Frank Mayhar wrote: > > Lydia Nickerson wrote: > > The books don't exist by themselves, they were written by human > > beings, often for somewhat venal reasons. Was it Jeremiah that was > > written to justify the new line of kings and the changes in the > > religious structure? Joshua and Judges were written to prove that > > the Israelites were entitled to the land they'd stolen from the > > Canaanites. The Gospels were written as propaganda to prove that > > Christ was the Messiah, and tell several flat out whoppers to > > accomplish that. > > Yes, and most often this stuff was written _after_ the fact, particularly > the NT. Most of which was written, when, ca 100 AD? The only thing that late might be the book of Revelation. Normal dating of the various NT books runs from about 49 CE (Paul's earliest epistles) to the '90s, with Mark being sometime in the 60's, Matthew shortly after 70 CE, Luke a little after that, and John questionable, but usually considered about the 80's, not later than the '90s (the earliest NT papyrus is a fragment of John, and comes from Egypt c. 120 CE; if you allow for time for dissemination and copying >from its point of origin (probably Ephesus) it can't be significantly later than the '90s. The Johannine corpus is the only one which contains a _claim_ to be eye-witness (apart from II Peter, which is almost certainly pseudonymous and late), but many of the texts probably (and certainly all of Paul's epistles) were written in whole or in large part by people who knew eye-witnesses. They weren't written to the standards of a modern-day historian, but as general source texts for the period they're as close to their sources as most texts from the period are (Tacitus, Josephus (an eye-witness for only part of his history), Plutarch, etc.). Their reliability as sources for Christian belief is another matter, usually said to be "outside the scope of the historian". These estimates are debated. I've seen plausible arguments against the general consensus that the books might be earlier; I've seen few plausible arguments that they might be later. The history of dating in the last century and a bit has been that dates were gradually pushed earlier against a good deal of resistance, and they thus err on the side of late rather than early, if at all. This is especially true when one considers that much of the contents were almost certainly in existence as separate pericopes and other texts prior to their final redaction as the texts we have today. I won't get into the very long and complicated debate about exactly why the gospels were written -- i.e. the exact aims of the Christian kerygma -- or about the level of reliability (I can refer anyone who's interested to Sander's _Jesus and Judaism_ as a good approach to it) but I will note that most research I've seen from the last half-century or so is rather dubious about the existence as a pre-existing slot of the concept of Messiah in the middle of the First Century CE toward which the gospellers distorted the picture; there was certainly a general role in popular belief, but it doesn't seem to have had a great deal of determinate content, and it was not (outside of Christianity) linked up at all strongly with the other major titles like "Son of Man" (bar e'Nasa) recorded in the NT. The various OT books were almost certainly written too _late_ to have the aims Lydia attributes to them; by the time the books of Joshua and Judges were assembled, the question of entitlement to the land had been dead for several centuries. About Jeremiah, she's at least half-right -- Jeremiah (the person) is associated with a particular strong view regarding the law and the covenant (what we would now call the Deuteronomic one) and the book was assembled (quite possibly by Baruch) very close to the time it describes. -- James Burbidge jamesandmary.burbidge at sympatico.ca