My mistake, I was thinking of non-Christian references to the life of Jesus (and didn’t have the dates quite right there either; Tacitus wrote in the early second century and Josephus late in the first, although both references are rather brief). As best I can tell, you’re right about the chronology of Christian writings; Mark is thought to be the earliest of the surviving Gospels, and that was probably written around CE 70. The hypothetical Q source may have come somewhat earlier, but seems to have been a collection of sermons and proverbs rather than a gospel as such, if its projected influence on later works is anything to go by.
Edited to correct. But yes, forty years is a large enough gap to explain a lot of drift.
Ugh. Why’d I write “B.C.E.” when I meant “C.E.”? Oh well, I guess it didn’t confuse anyone. Anyway, besides a handful of people who question the usual gospel dating and try to argue that it was really considerably later, I know there’s also a tiny minority of scholars who date the life of Jesus much earlier, as much as a century or more before what the standard story reports. Hence, I’d wondered if you were a subscriber to one of those theories. It means having to assume some of the references to contemporary events in the gospels are just wrong, but honestly the standard story also has to do that; it just has a different set of mistakes it needs to explain away. Still, it’s a pretty tiny minority theory, and I haven’t really investigated what the evidence for it is supposed to be.
My mistake, I was thinking of non-Christian references to the life of Jesus (and didn’t have the dates quite right there either; Tacitus wrote in the early second century and Josephus late in the first, although both references are rather brief). As best I can tell, you’re right about the chronology of Christian writings; Mark is thought to be the earliest of the surviving Gospels, and that was probably written around CE 70. The hypothetical Q source may have come somewhat earlier, but seems to have been a collection of sermons and proverbs rather than a gospel as such, if its projected influence on later works is anything to go by.
Edited to correct. But yes, forty years is a large enough gap to explain a lot of drift.
Ugh. Why’d I write “B.C.E.” when I meant “C.E.”? Oh well, I guess it didn’t confuse anyone. Anyway, besides a handful of people who question the usual gospel dating and try to argue that it was really considerably later, I know there’s also a tiny minority of scholars who date the life of Jesus much earlier, as much as a century or more before what the standard story reports. Hence, I’d wondered if you were a subscriber to one of those theories. It means having to assume some of the references to contemporary events in the gospels are just wrong, but honestly the standard story also has to do that; it just has a different set of mistakes it needs to explain away. Still, it’s a pretty tiny minority theory, and I haven’t really investigated what the evidence for it is supposed to be.