Dr. Frank Turek of Crossexamined.org explains in simple term why we know that the N.T. documents must have been written in the first century. He is one of our keynote speakers at this year’s Apologetics Canada Conference!
Can’t attend the conference? The recordings of the conference will be made available in April on our online store.
Hey, nice job with the video. However, there is a typo in your title, “How Do We Know The New Testament Documents Were Written In the Fist Century?” It should be first not fist.
Thank you for letting us know. It has been corrected.
First, all Turek is doing is refuting the more radical skeptics. That’s about as fruitful for establishing Christianity, as an atheist’s refuting Pentecostal ecstatic utterances and other assorted craziness of today, is fruitful for disproving Christianity. Showing how dumb the extremists are, is much ado about nothing.
Second, I don’t see how establishing an early date for miracle-reports does the least bit of good toward establishing those reports as historically reliable. Nobody doubts the dates of the testimonies to the Virgin Mary appearing at Fatima, but this close association between event and testimony to event is singularly unimpressive to the Protestants. They will say this appearance is really a trick of Satan at best, no matter how much early eyewitness testimony to the contrary they are given. So they cannot fault atheists who remain unimpressed with gospel accounts even after granting they were all written in 34 a.d. Contemporaneity of the witness with the event is certainly an issue deserving consideration, but is hardly dispotive.
The same thing with those who one day feel they were healed at a Benny Hinn crusade, and then report it in public the very next day. No Christian apologist will so much as waste their time bothering with miracle-testimony that has earmarks of gullibility and mistake, no matter how early the report is published.
Neither do atheists.
The witness’s or author’s identity, relation to the reported events, how much or little his assertions square with trustworthy accounts, and his general credibility are matters far more germane to the question of the reliability of the miracle-accounts in the gospels, than how close the testimonies are to the event testified to.
I’ve been opposing Christianity for years, and the whole time I never doubted that every NT book was likely written before the 2nd century. The early dating of the NT can be disputed on technical grounds, but does no favors for the apologist, whatsoever, even if it be granted for the sake of argument.