When were the four Gospels written?

Question 1152

The date of the Gospels matters more than it first appears. If they were written generations after the events, by people far removed from the eyewitnesses, then doubts about their reliability gain a foothold, for legends can grow in the gap between an event and its recording. If they were written within the lifetime of those who had seen and heard the Lord Jesus, then they stand as early and credible testimony, open to challenge by anyone who had been there.

So the question is worth asking carefully. When were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John written, and how close are they to the life of Jesus they describe? The evidence, weighed honestly, places them firmly within the first century and within reach of living memory, which is a great support to the confidence with which we read them.

Within the Lifetime of the Witnesses

The strong evidence is that all four Gospels were written in the first century, within the lifetime of people who had known Jesus or could question those who had. The early church consistently attributed them to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, two of them apostles and two of them close companions of apostles, Mark associated with Peter and Luke with Paul. This was not a late legend that grew up after the fact but the steady testimony of the generation that followed the apostles, men who had every reason to know where these accounts came from and who named the authors without dispute.

The apostle Paul, writing his letters in the fifties, already cites the gospel tradition as something delivered to him and passed on to the churches. When he reminds the Corinthians of the resurrection, he lists the appearances of the risen Lord and says that most of the five hundred who saw Him at once were still alive, as if to invite his readers to go and ask them. The framework of the gospel was therefore circulating as living memory while the witnesses could still be consulted, which is the very opposite of a story that grew up long after the facts had faded.

A Telling Silence

One detail points to an early date with real force. In the year seventy the Romans besieged and destroyed Jerusalem and burned its temple to the ground, a shattering event for the Jewish people and for the young church, and the end of the whole sacrificial system. The Lord Jesus had plainly foretold this destruction, weeping over the city and describing its fall. Yet none of the Gospels records the fulfilment of that prophecy, which is remarkable, since a writer composing after the event would surely have noted how exactly the Lord’s words came to pass.

The book of Acts sharpens the point. Luke wrote Acts as the second volume after his Gospel, and Acts ends abruptly with Paul still alive and awaiting trial in Rome in the early sixties. It says nothing of the outcome of that trial, nothing of the death of Paul, nothing of the fierce persecution under Nero, and nothing of the fall of Jerusalem. The most natural explanation is that Luke wrote Acts before these things happened, because he recorded events up to the point at which he was writing. If Acts was finished before the early sixties, then Luke’s Gospel was earlier still, and Mark, which most take to be earlier than Luke, earlier again.

This line of reasoning suggests that the first three Gospels were written in the years before seventy, perhaps in the fifties and sixties, well within the period when eyewitnesses were active and could correct any error. The Gospel of John is usually dated somewhat later, towards the close of the first century, written by the apostle in his old age at Ephesus. Even on that later date, John wrote as a man who had leaned on the Lord’s breast at the supper, stood by the cross, and seen the empty tomb with his own eyes.

The Weight of the Evidence

Set against the dates of other ancient writings, the Gospels are remarkably close to the events they record. Historians happily reconstruct the lives of figures from antiquity using sources written generations or even centuries after the fact, and they do so without embarrassment. The Gospels, by contrast, were composed within a single generation, by or under those who were there, and the manuscript record that preserves them is earlier and fuller than for any other work of the ancient world.

Small fragments of the Gospels survive from within a century of their writing, and complete copies follow not long after, so that we can trace these accounts back to a time when their claims could still be tested against living memory. The gap between the events and our earliest evidence is short by any ancient standard, and the chain of transmission is unusually well preserved. The believer has no reason to be shaken by the charge that the Gospels are distant or unreliable, for the evidence runs the other way.

Eyewitness Testimony, Not Folklore

The Gospels themselves claim to rest on eyewitness testimony. Luke says he carefully investigated everything from the beginning, consulting those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word. John says plainly that he writes what he has seen, and that his testimony is true. Peter declares that the apostles did not follow cleverly devised myths but were eyewitnesses of the Lord’s majesty. These are not the words of men spinning legends but of men reporting what they had seen and heard, and staking their lives on it.

So, now what?

When someone suggests the Gospels are the product of distant legend, you can answer with confidence that the evidence points the other way. These are early documents, anchored in eyewitness testimony, written while the events were still fresh and the witnesses still living, and preserved in a manuscript record without equal in the ancient world.

Read them, then, not as folklore but as the sober record of men who staked their lives on what they had seen. They wrote, as John tells us, so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in His name. Let that purpose be fulfilled in you as you read, and let the nearness of these witnesses to their Lord draw you nearer to Him as well.

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life, that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you.” 1 John 1:1-3

For Further Study

For a careful treatment of the dating and reliability of the Gospels, the New Testament introduction of D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo is a sound guide, as is the older work of Donald Guthrie. Craig Blomberg has written accessibly on the historical reliability of the Gospels, and the studies of F. F. Bruce on the New Testament documents remain a clear and trustworthy place to begin.