Redating the New Testament

Description

if you want to find out how Robinson manages to date the whole of the NT before AD 70, you will have to follow him in this long and Oinstaking detective work. And the trail is indeed long, but by no means laborious, for Dr Robinson’s style is easy, even conversational. A book as much for the beginner as for the academic NT scholar’ (CEM Review), ‘The greatest pleasure Dr Robinson gives is purely intellectual. His book is a prodigious virtuoso exercise in inductive reasoning, and an object-lesson in the nature of historical argument and historical knowledge. It is, I think, the finest of all his writings, and its energy is marvellous’ (TheListener). ‘in fewer than 400 pages, Bishop Robinson challenges almost all the judgments which teachers of the New Testament throughout the world commend to their pupils on the dating of the NT books: his reassessment has the simple effect of having them all completed before AD 70. The rumour of this revolutionary conclusion has already given the book notoriety and led some either to dismiss it out of hand or to lose patience with what is taken to be frivolous donnish antics. It would be a great pity if this were to become its dominant reputation, for it is, as we should expect, a work of extensive and careful scholarship, raising serious if unfashionable questions … I am grateful to Bishop Robinson for compelling me to reopen my mind on any problems in the NT and happy to acknowledge with him that ‘all the statements’ which he puts forward ‘should be taken as questions.’ Many will profit from having to think afresh and to realize how little we truly know about the origin of those brief but powerful old books’ (J. L. Houlden in New Fire).