The Dating of the Gospels
PART TWO OF TWO PARTS
The “Library of Vatican Editions” and the “Osservatore Romano” support the Modernist errors.
IV. The Scientific Confirmation of the Traditional Dates
The work of three Biblical scientists (real ones this time) has been illustrated by Msgr. Francesco Spadafora, renowned Biblical scholar and teacher at the University of the Lateran, in “Palestra del Clero” (Feb. 15, 1986). He speaks of them as “a genial and important trilogy”
a) the Anglican John A.R. Robinson (4). He surprisingly quotes respectable modern authorities for the greatest part of his apparently old fashioned datings.
b) Mr. Claude Tresmontant (5). He speaks of the allegedly late redaction of St. Matthew. “Nothing supposes a late composition, delayed until the end of the first century: nothing, not one text, not one bit, one hair of the text, it is a completely arbitrary hypothesis.”
c) Fr. Jean Carmignac (6). The fruit of 20 years of research is that the language of the original synoptics (St. Matthew and St. Mark), or of their sources (St. Luke), is Hebrew or Aramaic, (probably Hebrew). Thus, “the Gospels were written earlier than we used to think, and their historical value is first hand.”
Msgr. Spadafora summarizes (6) their conclusions:
“Fr. Gelot, not convinced of the destruction of the foundation of the 1920 fad, erected by the German critic (R. Bultmann) and strangely transferred with slight modifications to the Catholic camp, thought of intervening so as to prevent it from crumbling.
“But the form itself proves him wrong. He offers no valuable arguments, here, on the other hand, we are in the domain of the positive. The trilogy Robinson/Tresmontant/Carmignac is walking on solid ground: sources and historical -- mainly philological arguments. And philosophy is almost as certain as mathematics.
“Moreover, for the dating of the synoptic Gospels before 70 A.D., and for the original language of Matthew in Hebrew or Aramaic, one arrives at the quasi-unanimous conclusions of the Catholic writers, confirming it with historical and philological arguments.
“In 1982, we exposed synthetically what I had proposed already for years as an echo of the thought of the Fathers in “The Church of Christ and the Formation of the Apostles.” (Ed. Rogate, Rome):
`The first to write the Gospel was the Apostle Matthew. Before he left Palestine, with others to preach, he gave his flock his precious Gospel written in their own language, Aramaic.
“But the departure of the Apostles from Palestine, to convert the Gentiles, seems tied with the sign given by Heaven: the famous visions of impure animals, offered to Peter in Jopp—the divine sign for the baptism of the first pagan, Cornelius the Centurion and all his family (Acts X,11).
“Moreover, we can deduce with certainty from the Acts that, in 42 A.D., on the occasion of the persecution of Herod Agrippa the First, no other Apostle was present in Jerusalem or in Palestine, when James was killed (and Peter, after delivery from prison by an angel), finally left the Holy Land.
“The first Gospel, thus, was written toward the year 40 A.D., within 10 years after the death of the Redeemer.
“Soon after, it was translated into Greek, the official language of the Empire, for the Jews who lived outside Palestine and spoke only Greek.
“When St. Paul, in 50-51 A.D., wrote the two Epistles to the Thessalonians from Cornith, the Greek translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew was already completed. St. Paul depends on it literarily, particularly in II Thessalonians (ch. II, 1-14; re. Mt. XXIV). The critics are in agreement.
“The author of the Acts and of the third Gospel is St. Luke . . . Now, the Acts do not cover beyond the year 63 A.D., for they do not mention the liberation of Paul from the Tribunal of Caesar, which took place in that year. The third Gospel, which is anterior, as is said in the prologue to the Acts, was composed by St. Luke in 60 during the captivity of St. Paul at Cesarea.
“This is a reference for dating the second Gospel: Mark put in writing the preaching of St. Peter around 50-55; St. Luke, in fact, often either follows or at least depends on him.
V. EVEN THE PAPYRI SPEAK
The whole world knows of the famous P52, the John Rylands papyrus, of the greatest importance because, for a long time (since its discovery in 1935), it was the oldest known manuscript of the New Testament. It contains verses 31-33 and 37-38 of chapter XVIII of St. John’s Gospel, on “Christ the King”. It is dated 125 A.D. The “voice” of the Rylands papyrus put an end to the cries of the German rationalists (and of their Modernist parrots), who denied the credibility of the dialogue between Jesus and Pontius Pilate as well as the authenticity of the Gospel of St. John, classified by them as “theological” and arbitrarily dated at the end of the second century.
The papyri which concern the New Testament have increased in number since then, to the greatest disappointment of the “critics” like Grelot, who resolve their embarassment ... by ignoring them! All the more surprising is that the Dean of the Biblical Faculty of the Biblical Institute (of which Grelot is a member) is the author of a precious discovery relating to the dating of the Gospels. His name: Fr. Jose O’Callaghan, S.J., an eminent papyrologue. His providential discovery of the deciphering of the 7Q5 is thus narrated by the learned Protestant Carsten Peter Thiede:
“The seventh grotto of Qumran, discovered and opened in the months of February and March 1955, at first sight, offered nothing as sensational as the rolls of the first grotto, discovered in 1945 and rendered public in 1947, which gave Qumran its fame. Seven years were necessary before the fragments of the 7th grotto could be published in 1952. However, the report of the discovery underlined a fact which, had it been studied right away, should have raised the greatest attention: all the grottoes of Qumran, with rare exceptions, contained exclusively Hebraic (or Aramaic) texts -- either from books of the Old Testament or writing of the Qumran community — the papyrus was hardly ever used On the contrary, the 7th grotto had only Greek texts and exclusively papyri manuscripts (as well as fragment #19: the print in reverse of a fragment of papyrus hardened in the ground.)
“This discovery, in itself sensational, remained nevertheless without consequence. The urgent task was to deafer the fragments, 19 in number. In truth, the papyrologues in charge, M.E. Boismard and P Benoit, didn’t make much progress. For the most part, the fragments were too small, and they contained few words, or combinations of letters so be ordered easily, were that ever possible. Thus, they concentrated on the deciphering of two of the five largest pieces, both from 7Q1: (Exodus XXVIII, 4-7; Baruch [Letter of Jeremias] VI, 43-44). For the fragments 3-5, they only advanced the hypothesis that they could belong to the Bible. For fragment #5, they thought that the singular combination ‘-nness-’ in the 4th line could belong to the word ‘agennesere’ [“will beget”] and thus be a part of a genealogy.
“The useless attempts to localize these fragments in the Greek Old Testament, including the Apocryphae; marked the end of the work in the early 60’s. No one supposed that, in these ‘biblical texts,’ there could be fragments of the New Testament: the New Testament, the announcement of Jesus Christ, had nothing to do with the Essenians of Qumran, and the fact, historically and archeologically confirmed, that the grottoes of Qumran, with their manuscripts, had been sealed in the year 68, when their dwellers fled before the Roman troops, led by Vespasian to Jerusalem, confirmed this opinion. Everything which was to be found in these grottoes must have been written before the year 68. According to the common conviction, this could have concerned only the ‘authentic epistles of St. Paul.’
“To which must be added the fact that the British papyrologue C.H. Roberts, the same who, in 1935, had deciphered and dated the P52 in Manchester, expressed publicly the opinion that the 7Q5 fragment, of relative importance, was writ-ten in the year 50 at the latest.
“Even J. O’Callaghan, who continued the work ten years after the publication of the findings, had not thought of discovering a fragment of Mark or of any other New Testament text. He was trying to discover passages of the Old Testament, at least for the largest fragments of the seventh grotto. Yet, after having experienced the same failure as his predecessors, the idea came to him that this singular combination of the letters in the fourth line of the fifth fragment,— `nness’-- perhaps was not part of a genealogy, but of the word Genezareth. But, the lake or territory of Genesaret, both in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, is mentioned only once with the particular spelling ‘Gennesar’ (I Mace XI, 67), whereas, usually the term used is `Chenereth; or `Chenare. But no other letter of the fragment corresponds to the passage. Before he dropped the whole matter, O’Callaghan, more out of scientific curiosity than true conviction, tried what was considered a priori as impossible: he examined the New Testament.
“Whosoever has tried in any domain to follow a path totally unlikely, and later on has found out that it was the one which led to the result which no one ever hoped to discover, will easily imagine the reaction of O’Callaghan when he found out that, in the New Testament, there existed precisely a passage in which everything coincided. The group of letters `-nnes-’ of Vennesaret; as well as the two other peculiarities in the fragment: a space on line 3, called paragraphos, which in the ancient manuscripts divided two sections of the text (the equivalent of what we still call ‘paragraph), and the sentence after the paragraph which begins with a ‘Kai’ (‘and’). In Mk. VI, 52-53, verse 52 ends the narration of Jesus’ walking on the waters, and verse 53 begins that of the cures at Gennessaret, and this begins with ‘Kai; the stylistic form of the parataxis (coordination) characteristic of Mark.
“When he saw that the other letters preserved corresponded perfectly well with this identification, O’Callaghan published his findings. And even though he had all the data to publish a certain result, he was prudent and wanted to initiate an international debate between experts. He expressed it in the title of his article by an question mark: ‘Papiros neotestamentarios en la cueva 7 de Qumran?’ Reactions came promptly from the expected directions. En-thusiastic approbation was expressed especially on the part of those who wanted to cast a decisive blow against the prevailing current of introductory studies of the New Testament; energetic refusal came on the contrary, from those who represented this current; and, in the midst of it all there were the famous scholars on the New Testament, papyrologues and experts of Qumran, who expressed a prudent assent, but who, for the moment, did not want to make any hasty conclusions.
“The debate was completely dropped after Kurt Aland, research director of the New Testament in Munster, spoke against the new discovery. His undisputed authority led the majority of experts to disregard it completely, even though neither Aland nor Ballet nor P Benoit, upon whom he relied, had worked with sufficient precision. The essential criteria of O’Callaghan and the decisive characteristics of the papyrus 7Q5 with its ‘paragraphos’ had been unfortunately neglected.
“For a scriptural historian, who, without prejudice, takes into consideration every element presented by a papyrologue, especially for the unique identification of our papyrus, little doubt remains: 7Q5 corresponds to Mk. VI, 52-53 (8).”
After the careful and scientific examination of the fragment, the German scientist concludes:
“Thus, to summarize, not only all positive proofs for the exactitude of the identification have been given, but also all possible objections have been eliminated. Based on the rules of paleography and of textual criticism, it is certain that 7Q5 is Mk. VI 52-53, the most ancient fragment of a text of the New Testament, written toward the year 50, and certainly from a book anterior to Mark, but presupposes a fully written Gospel, was already affirmed by the same Kurt Aland, before he tried to refute the discovery of the fragment.”
Thus, it seems that, after the hasty criticism of world experts on the New Testament, the truth is finally emerging, voiced by the Berlin professor, Carsten Peter Thiede, in his book (1986), which deals clearly and scientifically with the whole problem. Here again, as in the cases of the Holy Shroud and the Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, science eventually confirms the traditional Catholic teaching and cripples with a powerful blow the fabulous legends of the Roman Modernists, from whom we should always pray God to deliver us.
(1) Msgr. Piero Rossano, in “La Bibbia”, Paoline ed. 1989, pp. 1511-1515.
(2) P.P.H. Simon G. Dorado, N.T. Vol I, “In-troductio et commentarius in quattuor Jesu Christi Evangelic’: Marietti, El Perpetuo Socorro, Edit Turin, Madrid, 1960, pp. 1066.
“La Sagrada Escritura” Nuevo Testamento, I Evangelio, B.A.C. 207, Madrid, 1961.
(3) “Leon XIII et les etudes bibliques,” Institut Padano Arti Grafiche, Rovigo, 1976.
(4) “Le Christ hebreu. La langue et rage des Evangiles,” Paris 0.E.I.L. 1983, pp. 320.
(5) “Redating the New Testament,” London, 1976, pp. XIII, 369.
(6) “The Birth of the Synoptics,” Franciscan Herald Press, 1434 West 51st St., Chicago, IL 60609, (1987).
(7) “La Tradizione contra it Concilio” Ed. Pol. Volpi, Publisher (Ciarrapico), Rome, 1989.
(8) Thiede: “Die altesste Evangelien - Hand-schrift? Das Markus” (Wuppertal, 1986). Italian translation in “Subsidia biblica” #10, Gregorian University --Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1987; 73 pgs.
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