(Oct. 11, 2026)
The primary sources for historical reconstructions of the life of Jesus and early Christianity are writings of the first and second centuries of the Current Era (C.E.) To begin a historical investigation requires one to assess these writings. Who wrote each of them and why? What genre of literature are they? When were they written? What is the relation of one writing to another? The answers you start with will affect how your analysis proceeds.
There is widespread (but not universal) agreement among contemporary Biblical scholars on the answers to most of these questions. Generally I accept these answers, but recently I have come to question some of them. I will look more closely at these questions later as I focus on each specific writing, but tentative judgments must be made to know where to begin. Here I want to give an overview of how my judgments depart from the usual answers and a brief account as to why. Following that, I will turn to textual problems in using ancient writings as evidence.
The primary sources
Most of the primary sources are today found in the Christian Bible. These include:
Epistles. These appear to be letters written by various early Christian leaders to Christians living in different cities across the eastern Mediterranean. Letters that claim the missionary Paul as their author are especially important for reconstructing early Christian history. The conventional academic view is that at least seven of the Pauline epistles were genuinely written by Paul in the 50s C.E., and so are our earliest window into Christianity in the first century.
The four gospels. These are narratives of the public career, death and resurrection of Jesus. Although traditionally attributed to “Mark,” “Matthew,” “Luke,” and “John” as their authors (and referred to by these names as shorthand), the conventional academic view is that the true authors of the gospels are unknown. Mark is believed to have been written sometime shortly after the Romans’ destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., and Matthew and Luke are thought to have drawn upon Mark to write their gospels a decade or two later. There is some disagreement about John’s date of composition and reliance on the earlier gospels, but general agreement that in the form we have it, likely after some revisions to the original author’s version, it was composed around the same time or a little later than Luke.
The Acts of the Apostles. Acts is a narrative of how the Christian movement developed in the first several decades after the resurrection of Jesus. The conventional view is that it was written by the same author as Luke and around the same time.
There also are some primary sources not found in the Christian Bible. These include:
Other Christian writings. There are many other Christian writings from the second and possibly first century, most of them appearing to be letters written by notable Christian leaders. A least a couple of them will be particularly important for my analysis.
The writings of Josephus. Josephus was a Jewish official who was born shortly after Jesus is thought to have died and who later in life wrote histories of the Jewish people from ancient times up through the first century. His book Jewish Antiquities mentions Jesus, Jesus’ brother James, and John the Baptist (who also appears in all four canonical Christian gospels). Josephus’ books are believed to have been written in the last quarter of the first century.
The academic agreements on the chronology of these compositions can be roughly mapped out as follows:
50s: Epistles written by Paul.
70s: Gospel of Mark.
80s-90s: Gospels of Matthew and Luke, plus The Acts of the Apostles.
93-94: Jewish Antiquities by Josephus.
Late 1st-early 2nd century: the Gospel of John and some other Christian writings.
Under these assumptions the logical starting point for analysis is the genuine letters of Paul. But one of my my main disagreements is with the dating of these letters and their genuineness. I also disagree with dating Luke/Acts before the writings of Josephus. My tentative alternative chronology thus looks like this:
70s: Gospel of Mark.
80s: Gospel of Matthew.
93-93: Jewish Antiquities by Josephus.
Early 2nd century: Luke & Acts, followed by John and the Pauline epistles.
My chronology agrees with the conventional chronology on the dates of Mark, Matthew and Josephus’ book, but my disagreements have some radical consequences. If the Pauline letters are not from the 50s C.E., then Mark becomes our earliest window into first century Christianity. That window is less revealing, but it suggests quite a different picture of what happened between the time of Jesus and the destruction of the Temple. And if Luke/Acts borrowed from Josephus’ writings, as I think they did, their picture of the life of Jesus and the development of the Christian churches become less historically reliable due to their chronological distance from the events. If the (not) “genuine” letters of Paul rely in turn on Acts to give them some historical verisimilitude, then they are near useless for insights into first century Christianity, although they can tell us something about second century Christianity.
Let’s start with my disagreement over the relation of Luke/Acts to Josephus’ writings. I have been persuaded by Steve Mason (1999, see also this video) that the many passages in Luke/Acts that resemble passages in Josephus’ writings are most likely due to the author of the former works having some knowledge of the latter. Restated perhaps more clearly, their commonalities are due to Luke/Acts drawing on Josephus, not Josephus drawing on Luke/Acts, or both of them drawing from some unknown common source. I’m not sure how far Mason’s view has penetrated into Biblical studies (I intend to explore this question when I get to these topics), but so far, to me anyway, it is more compelling than the alternative explanations.
My disagreement over the “genuine” Pauline epistles is more consequential. Nina Livesey (2024, see also the videos listed on this post) has convinced me that they are later pseudonymous (“false name”) compositions and not real letters authored by Paul. She makes a very strong case for two of her points. One is that the conventional dating of the letters in the 50s was built on very weak foundations. The other is that the Pauline and other epistles resemble “letters in form only” more than the actual ordinary letters of that time. “Letters in form only” are rhetorical essays disguised as letters and meant for a broad audience rather then the ostensible addressee. This was a common literary device in Greco-Roman society circa the first and second centuries, because the content of a letter to a third party is usually seen as more credible than a more overt effort to persuade the reader. The real authors often attribute authorship to some known and respected figure instead of signing their own name for the same reason: readers are then more willing to accept what is in them. I should note that a great many scholars have already accepted that at least some of the letters of “Paul” in the Christian Bible are exactly what Livesey thinks these seven letters are as well.
Critics of Livesey (see this post) have trained their guns on another part of her book rather than these points, which leads me to believe they find them hard to refute. Their target instead is her attempt to provide a date and location for the composition of the letters in question. She argues they were likely written in a school of the Christian teacher Marcion in the mid-second century. I too find this part of her book less persuasive, although it is a respectable effort to provide a candidate for further research. I will look at her arguments more closely when I get to writing my page on “Paul’s” letters. It’s possible I will generate some ideas of my own concerning when they were written.
Although I have not yet delved into these two areas of disagreement with the conventional views as deeply as I would like, I have decided to proceed based on my tentative views for two reasons. One is that, based on what I know at this point, I do think the disagreements are correct. The second is that this offers an opportunity to plow new ground and perhaps generate some insights worthy of further research. Either that or I will find more convincing arguments that the conventional datings are correct.
Ancient writings as evidence
To finish my discussion of ancient writings I want to point out some textual problems in using these as evidence. But first, for clarity I should define key terms I will use:
Writing: something written to convey meaning.
Text: the content of a writing, that is, the sequence of words used.
Original text: the text as originally written by the author (or revised by a final editor) before being disseminated to the public.
Document: a writing written on easily portable but relatively perishable material, such as papyrus or parchment, as opposed to inscriptions on materials such as stone or metal.
Manuscript: a document written by hand (as all ancient documents were).
Manuscript text: a text as found on a specific manuscript.
It is usually the text of a writing that provides evidence to test a hypothesis, but original texts of the primary sources no longer exist. Scholars must reconstruct what was in the original text by utilizing such evidence as is available. One type of evidence is still-existing manuscripts. These manuscripts were produced as part of a long chain of copying a text over and over from the time of the original text until the creation of a manuscript which managed to escape the ravages of time, usually one created hundreds of years after the original text was composed. The copying was more likely than not accomplished by scribes listening to the earlier manuscript being read aloud, not by the earlier manuscript being set in front of the scribe, and so mistakes could easily be made.
Due to a long history of copying and recopying by different scribes, surviving manuscripts (and fragments of manuscripts) have variations in their texts. Judgment must be used in determining which variants are reliable indicators of the original text. As scholars can disagree about these determinations, an analyst has to be cautious about depending too much on a particular reconstruction.
Yet another problem requires another definition:
Witness: a document that attests to the existence of another document by quoting from it or referring to it.
The text of “witnesses” are subject to the same uncertainties for similar reasons: they have been copied by hand over and over until being written as a manuscript that is still in existence. Sometimes what has survived is not just a witness to a text, but a witness to a witness of a text!
Once an original text is reconstructed it still has to be translated into a modern language before most of us can read it. Translators also have to use judgment as they try to convey the sense of a text, and they too have disagreements with their peers. This introduces yet another possibility for a reader to misunderstand what was in the original text.
In sum, when you read an English translation of an ancient text like those listed above, you are reading one possible translation of one possible reconstruction of an original text that disappeared long ago. Many of the variations are small and relatively inconsequential, but others can make a big difference to the results of a historical analysis. Occasionally I will have reason to raise these issues as I look at specific topics.
References
Livesey, Nina E. (2024). The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context. Cambridge University Press.
Mason, Steve (1992). Josephus and the New Testament. Hendrickson.
