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A Legendary Jesus and New Testament Dating

Introducing the Fourth Option

I became a Christian in November, 1968, my junior year at the University of Missouri. A Campus Crusade worker delivered a talk at my fraternity house and I found it so persuasive, that about a month after hearing it, I trusted Christ.

The talk was pretty well-known in the 60's and it was entitled "Lord, Liar, Lunatic." The basic idea is that, given Jesus' claims about Himself as being God come in the flesh, there are only three alternatives: He was either a liar, He was crazy or He was who He said He was. The first two options are ridiculous as Josh McDowell has demonstrated in his classic work Evidence That Demands a Verdict (Here's Life, 1972); so the most rational thing to do is to embrace alternative three.

To this day, I find the argument powerful, except for one thing. It leaves out a crucial fourth option: He was a legend.

Most people do acknowledge that Jesus was a real person, but some claim that the picture of Jesus as the miracle-working Son of God who rose from the dead is mere legend. Since 1968, I have come to see that this alternative, like the first two, is not as reasonable as the one I have believed for over three decades. I would like to tell you a few reasons why I reject the legend alternative.

The Core of the Legend View

Here's the gist of the legendary view. Jesus lived and was a powerful revolutionary, a charismatic leader. After he was crucified, His followers had experiences that they wrongly interpreted as experiences of Jesus bodily risen from the dead. In light of these experiences, they began preaching and evangelizing. They were so convinced that Christ was still with them, speaking to and through them, that they lost interest in what the real historical Jesus — the Jesus before the crucifixion — was like.

As time went on, more and more legend was added to stories about Jesus, and the Church's Christology (one's view of who Jesus was and is) evolved from a low Christology (Jesus is just a charismatic man) to a high Christology (Jesus is God in the flesh, a miracle-worker). By the time the Gospels were written (AD 70-100), much legendary material was afoot and it overshadows a small core of real historical facts in the Gospels.

Legendary Development in the Ancient World

Many things are wrong with this picture. To begin with, half a century ago, Roman historian A. N. Sherwin-White, an expert in first-century Greek and Roman history, has noted that the rate at which legend accumulated in Jesus' day has been fairly accurately determined (A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament [Clarendon, 1963], pp. 186-93). Sherwin-White claims that even two generations is too short a time frame to allow legend to replace the hard core of historical fact.

Sherwin-White's point can be strengthened when we realize that first-century Jewish culture was an oral culture; that is, it preserved and passed on its important traditions largely through memorization and oral performance/recitation in community gatherings (see James D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus [Baker, 2005]). In such a culture, memorization skills were well-developed, and there was both the ability and concern to pass on the unchanged words and deeds of important religious figures. Thus, the tradition about Jesus between AD 33 when He was crucified until the Gospels were written would have been passed on and preserved in an oral context that would strengthen historical preservation and make legendary development even more unlikely than it would in the general Roman and Greek culture.

The Dating of Matthew, Mark and Luke

The late J. A. T. Robinson held to a late dating of the gospels (AD 70-100) until some of his conservative students challenged him to reconsider their dating with an open mind (cf. his Redating the New Testament [Westminster, 1976]). To his amazement, he discovered that the late dating was based largely on one scholar quoting another in one big circle. His own study of the issue led him to date all the gospels prior to AD 70. In my view, one of the most sophisticated treatments of the dating question is John Wenham's Redating Matthew, Mark, and Luke (InterVarsity, 1992). Wenham argues that the Gospels should be dated between the early forties to the late fifties.

We can date Acts pretty reliably at AD 60-62. In Acts, the city of Jerusalem and martyrdoms (Stephen and James the brother of John) are clearly important, yet neither the fall of Jerusalem (AD 70) nor the executions of Acts' three central figures — James the brother of Jesus, Peter and Paul (AD 62-67) — are mentioned. The best explanation is that Acts was written before these events, an explanation made more secure when one notes that the last chapter of Acts has a sense of immediacy about it and presents Paul still under arrest in Rome (AD 60-62). This means that Luke must be dated earlier than Acts, and if, as most scholars accept, Luke knew of Matthew and Mark (see Luke 1:1-4), the first three Gospels were written within thirty years after Jesus' death, well within Sherwin-White's two generations.

Typically, liberal Bible scholars reject an early dating, preferring AD 70-100. But even this date fits within the two-generation framework. Further, the two key planks in this later dating are:

1. It takes time for Christology to evolve from a charismatic leader to a divine figure, so the Gospels must be late.
2. The earliest gospel — Mark — contains predictive prophesy (in Mark 13, Jesus predicts the fall of Jerusalem); any predictive prophesy is likely to be a fiction, so Mark must be dated at or shortly after AD 70.

These two planks are question-begging — they assume a legendary view to argue for the late date that (allegedly) supports the legendary view. And they are expressions of bias. As such, they place a straight jacket on historical investigation in a way that disallows evidence for an early dating from the outset. The early dating suffers from no such bias, being established on objective historical and literary arguments (for example, the dating of the fall of Jerusalem).

Paul Letters

The epistles of the Apostle Paul were written from AD 49-65. Thus, they provide a sixteen year period to test the evolutionary, legend thesis. But when we look at his letters, his view of Jesus is the same in both his earliest letter (Galatians) and his last letters (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus). Further, his view of Jesus is uniformly high — he knows of no merely charismatic teacher; he only knows of a miracle-working, incarnate Son of God. This means that Paul had already come to accept a supernatural view of Jesus sometime before AD 49.

Some scholars attempt to marginalize Paul by claiming that he was in serious conflict with Peter such that Paul's Christology is not representative of the early church. Unfortunately, this claim is a significant exaggeration for which there is no sufficient evidence. Their confrontation about certain issues (for example, Peter eating with Jews to the exclusion of Gentiles) hardly justifies this hasty generalization. Moreover, Paul himself checked out his gospel and Christology to make sure it was in harmony with the rest of the early church (cf. Galatians 1 and 2). This means that we have solid historical evidence that the early church had accepted a full-blown view of Jesus before AD 49, again, well within two generations.

But there's more. Paul wrote his letters in Greek and addressed them to Gentiles who did not know Hebrew or Aramaic, the language of the Jews. However, in various places in his letters (for example, Romans 1:3-4; 1 Corinthians 11:23ff, 15:3-8; Philippians 2:6-11; Colossians 1:15-18; 1 Timothy 3:16; 2 Timothy 2:8) we come across a few verses that translate easily back from Greek into Aramaic (while the rest of the epistle does not) and that exhibit traits of Hebrew poetry.

Many NT scholars take these passages to be early hymns and creeds that originated from and were used in church services in the early Jewish church in Jerusalem from AD 33 on, and which Paul translates into Greek and incorporates into his letters. Thus, these various hymns and creeds embedded in Paul's writings show that the early Jewish Christian community had a high, supernatural Christology at a very early date — between AD 35-45. Where is the time for legend to accrue here?

C O F F E E  S H O P

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Do you believe that the argument for Jesus Christ being a legend is persuasive? Why or why not?

Join the discussion!

Much more could be said, but one thing seems clear. The materials in the NT that present a full-blown, supernatural Jesus originated well within the timeframe in which legend begins to prevail, and they were written while hostile and friendly eyewitnesses were in place. As Peter said, "we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty" (2 Peter 1:16, NASB).