Quote:
Originally Posted by UtahDan
I'm just an amateur here but I had it in my head that the Pauline letters were all older than than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Where did I get that idea?
|
Dating these documents is really fancy guesswork.
Mark is considered the oldest of the Gospels, dating in the early fifties, and Galatians is considered during the same time frame, maybe as early as 48 C.E. or later depending upon other scholarship. Romans, Phillipians, Philemon, Colossians, the letters to the Corinthians, and 1 Thess, were considered to have been written later, and the others are disputed to not even be Pauline.
During the late eighteenth century, a couple of Germans, F.C. Baur and Walter Bauer as well as some French and I believe even Dutch starting dating the documents. They usually "date" something based on an internal reference to some other ruler or concept which they believe they can identify with some degree of certainty. However, the Gospel of John is tied to some of the "Temple" language which recent research shows may have been much earlier than earlier surmised.
None of this can be exclusively confirmed because our earliest copies are third or fourth century IIRC.