Redating the NEW TESTAMENT   John A.T. Robinson

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ISBN 10: 1-57910-527-0
ISBN 13: 978-1-57910-527-3
Pub. Date: 10/31/2000
$ 37

"One of the oddest facts about the New Testament is that what on any showing would appear to be the single most datable and climactic event of the period - the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and with it the collapse of institutional Judaism based on the temple - is never once mentioned as a past fact. "

For my father
arthur william robinson
 who began at Cambridge just one hundred years ago
to learn from Lightfoot, Westcott and Hort,
whose wisdom and scholarship remain the fount
of so much in this book

and my mother
mary beatrice robinson
who died as it was being finished
and shared and cared to the end.

Remember that through your parents you were born;
What can you give back to them that equals their gift to you?
Ecclus.7.28.

All Souls Day, 1975

 

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I really have no more to say than thank you — to my long-suffering secretary Stella Haughton and her husband; to Professor C. F. D. Moule from whose New Testament seminar so small a seed has produced so monstrous a manuscript, on which he gave such kindly judgment; to my friends, Ed Ball, Gerald Bray, Chip Coakley, Paul Hammond and David McKie, who advised or corrected at many points; and finally to Miss Jean Cunningham of the SCM Press for all her devoted attention to tedious detail.

John Robinson

Trinity College
Cambridge
 

ABBREVIATIONS

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Dates and Data

WHEN WAS THE New Testament written? This is a question that the outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the experts must by now have settled. Yet, as in archaeology, datings that seem agreed in the textbooks can suddenly appear much less secure than the consensus would suggest. For both in archaeology and in New Testament chronology one is dealing with a combination of absolute and relative datings. There are a limited number of more or less fixed points, and between them phenomena to be accounted for are strung along at intervals like beads on a string according to the supposed require­ments of dependence, diffusion and development. New absolute dates will force reconsideration of relative dates, and the intervals will contract or expand with the years available. In the process long-held assumptions about the pattern of dependence, diffusion and development may be upset, and patterns that the textbooks have taken for granted become subjected to radical questioning.