In this video Dr. Gary Habermas shares a remarkable New Testament development.
Here is a short excerpt from a recent book by Gary Habermas that included as a way to compliment the above, John Ankerberg.
Yes, for all the older cats reading this, John Ankerberg is still doing his thing. Old school!
Ankerberg: Now, once again, we want to drive home the point that using the critical scholars’ own assumptions, you can show that Jesus claimed to be God. That doesn’t mean we agree with their assumptions; it just means that the historical evidence is so strong, non-Christians can come to believe in Christ by examining these facts. Dr. Habermas summarizes this point. Listen:
Habermas: Perhaps we should backtrack here just a little bit and talk about theological definitions and, in particular, the method that I’m employing here. My point is this. If you take the traditional view of Jesus Christ as laid out in the gospels at face value, in the red letter editions, obviously no one is going to dispute the fact that Jesus in those texts claims to be the Son of God, died on the cross for our sins, and was raised from the dead.
However, I’m taking a different approach, what I might call the “Minimal Facts Method.” It is what I sometimes call that “lowest common denominator” approach. I’m saying that, even if the critics were correct about their own methodology and can note, say, five layers of tradition behind the four gospels, we can make very good use of these texts alone. After all, we are utilizing actual gospel texts, such as Matthew 11:27, Mark 14:36, and Mark 13:32. In each of these passages, Jesus is making a claim to be Deity. We’ve also talked about exceptionally early New Testament creedal traditions along with some early Acts sermon summaries that also clearly make lofty claims about Jesus.16
Evangelicals sometimes question such a piecemeal approach, asking, “Hey, look–this whole book is Scripture. Why do we have to look at pieces?” But the critic who views the New Testament as just a book of ancient literature and perhaps nothing more is looking for the earliest, best-attested statements in support of whatever topic we are studying. And since we are doing apologetics here, we wish to put our strongest foot forward.
Remember also that many Scripture passages specifically tell us that some earlier statements are being used that predate the books in which they appear. Paul clearly states that he passed along the material that he had received from others, a report that he took to be a central matter of first importance. ( I Cor. 15:3) He states almost the same words concerning another tradition in 1 Corinthians 11:23. Many other times, too, we also read comments regarding the existence and passing on of prior traditions.17
Lastly, when evangelicals preach or teach, they may even speak regularly from a series of key texts extracted from anywhere in Scripture, too. Really, what’s the difference in commenting on or even isolating these specific passages?
The bottom line in this discussion is that we have a number of texts in the synoptic gospels that, according to critical methodology, support Jesus having called himself both the Son of Man and the Son of the Father. Add to this that we also discussed in some detail perhaps the major text (Mk. 14:61-64) where Jesus affirmed being both the Son of the Blessed One as well as the Son of Man in the previous program, including sitting on God’s right hand. These references are supported by brief creedal confessions that are early, predating the books in which they are written, and also confirm these designations. All of these early creedal comments could well be apostolic in nature and seem to be precisely that at least in the case of 1 Corinthians 15:3ff.
So even if all we had were the critically ascertained, lowest common denominator methods, we still have excellent reasons to think that Jesus called himself the Son of God. Even the use of critical methods fails to displace this last argument. We really can arrive at some of the strongest arguments for the Deity, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus in this manner.
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FOOTNOTE # 17: Besides the texts in 1 Corinthians 11:23ff. and 15:3ff., include 1 TIMOTHY 1:15, 3:1, 4:9, 2 TIMOTHY 2:11, and Titus 3:8.
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Let’s peer into how one of the most well-known Biblical critics of our day looks at this issue. Take note I agree with him in most of the points he makes about the early creedal traditions; however, I view Mark and the other Gospels as earlier date wise than he:
My second point is that what Paul does tell us makes it very clear that he knew or at least believed that Jesus had lived as a historical person some years earlier. Paul mentions that Jesus was born; that he was a Jew, a direct descendant of King David; that he had brothers, one of them named James; that he had a ministry to Jews; that he had twelve disciples; that he was a teacher; that he anticipated his own death; that he had the Last Supper on the night he was handed over; that he was killed at the instigation of Jews in Judea; and that he died by crucifixion. He also refers on several occasions to Jesus’s teachings. Paul certainly knew that Jesus existed, and he knew some things about him.
I should stress in addition that Paul indicates on several occasions that the traditions about Jesus are ones that he himself inherited from those who came before him. This is clearly implied when he says that he “handed over” what he had earlier “received,” technical language in antiquity for passing on traditions and teachings among Jewish rabbis. Even where Paul does not state that he is handing on received tradition, there are places where it is clear he is doing so. I have mentioned, for example, Romans 1:3–4, an ancient adoptionistic creed about Jesus that indicates he “became” the son of God only when he was raised from the dead. This creed was not written by Paul: it uses words and phrases not otherwise found in Paul (for example, spirit of holiness) and contains concepts otherwise alien to Paul (that Jesus was made the Son of God at the resurrection). He is using, then, an earlier creed that was in circulation before his writing.
Where did Paul get all this received tradition, from whom, and most important, when? Paul himself gives us some hints. He indicates in Galatians 1 that originally, before his conversion, he had been a fierce persecutor of the church of Christ, but then on the basis of some kind of mysterious revelation he came to see that Jesus really was the Son of God, and he converted. After three years, he tells us, he made a trip to Jerusalem, and there he spent fifteen days with Cephas and James. Cephas was one of Jesus’s twelve disciples, and James was his brother. I will stress the importance of this fact in the next chapter. For now I simply want to point out that this visit is one of the most likely places where Paul learned all the received traditions that he refers to and even the received traditions that we otherwise suspect are in his writings that he does not name as such. And when would this have been?
Since Paul sometimes provides a time frame (“three years later” or “after fifteen years”), it is possible to put together a rough chronology of Paul’s life. To give us a rock-solid start, we can say that Paul must have been converted sometime after the death of Jesus around 30 CE and sometime before 40 CE. The latter date is based on the fact that in 2 Corinthians 11:32 Paul indicates that King Aretas of the Nabateans was determined to prosecute Paul for being a Christian. Aretas died around the year 40. So Paul converted sometime in the 30s CE. When scholars crunch all the numbers that Paul mentions, it appears that he must have converted early in the 30s, say, the year 32 or 33, just two or three years after the death of Jesus.
This means that if Paul went to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and James three years after his conversion, he would have seen them, and received the traditions that he later gives in his letters, around the middle of the decade, say the year 35 or 36. The traditions he inherited, of course, were older than that and so must date to just a couple of years or so after Jesus’s death.
All this makes it as clear as day that Jesus was known to have lived and died almost immediately after the traditional date of his death. We do not have to wait for the Gospel of Mark around 70 CE to hear about the historical Jesus, as mythicists are fond of claiming. This evidence from Paul dovetails perfectly with what we found from the Gospel traditions, whose oral sources almost certainly also go all the way back into the 30s to Roman Palestine. Paul too shows that just a few years after Jesus’s life his followers were talking about the things he said, did, and experienced as a Jewish teacher in Palestine who was crucified by the Romans at the instigation of the Jewish authorities. This is a powerful confluence of evidence: the sources of the Gospels and the accounts of our earliest Christian author. It is hard to explain this confluence apart from the view that Jesus certainly existed.
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This is more way I line up with the dates for the New Testament, influenced by Jonathan Bernier.
The Gospel Coalition has a good write up with challenges about his book HERE:
In his chapters on the Synoptic Gospels, Bernier concludes that the most likely relative compositional sequence consists of Mark (42–45 CE), followed by Matthew (45–59 CE), then Luke (59 CE). If indeed the sequence of Mark–Matthew–Luke is accurate, one wonders whether these timescales are sufficient (on the Farrer Hypothesis) to allow for the transmission of Mark to the Matthean Evangelist, the composition of Matthew, and its subsequent transmission and incorporation into the Gospel of Luke. And despite the potential implications for chronology, Bernier appears to dismiss the possibility of Matthean posteriority in just one sentence on pp. 37–38, though he does soften that conclusion with some equivocation on p. 80 (“it could have been written as late as 70”). More importantly, Bernier’s very early dating of Mark requires him to reinterpret or write off patristic testimony which appears to link Mark’s Gospel to Peter’s (and Paul’s) “departure,” a term which most naturally refers to death (see pp. 76–77). While his attempt to construct a plausible case in this section is often intriguing, at times his conclusions feel forced.
Here is my synopsis:
Basic Findings of Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament
Jonathan Bernier’s Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament: The Evidence for Early Composition is a comprehensive examination of when the books of the New Testament were written. His central conclusion is that a lower chronology is most fully warranted. Rather than placing much of the New Testament after AD 70 and into the late first or second century, Bernier argues that the evidence frequently permits—and often favors—substantially earlier dates. With the exception of the undisputed Pauline letters, whose early dates are already generally recognized, he concludes that the majority of the New Testament writings were likely composed twenty to thirty years earlier than is commonly supposed in contemporary scholarship.
Bernier’s conclusion is based on more than simply preferring earlier dates. He organizes the evidence around three complementary methods: synchronization, contextualization, and authorial biography. Synchronization considers a text’s relationship to identifiable historical events and other writings; contextualization considers the stage of Christian development reflected by the document; and authorial biography asks where a writing best fits within the known life and career of its proposed author. Bernier then weighs competing possibilities according to how much relevant evidence they explain, their parsimony, and their freedom from logical fallacies.
The resulting chronology is striking. Bernier dates Mark to approximately AD 42–45, Matthew to 45–59, Luke to 59, and Acts to 62. His Pauline chronology places Galatians at 47–52, the Thessalonian letters at 50–52, 1 Corinthians in early 56, 2 Corinthians in late 56, Romans in the winter of 56/57, and the prison letters around 57–59. This becomes especially significant for the Pastoral Epistles. If they are genuinely Pauline, Bernier places 1 Timothy at AD 63–64 and 2 Timothy at AD 64–68, while providing substantially later alternatives if they are pseudonymous. He is careful to acknowledge that the Pastorals are more difficult to situate within Paul’s reconstructed career, rather than simply assuming Pauline authorship.
Chapters 9 and 10 extend the investigation beyond the New Testament to 1 Clement, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas. Bernier dates 1 Clement approximately AD 64–70, while giving the Didache a deliberately broad AD 45–125 range because the evidence does not allow him to confidently choose between lower, middle, and higher chronologies. He likewise places the Shepherd of Hermas around AD 60–125.
Overall, Bernier’s argument is not that every early date can be established with certainty, but that the evidence for a substantially earlier New Testament deserves to be taken seriously. His lower chronology places a remarkable amount of the New Testament within the first Christian generation and, in many cases, before AD 70. That becomes particularly significant when considering the Pastoral Epistles: if 1–2 Timothy are Pauline, their language concerning the “pattern of sound words,” the “good deposit,” and the faithful transmission of apostolic teaching belongs within the lifetime and ministry of the apostles rather than requiring a second-century setting.
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While I was updating my understanding of the time tables, I also thought of a previous post regarding Buddhist scripture compared to that of the New Testament. Here is a graphic that sets it all out:
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