How do we know when the Gospels were written?

His writings in defense of the divinity of Christ are one writing, called Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew. Hey, guess why he didn't quote from the Gospels? For the same reason he didn't quote from anywhere else in the NT...*in that writing only*!From his First Apology, ch. 66:

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For the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that Jesus took bread, and when He had given thanks, said, "This do ye in remembrance of Me,(7) this is My body;" and that, after the same manner, having taken the cup and given thanks, He said, "This is My blood;" and gave it to them alone. Which the wicked devils have imitated in the mysteries of Mithras, commanding the same thing to be done.

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I don't know where you got "Christian Records, p.71," but whoever wrote it didn't know what he was talking about. Justin's First Apology is not a questioned writing.I don't have my first volume of the Ante-Nicene Fathers with me here at work, so I can't use their Scripture index, but a quick search found me Mark 9:42 quoted in Rome's letter to the Corinthians (1 Clement), which is almost indisputed as a 1st century writing. It's in chapter 46, and the whole reference to the stumbling block and the millstone around the neck is clearly quoted.As for the statement that: I'd have to see that, because that would be a very famous quote. As inaccurate as everything else you posted was, my thought is that this, too, is just fabricated.Edited by truthlover, : Fixed a code I entered wrong

What are you talking about. You said Justin Martyr and earlier authors didn't quote the Gospels. I showed, with reference to their writings, that they did.I am using the very writings you mentioned not just to support an argument, but to present an absolutely conclusive argument, which is that the statements you quoted are simply false.Nothing else happened, so I have no idea what you're talking about when you say I'm using the Bible to support an argument. I didn't quote Paul.Are you okay? Did you mean to answer someone else? Nothing you responded to me makes any sense at all. Then you ought to be grateful that I was able to inform you that the information in your post 45 is all inaccurate.

People have really weird ideas of how long people used to live. "Average life expectancy" includes kids who die of diseases at age 8. No one was dying of old age in their 20's in the 1st century, and it was common for people to live into old age; just less common than now.

Well, chapalot has been suspended, but I have to address this. St. Irenaeus wrote that there are 4 Gospels (which is what chapalot quoted). Irenaeus sat under Polycarp's teaching in Smyrna in the first half of the 2nd century, thus showing that the 4 Gospels were known at the time of the earliest writings of the fathers. Since this contradicts what chapalot said earlier, I'm really confused why he bothered posting it. I considered posting that quote. That's nice. W.R. Smith, the skeptic, doesn't believe Paul wrote any of the ten epistles most scholars attribute to him. Richard Dawkins states "categorically" that God doesn't exist. You won't win any arguments quoting him, though, without citing some reasons he holds to a minority opinion, even if you call his statement "categorical." Paul spread Christianity through the western world. That's true. If he made everything up or changed what others were teaching, then he's the father of modern Christianity. If he didn't, and he really got his teaching from Yeshua, then Yeshua is the father of Christianity. There's been threads in EVC debating that, but it's really not pertinent here. That's simply not true. He did write the first history. He used earlier writings to write it. No one believes the nonsense you wrote earlier that he forged those writings. I have read Origen, though I've only dabbled in Philo. They have nothing to do with... It is likely that there's similarities between the Essenes and the Ebionites. There is nothing similar about the pathway of the gnostics and the Ebionites, so you'll have to choose one or the other. I'm noticing. Could you try noticing that what you're reading is very little of pure or impure truth, it's mostly just inaccurate? I've given you plenty of references. Could you try paying attention to those references and not "rely on doctrines or dogmas," which is what you are clearly doing despite your denials?

Lol. Those good ol' educated Hindus. Good thing you were able to attain their authority to back up what you're saying. The part about contradicting Paul's story in Galatians some is true. The rest is nonsense. Acts is quoted long before AD 150. Who cares if someone thinks it reads like a fantasy novel, and it quotes the Old Testament well enough. Most folks had to quote from memory back then. Misquotes are common, but I haven't seen any evidence that you or any of your sources would know whether anything was misquoted or would know to check the LXX, which is the version that would have been quoted in Acts.Some of the other stuff you wrote is people's opinions. They're entitled to their opinion. I just wanted to point out that on factual matters, your posts are almost exclusively error.

Well, then, he didn't only influence John, but all of early Christianity. The Logos doctrine is my favorite in early Christianity. I believe it and it touches my whole philosophy of life.I suppose I had better read Philo rather than thumb through pages here and there. Thanks for the info.

I'm okay with you arguing that Clement MIGHT have been quoting something other than Mark. That's a reasonable enough assertion, but it is simply not true that your link "shows that Clement did NOT quote a written Gospel at all."Clement quoted everything loosely. There weren't Bibles available at local bookstores back then. He might well have been quoting a written Gospel. I'm okay with your asserting that.Ignatius and Polycarp don't quote the Gospel of John. That's a big deal, because they were bishops in John's churches.It's hard to push anything back much later than that, though, because Irenaeus knows of the four Gospels, and while he wrote in AD 185, he was in his 60's at the time, and combined with Justin's knowledge of "the memoirs of the apostles, known as the Gospels" there's really not any doubt they were all written in the early first century AT THE LATEST.I jumped all over chapalot's posts because there was so much nonsense in them. I don't mind reasonably looking at these issues, as long as we're being reasonable. Chapalot is being an evangelist for an imaginary gnostic/Jewish combined religion.

I did notice these things, and my guess is that there was no reason to mention the names of the Gospels, and that Justin was quoting from memory. That is what is normally assumed when quotes are not given word for word accurately, which is what is normal for that time.Your point, I assume, is that the Gospels Justin mentioned might be different from our four. That seems extremely unlikely, given that a 60-year-old Irenaeus, who lived in Gaul, but hailed from Smyrna and interacted often with Roman bishops (where Justin was from), knew about the four Gospels by name and spoke as though it had always been like that.You can argue that Justin doesn't give the names, so his reference doesn't prove it's the same four. True enough, but it does prove that there was more than one Gospel in his time, written down, that he assumed to be by the apostles. Irenaeus' age makes him a relatively contemporary reference to Justin, and he does give the names. He only wrote 30 years later, and in Irenaeus time the references to the Gospels and their having been around a long time are universal.

Justin didn't mean eight days later, he meant that Jesus rose on Sunday. It's the same terminology used by both Barnabas and Ignatius in their letters. I can see someone asserting this. Stating it like it's fact and that the Gospels were still changing in his time is a large presumption. Do you have any references suggesting the Gospel was changed from "this day I have begotten thee?" at Christ's baptism. Who are you saying quoted it that way or what manuscript are you saying has it that way?

Equinox, that link didn't help much, because I don't want to buy a book. I did do a search on Google, found a reference that Clement of Alexandria quoted it that way, and then I found it in The Instructor Book I, Ch. 6. The name normally given for that writing is Pedagog..., but I can't ever remember how to spell the rest of the word.It's also found that way in the Gospel to the Hebrews (is that still extant??), according to a web site that says it's based on the 1911 Encylopedia Britannica. Well, I'm just speaking from experience. I've read the first three volumes of the Ante-Nicene Fathers set all the way through and most of the first two volumes I've read at least twice. Even for Paul's letters and especially Hebrews in the Bible, you better not be hoping for word for word quotes, even from the LXX. Matthew's Gospel conflates two prophecies, one not from Jeremiah and the other a stretch, and attributes them to Jeremiah.It is common enough to have affected me as I read both the NT and the fathers to make me not expect exact quotes. By "the norm," I don't mean every time. I'm sure some were great at quoting, and actually, Justin is one of the best, overall, the quotes are not word for word more often than not, I'd say. Clement's letter is one of the worst.Edited by truthlover, : Fixed a code and added reference to Encyclopedia Britannica

Have a good weekend. I'm often not available on weekends, either.It's been a pleasure discussing with you, even though I suspect we'd disagree on our whole worldview, it's nice talking to someone who seems to want to say what's so rather than what he wishes were so.

I know you said that. I was saying that I would be okay if you had said something a little different, but your assertion here is too much for the evidence. You made an interpretation from some facts on a web site that were presented quite in an unbiased manner on the page you linked to. You drew conclusions, I stated that your conclusions only possibly follow. They aren't proven by the data you presented. We both made an argument from the same facts. I think this post makes it clear my arguments are better. You probably won't agree, but that's what debates are all about. I did not read the whole web site you linked to. I did read the whole page you linked to.What I said is that Clement quoted them loosely. In response, you state that somewhere on a web site you linked, it says Clement refers to the Tanakh and Paul's writing as writings about 100 times.This doesn't even address what I said, which is that Clement always quotes loosely, and that just because he said, "It is said," doesn't prove that it can't be a writing and has to be a verbal quote. I said nothing to which this statement of yours is even relevant. That does not mean that he had those writings sitting in front of him. The looseness with which Clement quotes the Tanakh and Paul pretty much proves he didn't have them in front of him, or he would have quoted them more accurately. I have examples in the next section of this post, but first:

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"For somewhere he says, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.'"

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That's from I Clement 15. It seems unlikely that you'd be willing to admit the obvious, which is that by "somewhere" he means in some writing, but I think any reader of our little debate here would agree with me. This is pretty conclusive evidence that he is quoting from some Gospel, even if it's Q or the Gospel to the Hebrews, as a writing, that he doesn't have in front of him but has seen at some time.He uses the exact same wording in ch. 46, in fact, in quoting Ps 18:25,26, where he says "and again it says in another place" before quoting it.An example of why he would use "written" in one place and "said" in another is given in ch. 36 of Clement. He quotes Heb 1:7, saying, "It is written." Why? Because he is quoting something that was only written. It is not a quote attributed to a person verbally. But then he quotes Ps 2:7-8 (or possibly Heb 1:5) with "of his Son the Master spoke thus:" Why is he using speaking now? Because even though this is written, it is a verbal quote.This explains why Clement would mention "the Master said" or "Jesus spoke." He does the same with Ps 2:7-8, even though we know that he knew it was written in the Tanakh. No, I didn't. Are you not aware how common this is? In fact the Gospel of Matthew has a quote in it from the Tanakh that he attributes to Jeremiah that comes from Zechariah with an extra part that might possibly be a misquote of a verse in Jeremiah. This is not uncommon. Look at a reference Bible sometime and look how many references in quotes have a double reference, or more, because they're not sure where a quote came from.As far as Clement himself goes, I opened randomly to a page in his letter just now. In chapter 17, he quotes Job as saying, "No one is clean from stain; no, not even if he lasts but for a day." The best the editor can do is suggest comparing this quote to Job 14:4-5, because it's so loosely quoted. In the very same paragraph he quotes Moses from Exod 3 and 4, 22 verses apart, as though it were one sentence, and then he follow it by quoting Moses as saying, "I'm only steam from a pot," a quote the editor is unable to find anywhere.That's random. The letter of Clement is famous for this sort of quoting. Thus, the fact that the part I quoted pulls from two parts of Matthew, making one statement out of them, is just normal for Clement.To quote the famous and respected J.B. Lightfoot (hope I got the initials right), in response to the very argument you presented, he says, "As Clement's quotations are often very loose, we need not go beyond the Canonical Gospels for the source of this passage" (Apostolic Fathers, 1.2.52). Every one of these obnoxious statements that permeated your post is in some manner inaccurate. In the midst of whining like a Jr. High student and acting like a religious evangelist, you are doing the very thing you accuse me of: not reading my comments properly. The result is that you're repeatedly rude for no reason other than you either read too fast to understand what I said to you, or were too evangelistic to listen to what's being said to you, or just have no time for the effort it takes to communicate in a purely written environment that offers no facial, tonal, or non-verbal clues to what people are saying.You were zero-for-five on your snotty remarks. You might want to try being reasonable, and you might be given a hearing by someone. This complaint is valid, but if you had not been in your unreasonable state of mind, it would not have been hard to tell that my "1st" was a typo. I meant the early 2nd century, and it's obvious from the rest of my post that I don't believe the Gospels were written in the early 1st century.In the end, despite my arguments above, it is entirely possible that Clement's quotes are not from the four Gospels we know, but they are from the Gospel to the Hebrews or Q or possibly (but very unlikely, because he mentions that these sayings are "somewhere") from an oral tradition.In the end, the problem is just as I told you it was. You are making bold assertions about things that you can't be sure about, and in this case, you're making bold assertions about things you don't understand very well. You can't just quote some overconfident skeptic and then act just like an evangelist quoting the Scriptures. It just won't fly.Edited by truthlover, : Changed some wording to avoid expressing any more irritation than I already am.

Hmm. This post of yours was a lot better. It's the "clear" part I disagree with.The Gospel of Mark is said to be Peter's Gospel by others, too. Luke's is also said to be Paul's, because Mark was Peter's companion and Luke Paul's. Mark's was more likely to be called Peter's, because Mark was supposed to have gotten it all from Peter, whereas there's no claim Luke got it all from Paul. We're not talking about "earliest writers," or at least I wasn't when you quoted me. You asked about Justin. Justin is a half century later than the "earliest writers." Justin's only major writing that could quote any of the NT is his First Apology. The Second Apology and the Discourse with the Greeks are small, and the Discourse with the Greeks quotes mostly their poets.In the First Apology, he quotes the Gospels extensively. Yes, he quotes them as sayings of Christ, but he quotes the prophets as though they were sayings, too. He says, "But when you hear the utterances of the prophets spoken as it were personally..." in ch. 36. The rest of the paragraph makes it clear he's talking about the writings of the prophets, if you want to go look it up.Meanwhile, chapters 15-17, a full 2 pages of size 10 font in my Word document, is mostly quotes from the Gospels. The way those guys quoted, it's really no surprise that someone could go through those and find places where he's way off.Later, Justin says that these things are in the memoirs of the apostles, which are called Gospels.Nothing about any of this seems like "proof" that Justin didn't have the four Gospels.Oh, and as far as I can tell, Justin never called Mark's Gospel the memoirs of Peter. It's Papias who first says that Mark was Peter's interpreter, and that's just from Irenaeus quoting him. I didn't find any mention of Mark in a search through Justin's writings. Justin quoted from memory for the same reason everyone else did. It's hard to search through scrolls to find an exact reference. Scrolls were rare. Who knows if he even owned any, or if he just had access to them through the church. The scrolls had no chapters or verse references, and there was no Strong's Concordance to search in. I hope you're seeing that your evidence, when examined, is not so conclusive. While I don't believe there were dozens of any important Gospels, I did know that there were at least two or three others, including the Gospels of Thomas and the Hebrews. I wondered if YOU knew, because you are insisting that Justin and Clement had to be quoting oral tradition apart from anything written. I told you why. Irenaeus was over 60 when he wrote Against Heresies. He had been in Polycarp's church in Smyrna in his younger years. He had visited Rome and been in rather important discussions with the bishop there. He was familiar with the church of Rome in Justin's time, and Justin lived in Rome. Irenaeus claims all the Gospels were written by AD 98, when he says John's Gospel was written. It seems very likely that there were copies of the four Gospels in Rome in AD 150, because Irenaeus was there for long discussions about that time. Surely, he wouldn't have thought the Gospels were ancient if they appeared for the first time when he was in his 40's (just 10 years after Justin wrote) and weren't know by name in his younger years in Smyrna. This is in reference to my statement that "in Irenaeus time the references to the Gospels and their having been around a long time are universal."Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies in AD 185. When I wrote the above statement, I had Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian in mind, both of whom wrote beginning around AD 190.I went to look up references in Clement for you, and I forgot one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Justin knew of the same four Gospels Irenaeus mentioned, besides Irenaeus' trip to Rome to discuss the heresies of Valentinus. Tatian!Tatian was a disciple of Justin's who became a heretic. He also is the editor of the Diatessaron, a harmony of the four Gospels.I don't think Clement and Tertullian are at question. They both mention the Gospels regularly. I found Clement a bit tedious, so I don't remember his writings real well. I only read them once. Tertullian was interesting, and he argued about how ancient the Gospels were just like Irenaeus did. I never read Aristides. I think that was only recently found. It's not in the Ante-Nicene Fathers 10-volume set, nor in any other books I have. It is on the internet, though. Let me go look it up.Ok, I found the place in chapter 16 where he says that the Christians are a new people. The Anonymous Letter to Diognetus calls the Christians a new race, too. I think that's just because they've only been around about a hundred years. That's pretty young for a group of people, especially when they're being compared to the Jews and Greeks.If you want to read the context, I think you'll agree that's what it says.Well, I apologize the last post was so strongly worded. It wasn't as strongly worded as the post it responded to, but this post of yours was a lot more reasonable, so mine was less strongly worded, too. I hope you're willing to look at the evidence I've presented, though.