Dating the Bible
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With the exception of a couple of fragments discussed below, no Bible texts that we have predate about 200 B.C.E. found among the Dead Sea scrolls. Nor are they mentioned by historians outside Israel. Therefore differences that exist between different schools are more ideologically driven than based on historical documentation.
There are two main schools of thought: one based on the belief that the Bible is an accurate history of God’s actions into history, and the other, about 200 years old, has a spread of beliefs ranging from “maximalists”, who believe that most of the Bible may be historical, to “minimalists” who accept almost none.
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Historical School
This used to be accepted by the majority of both Jews and Christians, though today it is largely confined to Orthodox Jews and “fundamentalist” Christians. Its primary teaching is that Tanakh, and for Christians the New Testament as well, with the exception of minor copyist errors, is an accurate historical rendition of the events portrayed, written by the authors where attribution is listed.
A few examples of how the historical understanding dates some of the controversial texts: Torah (otherwise called “Pentateuch”), on the basis of 1 Kings 6:1, was written from mid to late 15th century BCE. Isaiah in its entirety was written in the times and by the author listed in chapter one, verse one. Daniel was written by the court official who lived and worked from the time of Nebuchadnezzar to the first year of Cyrus. Where events and people are mentioned before they happened or were born, they are explained as evidences of God’s ability to tell the future in his communication with mankind.
For some scholars, these traditionally understood dates reveal patterns of linguistic development in Biblical Hebrew that are not recognized when one promotes other compositional dates.
Further, those scholars in the historical school who are Christians agree with the historically and traditionally recognized dates for the New Testament. These traditional dates are:
- The first three Gospels, Acts, Paul's Epistles, Hebrews, James, Peter's Epistles were written in the period between about 50 - 65 AD.
- The Gospel of John, John's Epistles, Jude and Revelation were written between about 85 - 100 AD.
Modern theories
The Hebrew Bible
The authorship of the Hebrew Bible is an open topic of research, and who and how many people contributed to the text a vital and lively area of investigation to this date. Therefore, assigning solid dates to any of the texts is difficult. Since the dating of the authorship of these books depends on the particulars of the deconstruction of the texts, the range of dates assigned to the first five books is rather broad.
There are fundamentalist scholars who follow the traditional assignments of authorship, and to them, the Pentateuch should have been written by Moses in the period of Exodus, ca 1450-1440 BCE. Other scholars (the biblical minimalists) would insist that the whole of the Pentateuch is a post-exilic construction, perhaps with material from an earlier oral tradition. A middle ground is held by people such as Israel Finklestein, whose archeological studies tend to suggest that a substantial portion of the Pentateuch is a 7th century BCE construction, designed to promote the dynastic ambitions of King Josiah of Judah. A traditional strain of scholarship (the biblical maximalists) would assign portions of the Pentateuch (generally the J author) to the period of the United Monarchy in the 10th century BCE, would date Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic history to the time of King Josiah, and that the final form of the Torah was due to a redactor in exilic or post-exilic times.
One way to date an ancient text is to examine the text for places or events that were known to the author. If, for example, the text refers to a town or village that did not exist until the 3rd century BCE, then that can be used as a reference to pin down the approximate date of authorship. Also used can be the style of writing, and common facts known at a particular place and time. Loan words from other languages can be important, as the period of contact between different cultures creates watermarks in time that allow for dating.
To give a working example, in the views of some scholars (e.g. Hartman and Di Lella, 1978), the book of Daniel was written in the 3rd century to 2nd century BCE, even though it claims to have been written in the 6th century BCE (Hartman and Di Lella suggest multiple authorship, with some material dating to the third century, culminating with a second century editor and redactor). The reasons for such an assignment include, according to proponents of this view, a use of Greek and Persian words in the Hebrew of the text unlikely to happen in the 6th century, that the style of the Hebrew was more like that of a later date, that the style of Aramaic used in the Book of Daniel was that of a later date than 6th century, that the use of the word "Chaldean" occurs in a fashion unknown to the 6th century, and that the repeated historical gaffes of the author of Daniel betrayed an ignorance of the facts of the 6th century that a high official in Babylon would not have, while the 2nd century history was found to be far more accurate (see Ferrell Till's analysis).
Documents, inscriptions, and objects that have portions of the Torah, or the whole of the text, allow researchers to place an upper bound on the date of a particular portion of text, or perhaps even the whole of it. If the portion of text is small, it can be argued that it simply is part of an oral tradition; for that reason whole books or substantially whole books are proportionately more meaningful in determining when the whole of the Bible was written. Also useful are documents, inscriptions, and objects that speak of the Hebrew Bible, or portions thereof, or of people, places and events that are in common with Biblical narrative.
The oldest known object with a fragment of Torah is a good luck charm, inscribed with Num 6:24-6:27, and dated to approximately 600 BCE (Dever, p. 180). Though whole copies of the Bible were not found at Qumran, the documents of the Dead Sea scrolls contained versions of many books of the Hebrew Bible. The Scrolls have been dated from the 3rd century BCE to 68 CE.
In terms of the dating of complete authoritative texts, there are three main versions of the Hebrew Bible. There is the Masoretic text of the Torah, thought to be first assembled in the 4th century CE. The oldest known copy (the oldest is the Aleppo Codex, the oldest complete text is the Leningrad Codex) now dates to the tenth century CE. There is the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Torah, made under Ptolemy in the third century BCE. The oldest copy of the Septuagint is centuries older than the oldest complete Masoretic text, and fragments of the Septuagint date to the second century BCE. There is also the Samaritan Torah, which emerged after the Assyrian occupation of the northern kingdom of Israel. The Peshitta, a translation of the Christian Bible into Syriac, a variant of Aramaic, can be useful in determining authenticity of passages and hence help establish dates. The earliest known copy of the Peshitta dates to 445-460 CE.
The New Testament
Dating and authorship of the New Testament is the subject of much study, and much controversy. The traditional view is that the works were completed within the lifetimes of the contemporaries of Jesus. Some scholars believe the dating to be much later. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the Gospels draw on earlier sources.
Approximate dates
The most accepted historical understanding of how the Gospels developed is known as the two source hypothesis. This theory holds that Mark is the oldest Gospel. Matthew and Luke are believed to come later, and draw on Mark and also on a source that is now lost, called the Q document, or just "Q". John is thought by many to be a later work.
- Gospel of Mark: +65-70 CE
- Gospel of Matthew: +75 CE
- Gospel of Luke: +80-90 CE
- Gospel of John: +95-100 CE
- Acts: +70-90 CE
- James: +45-50 CE, disputes to late 1st to early 2nd century CE
- Colossians: +60 CE+
- Corinthians: +57 CE
- Ephesians: +65 CE
- Hebrews: +60-90 CE
- Epistles of John: +90 CE
- Jude: +65-100 CE
- Epistles of Peter: +64 CE+
- Philemon: +56 CE
- Philippians: +57-62 CE
- Romans: +57-58 CE
- Galatians: +54-55 CE
- Thessalonians: +50 CE
- Timothy: +60-100 CE
- Titus: +60-100 CE
- Revelation: +81-96 CE
The Gnostic Scriptures
The Nag Hammadi collection, also known as the Gnostic Scriptures (Pagels), were not accepted as canonical by Jerome in the 4th century CE. They were written in Coptic, and are generally dated to the third and fourth centuries CE.
See also
- Documentary hypothesis
- The Bible and history
- Synoptic problem
- Markan priority
- Dead Sea Scrolls
- Nag Hammadi
References
- Dever, William G. What Did The Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know It?, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, USA, 2001.
- Fox, Robin Lane The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, NY, 1992.
- Hartman, Louis Francis, and Di Lella, Alexander A. (Ed) The Book of Daniel (Anchor Bible, Vol. 23), Anchor Bible, 1978.
- Külling, Samuel Zur Datierung der Genesis “P” Stücke PhD dissertation, 1970
- Pagels, Elaine The Gnostic Gospels, Vintage, reissued 1989.
External links
- Review of the Leningrad Codex (http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/reviews/codex.html)
- Textual Criticism of the Torah (http://www.aishdas.org/toratemet/en_text.html)
- The Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) (http://www.religioustolerance.org/daniel.htm)
- When was the Book of Daniel Written? (C.H. Salvia versus J.P. Holding) (http://theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6135)