The Dating Game.

The various schemes for attempting to assign dates to the writings of the New Testament derive from Modernist ideologies and methodologies.  Therefore they function as a project of Empire.  The Church needs to hear such hypothesizing with the greatest suspicion, for by definition Empire never has the best interests of the Church at heart.  

Such efforts necessarily treat the text like an inert, inanimate, dead object; in other words, an "it."  This precludes any kind of real relationship with the text or with the community/tradition that lives in conversation with it.  Under Modernity, the text gets reduced to an object for dissection and a tool for utilization in theological arguments, rather than as "the unique and authoritative witness to the Word of God," Jesus Christ.

While scholars may come to broad consensus about the dating of documents, nevertheless there always remain outliers advocating radically different assessments.    People basically choose which valuations best support the argument they want to make based on where they want the church to go today.  In reality, since actually carbon-dated manuscripts of the New Testament go back only to the late 2nd century at the earliest, the issue of composition date of specific documents becomes more or less arbitrary, with scholars ignoring or challenging the consensus when it suits their purposes.  Sometimes their agendas reflect a sincere desire to inform and reform the Church, but at other times they have no more integrity than feeding a need for novelty, publicity, publication, academic advancement, media attention, or ecclesiastical influence.

In other words, in fact we simply cannot know with any kind of certainty or confidence how or when an ancient text arrived at its originally written form.      

Real spiritual authority therefore cannot derive from any assessment of a document's purported age.  Rather it emerges from the living community/tradition which keeps, interprets, and applies the truth to which Scripture points.  We have an "open source" document tradition that from the beginning underwent evolution, adaptation, embellishment, interpretation, expansion, and application by the community.  This process continues even after the text's crystallization by canonization in the Church's homiletical, liturgical, devotional, and theological tradition.  The only thing we might gain from an analysis of which pieces might have come earlier would suggest how the community may have responded to changing situations in the past.  But the idea that words assessed as "earlier" by this or that scholar convey more ecclesiastical authority than words deemed "later," does not accomplish anything but distract the community by miring it in pointless arguments about historicity, detracting from its active witness to the liberating love of the Creator in its own historical context.

We can no longer use "earlier" as a kind of trump card demanding that the Church accept the authority of this or that text.  Authority does not come to the Church from a cadre of specialists credentialed by Empire and guided by Empire's methodologies, standards, and criteria.  Rather, authority in the Church emerges from the movement of the Spirit in the living community.  The gathering of disciples discerns the Voice of the Creator in the creative tension between the core values of the tradition, and the demands of the contemporary historical context, the specific life situations of actual disciples.

+++++++