Whenever I read a book or see a TV show about where the books of the Bible came from, I have no trouble following the textual analysis (e.g. the books of Matthew and Luke came from Mark and Q because yadda yadda). However, there’s one thing they never seem to explain…
They state, for example, that the book of Mark was written in 50 CE (or thereabouts). How do they arrive at that date?
Dating the books of the New Testament is very difficult. Textual analysis is impossible because we are dating books within such a short time frame. I doubt you could tell the difference between prose from 1950 and 1970, or even 1920 and 1990. Mark is usually dated around 66-70 CE, because it describes the first part of the destruction of the Temple, but not the whole thing. Others think that it does describe the complete destruction of the Temple (that is, all that was destroyed, not the entire Temple though) and date it to after 70 CE.
I’ve never heard Mark dated to 50 CE. Such a date has little justification. I imagine that a conservative scholar who accepts Q, but who still wishes to maintain that the gospels were written my the men whose names appear on them might posit such a date.
Ouch! Then the dating is based on an unproveable premise. They posit that Mark must have written his book around 70 CE because he knows some of the details of the temple’s destruction. However, this is based upon the presumption that Jesus could not have predicted the sacking of the temple.
While I agree with that assumption (I don’t believe in clairvoyance or prophecy, and I’m not even sure about the historicity of Jesus), it’s not an argument that is likely to convince any fundamentalists. They’ll maintain that Jesus DID predict it because, after all, he was the Son o’ God ™.