1 John 3:16


"By this we perceive the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."

Tuesday 24 August 2010

Date of Authorship

Evolutionary theories are used by some to support the idea that the New Testament was orally passed down and not written until much later. Some suggest that the written form of the New Testament did not exist until 325AD. At the Council of Nicaea the Canon was confirmed, but this was because it had already been accepted by the church for hundreds of years. It seems apparent from the internal evidence within the New Testament that it was all written in its final form before 70AD, for the following reasons:

1. None of the books in the New Testament mention the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD, though Matthew, Luke, Mark, Thessalonians and Revelation all prophecy of it. The Gospels, Acts, Hebrews and Revelation 11 also assume the temple was still standing at the time they were written.

2. Paul often quoted from the Gospels, as though he had them available at the time in a written and widely known form (1 Cor 7:10, 11:24, 1 Thes 4:15).

3. Paul called the Gospels scripture (1 Cor 15:1-3).

4. Paul instructed that his epistles be copied and read in other churches (Col 4:16).

5. Peter in his epistles called the New Testament scripture, referring to the Gospels and Paul’s writings (compare 2 Pet 1:19-21, 3:1-2, 15-16).

6. In Acts, the disciples “continued in the Apostle’s doctrine” showing the earliness and spread of the record of the words of Jesus. With such a wide and early circulation of texts it would have been impossible to corrupt any one text without detection.

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