Open any study Bible to the Gospel of Mark and the introduction will tell you when it was written. Usually "around 70 AD." It sounds like a fact somebody looked up.
Nobody looked it up. Mark never says when it was written. Neither do Matthew, Luke, or John. There is no date on the first page of any of them. The number in the introduction was worked out, not recorded. And how scholars work it out is one of the more interesting things you can learn about the Bible.
The order on the shelf is not the order they were written
Matthew comes first in your New Testament, so it feels like Matthew came first in time. For most of Christian history people assumed so. Mark looked like a shorter version of Matthew.
Most scholars today think it ran the other way. Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap so closely that you can print them in parallel columns and watch whole scenes line up word for word. Nearly all of Mark shows up inside Matthew or Luke. Where Mark's Greek is rough, theirs is smoother. Where his details are awkward, theirs are tidied. Editing tends to run in one direction, from rough to smooth, so the copying seems to flow out of Mark, not into him.
That view is called Markan priority. It is one of the most widely held conclusions in Gospel studies, though a minority still argues for Matthew first. It matters for dating because of one simple rule: a book that copies another book came after it.
The clue is a pile of stones
So when was Mark written? The trail runs through one building.
As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!" Then Jesus asked him, "Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down."
Mark 13:1-2
Herod's Temple in Jerusalem was one of the wonders of the Roman world. In 66 AD Judea rose against Rome. Four years later Roman legions took the city and burned the Temple to the ground. It was never rebuilt.
Mark 13 is a whole chapter about exactly that kind of crisis: wars and rumors of wars, a warning to flee Judea when the moment comes, and this prediction about the stones. That urgency is why most scholars date Mark close to the year 70.
Here is where they stop agreeing. Some read chapter 13 as a writer watching the war build, so just before 70. Others hear a writer who already knows how it ended, so just after. The difference is a few years. It changes the mood of the whole book: a Gospel written into a catastrophe, or out of one.
Luke tells you he was not first
Luke is the one Gospel writer who describes his own method, and he says plainly that others wrote before him.
Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I, too, decided, as one having a grasp of everything from the start, to write a well-ordered account for you, most excellent Theophilus,
Luke 1:1-3
"Many have undertaken." Luke had sources in front of him, and most scholars think Mark was one of them. The same goes for Matthew. If both used Mark, both come after Mark, and most scholars place them in the 80s AD. John, with its different stories and long speeches, is usually dated last, around the 90s.
That is the whole chain. Date Mark from the Temple, and the other three hang from that peg.
The letters came before all of them
One more surprise. The oldest Christian writings we have are not the Gospels. They are Paul's letters.
Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace.
1 Thessalonians 1:1
1 Thessalonians is widely dated around the year 50, within about twenty years of the crucifixion. When Paul sent it there was no written Gospel to read. And the letters themselves quote things that are older still. Paul passes along a summary of the faith that he says he received from others.
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
1 Corinthians 15:3-5
So the New Testament's page order runs backwards from its writing order. The front of the book was written after its middle.
What the dates are, and what they are not
They are ranges. Mark around 65 to 75. Matthew and Luke around 80 to 90. John around 90 to 110. Scholars argue about the edges of every one of those, and nobody can give you a year.
Two different kinds of claim sit inside that. That Mark was written first is close to a consensus. Exactly when Mark was written is a live debate. Honest scholarship holds both at once, and it is worth noticing which kind of claim you are reading whenever someone prints a date.
Put it together and roughly forty years separate the crucifixion from the first written Gospel. That is the gap the letters, and the traditions inside them, were carrying in the meantime.
For further exploration
Three things to read with the text open:
- Read Mark 13:1-2, then Mark 13:14. The second verse stops mid-sentence to say "let the reader understand." Ask who the reader is, and when.
- Read Luke 1:1-4. Count what Luke says already existed before he started writing.
- Read 1 Thessalonians 1, then Mark 1. Try reading them in the order they were written. Notice what changes when the letter comes first.
The dates do not change what the Gospels say. They change what you know about the people who wrote them, and when.
Sources
- Mark 13:1-2, 13:14; Luke 1:1-4; 1 Thessalonians 1:1; 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 (NRSVue)
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible, introductions to Mark and Luke
- Bart D. Ehrman and Hugo Méndez, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, on the Synoptic Problem and the dating of the Gospels
- Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, on the dating of John