Sunday School

The Chronology of the New Testament, part one : Who wrote what, when, and why it matters

Welcome to Sunday School! This new weekly feature will cover topics centered on the Bible, theology, and scholarship that are usually never talked about in most churches. Over the past twenty plus years I have received a common response when I have talked about basic biblical scholarship: Why am I just now hearing about this? It’s a great question. Many people would like to embrace a more expansive view of God and humans, but feel like faithfulness to God and the Bible keeps them from it. They have a capacity for compassion that exceeds the understandings of God they’ve inherited. That’s why it is critical that good scholarship is made accessible, not just in the academy or for people who have advanced degrees, but also in Sunday School classes everywhere. That’s the goal of this new weekly article. My hope is that this won’t be a monologue or the last word in a one-sided conversation, but that it will spur more discussion in the chat. What if, together, we can change the meaning of the phrase “Sunday School answer”? That usually means an answer that isn’t well thought out, or just repeats something that has been memorized and believed uncritically. My goal is that we will have meaningful conversations, and that for us a “Sunday School answer” will reflect our thoughtful engagement with the material.

Now, without further ado, welcome to Sunday School.

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I have been around the Bible my entire life. From an early age—probably before I was even literate—I was learning and memorizing the Bible. My gratitude for that can not be over stated. It’s been extremely helpful to my work to have so much of the Bible filed away in the recesses of my brain. That early experience of the Bible, however, was a two-dimensional experience. It wasn’t real. What I mean is my experience of the Bible was no different than any other story I had heard. I had no context for anything that happened in the pages of Scripture, and honestly just assumed that Jesus had lived where I lived, just a while ago, and spoke fluent King James english.

College changed everything. When I, against all the warnings I’d heard, took Hebrew Bible and New Testament my relationship to the Bible changed dramatically. Learning that these stories and letters had their own contexts that shaped their meaning was transformative for me. I was immediately obsessed. Suddenly the Bible had depth, and it became far more real—these were stories written by real people, living in a real time and place, with real experiences, pressures, and contexts.

In the years since, I have found that sharing these ideas has a similar effect on others. That being the case, I thought I’d write a series of posts about the chronology of the documents that make up the New Testament—who wrote what, when—and why knowing this information matters.

Let’s begin with the latter point. Why does it matter that Paul, and not the Gospels, is our earliest written witness to the story of Jesus? Why does it matter that scholars believe the historical Paul to be the author of only seven letters, while thirteen are attributed to him? Why does it matter that Mark is the first Gospel to be written and that it is dated to around the year 70 CE?

To put it simply, it matters because each NT source is a product of its context. They weren’t composed in a bubble, and the realities and pressures of the world around the authors shaped the way they saw things and what they wrote. The problem is that we’ve been taught to read Paul’s letter to the Romans, for example, as if he were writing a systematic theology that lays out the “plan of salvation,” when in reality he’s trying to find a way to hold together groups of people that were very, very different. It’s not Paul’s theological “magnum opus,” but more like he’s building the plane while trying to fly it.

The various letters and texts that make up the NT are not unaffected by their contexts. Far from it. In fact, they are significantly shaped by the contexts in which the authors lived and tried to articulate the meaning of Jesus. Take the Gospel of Mark for example. I mentioned above that Mark was written around the year 70 CE, which was a significant date for Mark’s community. That was the year Rome destroyed the city of Jerusalem, including the Second Temple. Up until that point most of Jesus’s followers had remained part of Judaism, and continued the practices and traditions they had known. When Mark writes his story of Jesus he does so with 70 CE in full view. The cataclysmic events of that year shape the way Mark interprets Jesus and the way he shapes the narrative of his Gospel. Once you see it, all sorts of things begin to make all kinds of sense.

Today I’ll wrap up with a timeline of the NT texts. I won’t explain or add commentary. That will come in follow up posts.

1 Thessalonians c. 50 CE
Galatians c.54 CE
1 Corinthians c.50s CE
2 Corinthians2 c. 50s CE
Philemon mid 50s - early 60s CE
Philippians - 60s Ce
Romans - 60s CE
Mark - c. 70 CE
Colossians - 70s - 80s CE
Matthew - 80s CE
Hebrews - late 80s - 100 CE
John - c.90 CE
Ephesians - c.90 CE
Revelation - 90s CE
James - 90s - 100 CE
Jude - 100s CE
1, 2, 3 John - 100s CE
Luke/Acts - 110s-120s CE
2 Thessalonians - 110s CE
1 Peter - 110s CE
1 + 2 Timothy - 110s CE
Titus - 110s CE
2 Peter - 120s - 135 CE

What about this timeline do you find interesting or surprising? What questions does this suggested chronology raise for you? What would you push back on? Let’s discuss in the chat this week!

Next week: We will discuss the seven genuine letters of the historical Paul.