Let's be honest: 2020–2021 has not been awesome, for just about anyone. In a year where getting out of bed in the morning was itself a major accomplishment, blogging just wasn't a priority. But with Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament now in "post-production," I find myself having renewed energy. And with that energy, it has occurred to me that the title of this blog might now seem something of a misnomer. After all, these days, I'm blogging about chronology more than critical realism, and the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament more than the New Testament. So, what is the connection between critical realism and the New Testament, and biblical chronology?
What become Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament had started in 2007 as notes for my comprehensive examinations (a stage in most American and Canadian doctoral between coursework and dissertation-writing). I kept going back to it during my dissertation work, whenever I needed a break from my thesis but still wanted to be doing something intellectual. It never occurred to me to publish it, until I mentioned to my Doktorvater that I had 20,000 words of notes on the dates of the New Testament. His eyes bugged out, and he said "That's your second book!" In fact, it will be my third. My second book (the dissertation being the first) was published in 2016 as The Quest for the Historical Jesus after the Demise of Authenticity: Toward a Critical Realist Philosophy of History in Jesus Studies. My work on critical realism came from my discovery as a doctoral student of the work of the late Ben F. Meyer. Meyer was a New Testament scholar who taught in my doctoral alma mater—the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University—for most of his career; he was also a student of Bernard Lonergan's at the Gregorian University in Rome. Much of his work consisted of introducing Lonergan's thought into New Testament studies, and in Quest I aimed to continue his project for the twenty-first century. This blog was born in 2014, as I was working on Quest.
The Quest for the Historical Jesus after the Demise of Authenticity was not simply a detour on the way to writing Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament, however. Although I could not see it at the time, it was in fact necessary preparation. I have become convinced that much of the confusion around the dates of the New Testament texts has to do with what it means to generate and evaluate hypotheses. As a graduate student, I had become frustrated by situations in which one presents an argument that is carefully grounded in the relevant evidence, only for someone to say as an objection that a competing hypothesis is possible. I understood that such objections were largely vacuous, as the mere fact that something else is possible does not mean that a given hypothesis is mistaken. I didn't know how to fully articulate my frustration with such objections however, until I discovered and more importantly truly grasped Lonergan's distinction between intelligence and reason: intelligence asks what explanations might account for a given set of data, whereas reason asks which of these explanations is the correct one. This might sound like a trivial distinction, but it was really quite central to my development as a scholar. It allowed me to focus my attention not upon the work of generating hypotheses but rather on the work of adjudicating between them. And this insight, borne during the work that led to The Quest for the Historical Jesus after the Demise of Authenticity, subsequently moved my work on what became Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament to a whole new level. What had previously been a mass of somewhat organized and at times connected observations about New Testament chronology became systematic, careful argumentation regarding the likely times at which the New Testament texts were written. I began to see where the various pieces fit, and more importantly I began to see why.
No doubt, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament would be a learned piece of scholarship had I not learned to shift my attention from generating hypotheses to adjudicating between them. (These are not mutually exclusive of course, as in truly constructive work one is often adjudicating between a hypothesis of one's creation and those of others). But this shift changed things. Without it, I doubt that Rethinking could claim to be much more than a rehash of John Robinson's 1976 Redating the New Testament. With this shift from generating to adjudicating however, I was able to produce a very different work, even if Robinson and I at times come to similar conclusions. And insofar as this shift lies near the heart of Lonergan's project, this book is a fundamentally critical realist (in the sense used by Lonergan) work.
(I've not addressed the propriety of including "New Testament" in the name of this blog, especially without reference to the Hebrew Bible. I can however do so in brief by simply saying that a lively interest in and knowledge of the Hebrew Bible is a desideratum for producing competent New Testament scholarship).
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