem. AD 64 was when Nero burnt Rome and
blamed the fire on Christians to launch the great persecution. And AD 62 was
when Paul was martyred in Rome after 2 years of imprisonment.
Acts, the New Testament book that comes just after the Gospels is a methodical
account of the early church written by a doctor named Luke who was Paul's
assistant and note
taker. Since Acts doesn't mention any of the milestones
above and ends just after mentioning Paul's 2 year imprisonment in Rome,
it must have
been written in AD 62.
Acts starts,
"The former account I made,
O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, until the day in
which He was taken up, after He through the Holy Spirit had given
commandments to the apostles whom He had chosen..." (Act 1:1-2)
The
"former account" Luke mentions in Acts is what we call today the Gospel
of Luke, which was also dedicated to this man named Theophilus:
"Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order a
narrative of those things which have been fulfilled among us, just as those
who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered
them to us, it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of
all things from the very first, to write to you an orderly account, most
excellent Theophilus, that you may know the certainty of those things in
which you were instructed." (Luke 1:1-4)
The delivered eyewitness accounts Luke mentions above are what we today call
the Gospels of Matthew, written by one of Jesus' 12 Apostles, and Mark, written by the assistant to and the note taker for Apostle Peter.
If we estimate a 3-5 year gap between Acts and the Gospel of Luke and
another 3-5 years between the Gospel of Luke and the Gospels of Matthew
and Mark, this means three of four Gospels were written around
AD 52-59, only about 2 decades after they last saw Jesus. So the
Gospe
ls were writ
ten by eyewitnesses or their notetakers and read by
people who had witnessed the events recorded and therefore could validate their details.
Next, how do we know that today's Gospe
ls are the same as
the Gospe
ls writ
ten 2000 years ago?
The Gospe
ls were writte
n in Greek, and the earliest Greek manuscript discovered date to AD 100-150, or about a century after Christ, and
the number of ancient Greek manuscripts or fragments of the New Testament
discovered to date exceeds 5500. Two things can be said about this.
Firstly,
our knowledge of the history of the Roman Empire is based largely on
The
Annals of the Roman Empire, writte
n by the Roman historian Tacitus in
AD 116. Only two manuscripts of that in the
original language exist today. One dates from the 9th century and the other from
the 11th century. The details about Rome stand on two manuscripts writte
n about
a thousand years after the original, while the details about the Bible stand
on over 5500 manuscripts that date from only about 100 years after the originals.
In other words, there is far stronger evidence for the Bible than for the
history of the Roman Empire.
Secondly, these 5500+ manuscripts of the New Testament in the original Greek
were discovered over a vast geographic area that stretches from the Middle
East to North Africa to Western Europe.
Imagine a primary school class playing a
game of whisper phone. The teacher whispers, "Mary gave a red crayon to
Charlie" to two students, and they each whisper to two
other students, and so on. If after five generations, the student at one corner of
the classroom reports, "Mary gave a red crayon to Charlie", while the
student at
another corner reports, "Mary and Charlie fought over a pen" the
class won’t
know what the teacher had whispered originally. But if the two student at distant corners say exactly same thing, the original message can be deduced
without having been heard by everyone. What's the point?
The original copies of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have not
been and most likely won't be found since they probably disintegrated
long ago from having passed from hand to hand to be read and copied. But
almost all (95-99%) of the 5500+ manuscript copies of their Gospel
s
discovered to date all
say in effect, "Mary gave a red crayon to Charlie." So we can
deduce that what was originally writte
n is what is in those 5500+ copies, and
today’s Gospels are translated
directly from them.
For more on these types of details, read
The Case for Christ
by Lee Strobel.