GROUNDBREAKING Discovery on the REAL Dates of the Gospels

GROUNDBREAKING Discovery on the REAL Dates of the Gospels

How is it that Christian apologists and mainline scholars of the New Testament can disagree on everything about the Gospels except when they were written? Bart Ehrman published the eighth edition of The New Testament: A Historical Introduction in 2024. A lot has changed in the book, but not the dates. Mark is still dated after 70 AD. Matthew is 80 to 100 AD, as is Luke. John, finally, is around 100. The other gospels, such as the Gospels of Peter and Thomas, we are told, are quote, “much later than the events they narrate and are highly legendary,” end quote. What is really going on here? Ehrman is a critical scholar, but he is supporting dates that conservatives can happily live with. This late 1st-century dating of the four gospels has become modern academic orthodoxy. This consensus hides the fact that date ranges for the gospels are incredibly wide-reaching, anywhere from the 40s to the 160s. How is it that one scholar can date the Gospel according to Mark to 45 AD and another to 145 AD? What goes into dating the texts of the Gospels and those of the New Testament more broadly?

You can search far and wide for an academic course focusing on the dating of the Gospels. You might find a seminary, divinity school, or theology department willing to teach you gospel scholarship. You can saw off your leg, then your arm, to get into the course. If it is a conservative Bible college, you can leave your brain at the door as well because they are just going to give you more rehash from the church fathers about mythical apostolic figures: the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The books you can get on redating the New Testament are typically by traditional scholars or evangelicals using the same old myths that Irenaeus used in the late second century. Have you ever really wanted to take a deep dive into the dating question to really understand how scholars come up with the date of an ancient gospel text? Have you ever truly wanted to understand why a text that pastors and pundits place next to Jesus is really closer to Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second century?

Well, as of this moment, you have available to you a very rare opportunity in the course “Redating the Gospels without Apologetics,” taught by the prolific scholar of New Testament and Gnostic Christianity, David Litwa. Dr. Litwa will go deep into how scholars can reliably date an ancient document. He will not just focus on canonical texts either, but he will bring in figures like Marcion to help you think in new ways about what he calls the “wave model” of gospel scholarship. You can take Dr. Litwa’s course anytime, anywhere, provided there is an internet connection, without moving house or taking out a second mortgage.

Let us step back for a moment. Some people want to present New Testament scholarship as a kind of science with assured results. The fact is, the discipline is shot through with political and religious ideology. Even when people are aiming to seem objective, if you do not understand the role of money and politics in this field, you will inevitably fail to understand the fragility of its “assured results.” America is the great experiment in religious education. After the Second World War, it tried out something that had not been widely implemented before; it fostered the study of the Bible in public universities and colleges across the nation. Between about 1960 and 2010, biblical studies flourished in secular departments of religion. Here, the forces of favoritism privileging Christianity were, though never completely overcome, at least tamed. The study of the Bible was seen as important in America because the Bible was a cultural icon, and understanding it is important for understanding Western art, literature, film, law, and so on.

In the pre- and post-COVID world, and across America and the world, public and private schools unaffiliated with churches have been shutting down their religion and biblical studies departments because, frankly, biblical literacy is declining and these departments do not make money for the school. Colleges and universities have long been shifting to business models instead of focusing on public service. What does all this mean? It means that the study of the Bible is increasingly dominated by seminaries and religious schools that openly support a conservative, faith-based ideology in subtle or open opposition to historical-critical scholarship. Like it or not, big-name colleges and universities care more about progressive ethics than they do about history and language. This means that traditional historical-critical scholars of the Bible cannot find jobs and are forced to drop out of the academy.

Frankly, critical scholars do not want jobs in confessional schools where either public statements of faith or silent social norms determine what they can and cannot say about the Bible. At the same time, church schools and church presses are thriving because they are propped up by church budgets. These churches have statements of faith and mission that determine what can and cannot be said about the Bible. Thus, someone interested in the Bible, whether churched, formerly churched, or unchurched, is asked to spend thousands of dollars getting an ideological education in a brick-and-mortar seminary or church school. It is no wonder that most religious seekers are turning to the internet to meet their education needs. YouTube is great, but most of the content on YouTube is patchy and at best only provides an introduction, inviting people to go deeper into the study of the Bible, ancient Judaism, and ancient Christianity.

Let us just face it: conservative apologists support an ideology which supports their faith. By and large, they are not interested in history as history, but they use history as a tool to argue for the truth of their faith. “Christianity is the only historical religion,” they say. Therefore, it must be true. They claim that the Gospels are based on eyewitness memory. To support this ideology, they are always motivated to move the Gospels as close as they can to Jesus. They will use every strategy in the book, every method, and every rationale to convince you that the Gospels appeared no more than a generation after Jesus. What is at stake for them is their truth, a truth that uses historicizing rhetoric, even when good history and good historical method are against them.

Church-funded scholars uphold a religious myth which the church has been trying to uphold for centuries: the myth of apostolic eyewitnesses to Jesus. But if the Gospels were written by apostles or their companions, that would be the very first thing that gospel writers would say about themselves. Just compare Josephus. Almost the very first thing he does in his history of the Jewish War is establish his authority as an eyewitness. Josephus has a right to write about the Jewish War, and why? Because he was there. And he tells you he was there, and he tells you what he saw and heard, sometimes in the first person. None of the gospel writers act this way. None of the gospel writers say who they are, tell you their names, or identify themselves as apostles.

The preface to Luke uses historicizing rhetoric, but it is not an exception. It identifies its patron, Theophilus, but refuses to say who is actually authoring the text. And why is that? The simplest answer is because the authors or editors were not apostles. For if they were, they would have said so. This is not about humility; this is simply about common sense. An apostolic eyewitness to Jesus who refused to identify himself is more stupid than humble. But what about the names? Virtually all the translations of the Gospels print the titles “According to Mark,” “According to Matthew,” “According to Luke,” never bothering to tell you who these people actually are. Are they historical humans or fictional characters made up in church tradition?

The first thing to know is that every single one of these titles is a later addition to the text; an addition not attested until the very late second century, 150 years after Jesus lived. This is about as much time between presidents Lincoln and Obama as between Obamacare and the American Civil War. That is a long time. And what does “according to” even mean? It apparently does not mean “written by.” Technically, not even the church claims that the Gospel according to Matthew was written by a guy named Matthew, whoever he was. And yet, somehow, the religious imagination still imagines that a guy named Matthew sat at his desk and wrote a gospel with stylus and ink. This myth is perpetuated by the bad but universal habit of referring to gospel texts by proper names: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Conservative apologists and secular scholars use these shorthand names without ever telling you that this is not how the Gospels refer to themselves. One might think that gospel manuscripts would solve the problem. But no complete Bibles have been found that date earlier than about the mid-fourth century, more than 300 years after Jesus. Apologists boast that the New Testament is the best-attested text in antiquity. But they do not tell you that in the earliest period, the manuscripts are mostly scraps of papyrus, sometimes no bigger than a credit card, with a paper that looks like it passed halfway through a shredder with holes the size of quarters. And not a single one of these gospel papyri has a date. They are all dated by handwriting and the inherently subjective judgment of inherently subjective scholars.

So here is the game that conservative scholars play with the papyri. They know that the so-called original copies of the Gospels have all perished. So they need to get the papyri as close to Jesus as they can. Thus, they scour the other books of published papyri for early and datable examples which they can then compare with gospel papyri. Then they say that the handwriting of the early papyri looks like the handwriting of the gospel papyri and, voila, they move the gospel papyri as close to the late first century as they can. What they do not tell you is that gospel papyri better resemble handwriting samples from the third, fourth, and later centuries, making it impossible to place a papyrus in the early period with any certainty.

Carbon-14 dating does not come to the rescue because it does not give a precise date, but a date range that is often as long or even longer than 100 years. And sometimes the date of the papyrus is much older than the ink. But in the dating game, it is actually the date of the ink that is important because that alone tells us when a document was written. So conservative apologists can look smart with their smiles and suit coats. They can overwhelm you with the smokescreen of footnotes and their amazing philological knowledge while at the same time publishing unmixed and apologetic ideology—not history. The truth is: no papyrus of a gospel which was later canonized—not a single one—is reliably dated earlier than the very late second century. Not a single one.

And this explains why scholars cannot agree on the dates of the Gospels. No scientific method provides the “smoking gun” in the dating game. The only reliable way to date these ancient texts is by looking at internal datable references. What about church tradition? Does the early church not tell us when the Gospels were written and by whom? Let me ask you a question: if you were trying to study church ideology and mythology, why would you use church myth to tell you when a document was written? Church tradition is not history. It is mythology written by the first Christian apologists who are doing the same thing that modern apologists do—trying to get the Gospels as close to Jesus as they can.

Let us use an analogy. If you were studying the religion of an obscure African tribe, would you automatically believe representatives of the tribe when they told you that their holy books were written by one of their inspired sages named Mimu who buried himself alive 2,000 years ago? Would you not use comparative African history, language, and literature to understand the sacred text on their own terms? To use an example perhaps closer to home, if you were studying the Book of Mormon and wanted to fully understand its origins, would you automatically accept the Mormon tradition that the text originated from writing on golden plates buried in Palmyra, New York? Would you not ask for the plates themselves or try to find them? And if you could not find them, you would use comparative 19th-century literature and linguistic analysis to determine when and how the texts were written and by whom.

The same applies to the text of the Gospels. But let us play the apologist’s game for a moment because you will quickly find that appealing to church tradition is like grasping at water. Just imagine it: you take a time machine back to the year 185 to Lugdunum, France (ancient Lugdunum). Here you meet Irenaeus, who is writing an apologetic work against a Christian sect he does not like, the Valentinians. In the course of his attack, Irenaeus wants to prove that the four gospels are early and they all go back to the apostles. He has surprisingly little more than oral tradition to prove it. But he does have this obscure author named Papias who supposedly wrote in the early second century. Now, Papias says that there was a guy named Mark and Mark knew the Apostle Peter, and without Peter’s knowledge or permission, he wrote up a story based on Peter’s sermons, and that story became the Gospel according to Mark.

This sounds like an amazing external witness to the Gospel according to Mark, right? It is probably just a myth based on internal references to what became the New Testament itself. Papias, or his source, probably read the letter now called First Peter and, believing it was actually written by Peter, found an interesting reference to quote, “my son Mark,” end quote, in chapter 5:13. He then inferred that Mark was a disciple of Peter and thus a carrier of the Petrine gospel traditions. There is no tradition that Peter himself wrote a gospel. But there was a tradition, also unconfirmed, that Peter died in Rome. Thus, an ancient author could infer that Peter had a disciple Mark in Rome and that this Mark wrote up Peter’s sermons in a gospel notebook, which would explain why it has a rough character and why it has Latin terminology.

Is any of this myth necessarily historical? No. Is it even probable? No. Because there is nothing whatsoever backing it up apart from the fact that it is constantly repeated by church-funded apologists and historians. Whoever made church myths about apostolic authorship did the same thing that other writers in antiquity did when they wanted to write a biography of a famous person. People who wanted to write the biography of Homer, for instance, used data from Homer’s epics to write it. Never mind that Homer is probably a mythical person, and people writing 800 years after his supposed life had no other historical source to write their biography than the epics themselves. Likewise, the biographers of Euripides did not know independent traditions about Euripides, so they used his plays to reconstruct his life. They did the same with Aesop, another mythical figure who was given a biography based on the content of his fables. In actual fact, these fables were probably created by many ancient storytellers and editors who refined them and gathered them into collections around the fifth century BCE.

Something similar happened with the Gospels. The Gospels are books in search of authors. And once authors were determined by church myth, pious Christians sought for the biography of these authors. And what did they use as sources? The documents of the New Testament themselves. That is to say, they used bits and pieces from Pauline letters, from the book of Acts, from other named figures in random letters, and they concocted four stable authors of gospels—gospels which themselves were never stable in the first place. Unfortunately, the myth of the stable author has perpetuated itself based on modern presuppositions of how books are written. In the modern world, people write books and send the final draft to a publisher. The publisher then typesets the final draft, runs it through the printing press, and forms a complete book that can be released on a definite date.

That is just not how books were written in antiquity. Over a thousand years before the printing press and almost 2,000 years before the copy machine, no copy of an ancient book perfectly matched what its author actually wrote. Scribal mistakes, intentional or unintentional, are inevitable, and a single mistake made early in the tradition can completely change the meaning of a sentence later down the line. It is sort of like the “telephone game,” where one small change made at the beginning has huge, rippling effects at the end. This is what apologists never tell you. We may have over 100 New Testament papyri from the late second to fifth century, but none of them say the same things, even when they overlap in content. Not a single one. The text is never the same. And there are no witnesses to the text in the earliest period.

Which means that there is a century-long “black hole” separating the initial text of the Gospels and the earliest witnesses to them. That black hole period is the most important period for understanding the Gospels. But scholars have next to no idea what happened to the texts, assuming they existed, between, say, 50 and 150 CE. This is the bane of gospel scholarship, and it is why you need to educate yourself about the tools and methods that good historical-critical scholars use to date the Gospels. This is your opportunity to invest in yourself. Take Dr. M. David Litwa’s course, “Redating the Gospels without Apologetics.” I know I will be taking this course as well. The course link is in the description. You can sign up today. Be sure to do so; it helps us here at MythVision as well, as we are affiliates of Dr. M. David Litwa. I know for a fact this is important information, especially with the current dialogue with apologists and those like myself who are critical of them. Please check it out, and do not forget to like this video, comment your thoughts about this documentary, and be sure to share it. I hope you will never forget we are MythVision.

[The text continues, further expanding upon the complexities of historical analysis regarding the New Testament.]

The inherent difficulty in dating ancient texts extends far beyond just the canonical Gospels. It touches upon the very fabric of early Christian history, which is often presented as a seamless tapestry but is, in reality, a collection of disconnected fragments, woven together by later redactors with specific agendas. When we look at the historical critical method, we are not merely trying to identify a “date”; we are trying to reconstruct a world that has been obscured by centuries of theological overlay. The transition from oral tradition to written text is often treated by traditionalists as a direct, almost mechanical process—an eyewitness sees, tells, and a scribe records. However, this simplistic model fails to account for the sociological and psychological realities of the first century.

Why would a text be written down in the first place? In the ancient Mediterranean, literacy was not a universal standard. The production of a scroll was an expensive, time-consuming endeavor. It required resources, a community, and a purpose. Many of the early followers of Jesus were likely illiterate or occupied with manual labor. The shift toward producing written texts suggests a changing community need—a need to codify beliefs, to address internal disputes, or to standardize doctrine in the face of competing gnostic or rival movements. This is precisely why dating is so critical; it tells us not just when a text was written, but why it was written, and what environment it was intended to serve.

If we look at the epistles of Paul, for example—the earliest writings in the New Testament canon—we see a dynamic, evolving theology that does not always map perfectly onto the narrative structure of the later Gospels. This disconnect is another piece of the puzzle that is often glossed over. If the Gospels were based on the same stable oral tradition that the church claims, why is the theology of the Gospels so distinct from the theology of the Pauline letters? The divergence suggests a creative, evolutionary process, one that spans decades of intense theological development. By placing the Gospels in the latter half of the first century or even into the second century, we begin to see them as products of their own time—responding to the destruction of the Temple, the rise of the Roman imperial cult, and the internal struggle to define “orthodoxy” against “heresy.”

Furthermore, we must address the issue of the “apologetic bias.” When an apologist approaches a text, their starting premise is already established: the text is divinely inspired, the author is reliable, and the message is true. From this starting point, the work of dating becomes a task of confirmation bias. Any evidence that supports an earlier date is amplified; any evidence that suggests a later date is minimized, reinterpreted, or dismissed as an anomaly. This is the opposite of the scientific method. A genuine historical inquiry begins with a blank slate. It asks: what does the internal evidence suggest? What does the linguistic data reveal? How does the text reflect the social and political realities of the era? When we remove the theological blinders, we discover that the consensus of “first-century authorship” is not a firm pillar, but a house of cards held together by tradition rather than data.

It is also important to consider the role of the “lost” texts. We know from the archaeological record and early church polemics that there were many more documents in circulation than what eventually made it into the canon. Why were some kept and others destroyed or allowed to fade into oblivion? The process of canonization was a political act as much as a spiritual one. The texts that survived were those that proved most useful for the emerging hierarchy of the church. This creates a feedback loop: the church preserved the texts that supported its authority, and those texts, in turn, were used to justify the church’s interpretation of its own history. This is why the “canonical” vs. “extra-canonical” distinction is so fraught with historical inaccuracy. Both groups of texts were birthed in the same atmosphere of creative, competitive, and highly diverse religious thought.

Returning to the Papias fragments, which serve as the foundation for so much of the traditional dating scheme, we must ask why they are so often treated with such reverence. Papias is, by all accounts, a distant, possibly confused, and clearly biased observer. Eusebius, the fourth-century historian who provides us with most of what we know about Papias, himself admits that Papias was not a particularly reliable source. And yet, when it comes to the authorship of the Gospels, scholars often treat these fragments as if they were contemporary testimonies. This highlights a recurring theme in biblical studies: the desperate need for a link—any link—back to the “eye-witnesses.” It is a psychological desire for certainty in a world that is inherently uncertain.

As we deepen our inquiry into the dating of the Gospels, we must also confront the technological limitations of the ancient world. Transmission of texts was a messy, error-prone, and highly selective process. A scribe in the second century might revise a text to suit the needs of his local community, adding a nuance here, clarifying a point there, or even inserting a narrative element that had become popular in oral tradition. This is why the search for the “original” is often futile. We are not dealing with a monolithic, immutable text, but with a living, breathing tradition that changed as it moved through history. The idea that we can pinpoint a “date of composition” as if it were a modern book release is a fundamental misunderstanding of how ancient literature functioned.

By taking a course like Dr. Litwa’s, you are not just learning a date; you are learning how to read the landscape of ancient religion. You are learning to distinguish between the history of the text and the theology of the tradition. You are learning to see the human hands behind the ink—the editors, the redactors, the scribes, and the communities who were grappling with the meaning of Jesus in a world that was often hostile to their existence. This journey of intellectual liberation is not for the faint of heart. It requires the courage to set aside deeply held beliefs and follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it leads to a conclusion that contradicts everything you were taught in Sunday school.

The internet has democratized this knowledge. In the past, this kind of rigorous, critical scholarship was confined to the ivory towers of academia, accessible only to those with the time and resources to spend years in a degree program. Today, the tools are at your fingertips. The challenge is no longer access to information, but the ability to discern quality, to filter out the noise of apologetic propaganda, and to engage with scholarship that is committed to truth, regardless of the ideological cost. The study of the Bible is, and should be, a field that welcomes critical scrutiny. It is an invitation to explore the origins of one of the most influential movements in human history, and it deserves to be treated with the same intellectual rigor we apply to any other field of historical study.

As you continue your exploration, remember that every text has a history, and every history has a narrator. The question is not just what the text says, but who is telling you what it means, and what they hope to gain by that interpretation. By stripping away the layers of tradition, we don’t necessarily lose the meaning of the Gospels; rather, we discover a much richer, more complex, and ultimately more human story. It is a story of communities in conflict, of dreams of redemption, and of a world in the midst of profound, transformative change. We invite you to be a part of this ongoing discovery, to ask the hard questions, to challenge the status quo, and to embrace the rigor of true historical inquiry. The history of the Gospels is far more interesting than the myths we have been told about them—and the truth is worth the effort it takes to find it.