When Were the New Testament Gospels Written? And Who Chose Them to Be in the Bible?
According to some recent writers, churches only accepted the New Testament Gospels after “political and theological councils voted,” and Emperor Constantine was a key voice in these votes.
“The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen,” Richard Dawkins claims in The God Delusion,
more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Bartholomew, and Mary Magdalene. … The Gospels that didn’t make it were omitted by … ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones.
A Newsweek columnist has made similar claims, arguing that the four New Testament Gospels were never universally embraced in churches until after“political and theological councils [had] voted on which of the many Gospels in circulation were to make up the New Testament.” The columnist goes on to declare that the fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine was the key voice in these decisions. According to a Huffington Post article, other Gospels were “runners up” in a rather random literary contest that left many texts on “the cutting room floor” when the books of the New Testament were selected.
Such claims have multiplied in popularity over the past few years.
The impression in certain segments of popular media seems to be that, at some point in the history of Christianity, church leaders were faced with a dozen or more competing Gospels. These ecclesiastical power brokers selected the texts known today by the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — but they might just as easily have chosen a different set of Gospels.
The historical flaws in these popular claims are manifold. There is — for example — no hint of any moment in history when Christians did not embrace the four canonical Gospels as authoritative and true, even if other Gospels were being read at the same time. What’s more, the four New Testament Gospels were being traced to eyewitnesses of Jesus no later than the late first century.
What I want to consider in this post, however, is simply the antiquity of the New Testament Gospels in comparison with other texts that have been identified as “Gospels.” As far as we can tell from the surviving historical evidences, only the New Testament Gospels were both traceable to eyewitness testimony and written at a time when eyewitnesses of Jesus were still alive.
How Can Anyone Know When the Gospels Were Written?
So how can anyone determine whether or not the New Testament Gospels were actually written during the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses? These texts weren’t written as tweets or blog posts with time-stamps embedded in them, after all. And yet, a broad range of evidence suggests that the four New Testament Gospels were received as authoritative in the first century.
There are, for example, mentions of the Gospels in second century literature, with clear links to individuals in the first century. Also, very early fragments survive from copies of the New Testament Gospels.
With this in mind, let’s take a quick look at
when these fragments were copied,
where they circulated, and
what the earliest references to the Gospels suggest about their origins.
Widely Circulated in the Second Century
One of the oldest surviving portions from any New Testament Gospel is a tiny scrap of papyrus, about two inches wide and fewer than four inches tall.
This fragment, discovered in Egypt in the early twentieth century, is known as “Papyrus Rylands Greek 457” or more simply as “P52.” The Greek words on the front side of this scrap come from John 18:31–33. The fragment’s back side records a few words from John 18:37–38. Despite its small size and few words, Papyrus Rylands Greek 457 is one of the most significant fragments of the New Testament. Its importance is rooted, however, not so much in what it says but in when it seems to have been copied.
Distinct styles of handwriting enable scholars to assign approximate dates to ancient manuscripts. To determine when the document came into existence, scholars might compare the handwriting style of the less-certain manuscript with the writing styles in manuscripts that have well-established dates — provincial records, for example, or dated letters. The idea is that manuscripts from similar time periods will have similar handwriting styles. If the writing style in the less-certain manuscript is similar to the style of a manuscript with a definite date, both documents were probably copied in the same time period.
But there’s a crucial qualification that must be made before we consider the possible dates of these fragments: Since writing styles evolve slowly and unevenly, this process — known as paleography — can only assign a range of approximate dates to manuscripts.
The style of handwriting found in Papyrus Rylands Greek 457 is somewhat similar to a bit of papyrus from Fayyum, a desert region in the northern reaches of Middle Egypt. This fragment, known as Papyrus Fayyum 110, is a personal letter from a farmer named Lucius Gemellus. In the letter, Gemellus shares some thoughts with his slave Epagathos about the fertilization and irrigation of the olive orchard. The content of this letter isn’t particularly exciting, unless you’ve been losing sleep over the precise mixture of water and manure to toss on those olive trees in your backyard.
What’s significant are the strong similarities between the handwriting in this fragment and Papyrus Rylands Greek 457 because Gemellus dated this letter in the year that we know as “A.D. 94” or “94 C.E.” — though, of course, that wasn’t what Gemellus called it. For Gemellus, the date was the fourteenth year of the reign of Emperor Domitian. This places one of the most similar papyrus fragments to this one near the end of the first century.
This does not mean that Papyrus Rylands 457 was copied in the first century — or even necessarily in the second. Remember: Paleographic dating can’t provide precise dates; in nearly every instance, it provides a broad time frame when a manuscript might have been copied. Other manuscripts that are similar to Papyrus Rylands 457 include a second-century fragment of The Iliad (P. Berol 6845). There are a handful of other similarities in manuscripts that are both earlier and later than the second century. When all of the possibilities are weighed, however, it does seem likely that this fragment of John’s Gospel was copied sometime in the second century.
So what does this suggest about the Gospel According to John?
Sometime in the second century, the Gospel According to John was not only completed and being copied but also circulating far from its probable point of origin. Other second-century fragments from John’s and Matthew’s Gospels (P90, P104) have been unearthed in Egypt as well, about a hundred miles south of Cairo. That’s nearly four hundred miles from Jerusalem and more than a thousand-mile trek from ancient Ephesus. Although the locations of their discovery might be very different from their places of origin, these pieces of papyrus suggest, at the very least, that the Gospels According to Matthew and John were in wide circulation in the second century. Since Matthew’s Gospel seems to have used Mark’s Gospel as a source, it would seem that the Gospel According to Mark must have been available at this time as well. By the late second or early third century, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were so widely accepted as the authoritative accounts of the life of Jesus that they were being bound together in a single book (P4, P64 / P67).
Alongside widespread circulation of these four Gospels in the second century, there are numerous surviving reports that these texts were penned in the first century. Papias of Hierapolis — writing in the early second century about first-century events in Asia Minor — attests to the first-century origins of Matthew and Mark; the second-century Muratorian Fragment does the same for Luke’s and John’s Gospels. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the second century from modern France, echoes these same origin stories.
There is abundant evidence that the New Testament Gospels were written in the first century, that they were disseminated widely in the second century, and that they were already embraced in the second century as accounts of the life of Jesus that were authoritative for Christians.
What About the Other Gospels?
So what about all those other Gospels — the alleged “runners-up” that were excised and dropped the canonical cutting-room floor?
There are a few of these texts that were most likely written in the second century, but there are none that were written in the first century.
There is, for example, a second-century portion from an otherwise-unknown Gospel that parallels three New Testament texts and includes an additional fragmentary account from the life of Jesus. Other fragments that may have been copied in the second century come from a Gospel falsely ascribed to Peter and from a collection of sayings known as Gospel of Thomas. Yet, unlike the New Testament Gospels, there is little supporting evidence to link any text in this tiny handful of fragments to any first-century eyewitness.
Even though certain segments in these other Gospels may be traceable to true traditions about Jesus, there’s little reason to think that any of these texts is traceable to eyewitness testimony from the first century. There are a few other Gospels that may have originated as early as the second century. And yet, with few exceptions, other Gospels beyond the four New Testament Gospels were written much later, with neither pretense nor possibility of presenting eyewitness testimony about Jesus.
Canons, Councils, and Cutting-Room Floors
So what about the charge that “the four Gospels…were chosen more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen”? Or what about the suggestion that “political and theological councils voted on which of the many Gospels…were to make up the New Testament”?
Such claims ignore clear evidence that
the four New Testament Gospels were received as authoritative from the time that they first began to circulate,
the New Testament Gospels were traced to testimony from apostles and eyewitnesses from the beginning,
and that the alternative “Gospels” seem to have been ascribed to apostles long after the eyewitnesses had passed away.
The four Gospels were not randomly selected from a larger sampling of Gospels; they were the standard by which other texts were tested from the first century forward. They were received from the earliest decades of Christianity as the authoritative accounts of the life of Jesus. Historical evidence is utterly absent for any council or vote that selected the four New Testament Gospels from an abundance of other “Gospels,” all of which had an equal claim to eyewitness testimony.
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B. Nongbri, “The Use and Abuse of P52,” Harvard Theological Review 98 (2005): 23–52 cautions against assigning a date in the early second century, and he points out paleological parallels in other manuscripts, some of them later than the second century. For the first references to Papyrus Rylands 457 after its discovery, see C. Roberts, “An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel in the John Rylands Library,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 20 (1936):45–55. See also C. Roberts, Greek Literary Hands (Oxford, United Kingdom: Clarendon, 1955) 11. For more information about the Gemellus correspondence, see N. Hohlwein, “Le vétéran Lucius Bellienus Gemellus, gentleman-farmer au Fayoum,” Études de Papyrologie 8 (1957): 69–91.