In the first century CE, Hero of Alexandria described the aeolipile (pronounced “ee-oh’-la-pile”), the device shown in the drawing above. A fire below heats water in a boiler. Steam from the boiler enters the hollow ball through the two horizontal pipes that form the ball’s axle. The steam exits the ball through two jets and makes it spin.
We have no evidence that this was more than a curiosity, which, when you think about it, is remarkable. The Roman Empire (of which Alexandria was one of its biggest cities) built roads, bridges, coliseums and temples, and aqueducts that weren’t surpassed for many centuries. If they had applied their engineering genius, could the Romans have launched the Industrial Revolution 1700 years before it actually happened?
The Industrial Revolution
That would seem possible since the Industrial Revolution began in England with a far more mundane invention, the flying shuttle (1733). This increased weaving speeds by a factor of four. The spinners who made the thread now became the bottleneck, but the invention of the spinning jenny a few decades later made them more productive. To spin a pound of cotton had taken five hundred hours by hand. Machines reduced this to twenty hours by 1780 and just three hours a few decades later.
The weavers in this arms race shot back with the water-powered loom in 1785 and later, steam-powered looms. Cotton suppliers became a bottleneck, and the cotton gin (1793) boosted their productivity. By 1830, England had perhaps ten million spindles for spinning thread and over 100,000 looms, most powered by steam. One worker had become as productive as several hundred with manual equipment. The mills in Lowell, Massachusetts at this time were producing a hundred miles of cloth per day.
Like the trickle over an earthen dam that becomes a torrent, the change spread and grew. The equipment that worked so well with cotton was applied to silk, flax, and wool. The Jacquard loom wove elaborate designs with punch cards.
The innovation spread to other industries. The manufacture of glass and pottery were automated. More demand for steam power meant more demand for coal, so coal mining ramped up in response. Tin, copper, and lead mining also expanded. Thousands of miles of canals, followed by tens of thousands of miles of railway as well as steamship routes, connected mines to factories to markets.
England had gone in a few generations from a country like every other to a country like no other.
(Much of this is taken from my book, Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change.)
A Roman Empire without labor-saving equipment
The problem for the Roman Empire was slavery. Labor-saving machinery was the last thing needed by a society built on slaves doing manual labor.
The article “An Apologia for Anarchism” points out the problems. There is no incentive to find a quicker way to complete a manual task—manual labor is a good thing, because idle slaves are a problem. Slaves aren’t consumers. And slaveholders will use their slaves first rather than hire workers, which creates a discouraged class of unemployed free men.
Enter Christianity
Would Christianity be the answer? Emperor Constantine decriminalized Christianity in 313, and it became the state religion in 380. Many Christian apologists today insist that not only does their religion hate slavery but that we have Christianity to thank for abolishing it in Europe and the United States the early 1800s. They also tell us that not only does Christianity embrace science but that the Old Testament contains clues to scientific truths that preceded modern science by millennia.
With the Christianization of the Empire in the fourth century, Christians seem to be saying that society was fertile ground for the labor-magnifying ideas of the Industrial Revolution. Christianity obviously can drive innovation as we see with the remarkable period of cathedral building beginning in the twelfth century and the commissioned artwork from the Renaissance. Was the aeolipile too distant to be an inspiration in fifth-century Christian Europe? Did the flying shuttle (or any other invention that might drive innovation in an industry) simply not occur to anyone?
Those are possibilities, but the bigger problem is that Christianity’s claims about slavery and science are false. While the Catholic Church did disavow slavery, that wasn’t until 1965. The Old Testament didn’t reject the institution but instead managed it by imposing rules. Old Testament slavery was basically identical to slavery in America. Similarly, the New Testament tells slaves to obey their masters.
Christian claims that the Bible anticipated modern scientific discoveries are also wrong. In fact, such claims are inept post-hoc attempts to imagine farsighted scientific observations in verses that said nothing of the kind, and the Bible makes plenty of false claims about science.
Christian Europe didn’t nurture innovation. Yes, there was some during the medieval period (eyeglasses, water wheels, the stirrup, metal armor, gunpowder weapons, castles, improved plows, crop rotation, and others), but that was in spite of Christianity, not because of it.
Christianity has had a chance to improve the lot of its flock. It was largely in charge from the medieval period through the Renaissance, but there is little to show for it. Modern apologists struggle to point to fruits of Europe’s Christian period, like universities and hospitals, though these examples crumble on inspection. Christian Europe was ruled by superstition, not reason.
Science, not religion, has ushered in the health and prosperity that we have today. Keep that in mind during the ongoing U.S. presidential campaign.
See also:

• When Christianity Was in Charge, This Is What We Got
• Yeah, but Christianity Built Universities and Hospitals!
• The Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science

If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow,
there would be no doctors but witch doctors,
no transport faster than horses,
no computers, no printed books,
no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming.
If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow,
would anyone notice the smallest difference?
— Richard Dawkins,
Free Inquiry, 2004 Feb./March. p. 11

Image credit: Wikimedia

Christians have a long history of putting themselves at risk to help others during plagues. For example, the Plague of Cyprian (251–66) is estimated to have killed two-thirds of the population of Alexandria, Egypt. And yet,

During the Plague in Alexandria when nearly everyone else fled, the early Christians risked their lives for one another by simple deeds of washing the sick, offering water and food, and consoling the dying.

Many Christians will point to medieval hospitals to argue that they were pioneers in giving us the medical system that we know today. Let’s consider that claim.
(Part 1 considered the similar claim that Christianity is responsible for modern universities.)
Health care in the Bible
We can look to the Bible to see where Christian contributions to medical science come from.
We find Old Testament apotropaic medicine (medicine to ward off evil) in Numbers 21:5–9. When God grew tired of the Israelites whining about harsh conditions during the Exodus, he sent poisonous snakes to bite them. As a remedy, God told Moses to make a bronze snake (the Nehushtan). This didn’t get rid of the snakes or the snake bites, but it did mean that anyone who looked at it after being bitten would magically live. So praise the Lord, I guess.
This is a “hair of the dog” type of treatment, as is homeopathic “medicine.” Just as bronze snake statues are useless as medicine today, Jesus and his ideas of disease as a manifestation of demon possession was also useless. To those who point to Jesus’s few individual healings as evidence that Jesus cared about public health, I ask why Jesus didn’t eliminate any diseases or at least give us the tools to do so.
The Father of Western Medicine was Hippocrates, not Jesus.
Medieval hospitals
Without science, a hospital can do nothing but provide food and comfort. Palliative care is certainly something, and let’s celebrate whatever comfort was provided by church-supported hospitals, but these medieval European institutions were little more than almshouses or places to die—think hospitals without the science.

Christian medicine did not advance past that of Galen, the Greek physician of 2nd century who wrote medical texts and whose theories dominated Western Christian medicine for over 1300 years. Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance) did the physician Andreas Vesalius surpass Galen in the area of human anatomy.

Let’s also be cautious about how much credit Christianity gets rather than simply Christians. People planning a hospital in Europe 500 years ago would’ve been Christians, not because no one but Christians were motivated to build hospitals but because in Europe at that time, pretty much everyone was Christian.
Hospitals of that time in other regions of the world would’ve been built by people who reflected those societies—Arabs, Chinese, and so on, and India, Greece, and Rome were trying to systematize health care long before Christians.
Christianity’s poor attitude toward learning
Christianity had an uneasy relationship with any ideas that didn’t directly support the Church. The 1559 Index Librorum Prohibitorum listed books by 550 authors that were prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, though prior lists had prohibited books almost since the beginning of Christianity. The list is a Who’s Who of Western thought and included works by Sartre, Voltaire, Hugo, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Bacon, Milton, Locke, and Pascal. The List was abolished only in 1966.
Dr. Peter Harrison says, “From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeen century curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice.” For example, Augustine compared physical lust to “vain desire and curiosity … of making experiments with the body’s aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge.” Martin Luther said, “Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.”
This aversion to knowledge is ironic because when the Church was motivated, it could accomplish great things. My favorite example is the thirteenth-century explosion of innovative cathedrals that still stand today.
A modern look at Christianity’s medieval hospitals
We can get a picture of medieval Christian hospitals by looking at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity hospitals. They have minor comforts, and at best they are comfortable places to die. They’re not meant for treating disease and often lack even pain medication. This isn’t for lack of funds—some estimates claim that the charity took in $100 million per year, though we can only guess because the finances are secret.
One critique noted the mission’s “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.” Christopher Hitchens said, “[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.” Mother Teresa’s own philosophy confirms this: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”
This is the opposite of the approach of modern hospitals.
Hospitals and medicine today
Let’s return to the Malcolm Muggeridge quote with which I started this post series: “I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.”
Maybe the humanists were more focused on curing the problem than simply addressing the symptoms and having a good old pray.
I’d like to give credit where it’s due. If the medieval Church catalyzed human compassion into hospitals that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, that’s great, but don’t take that too far. The Church was largely in charge at that time. If the Church deserves praise for its hospitals, does it also deserve some condemnation for the social conditions that forced people into those hospitals? Did Christianity retard medical science with its anti-science attitude? We forget how long a road it was to reach our modern medical understanding. The book Bad Medicine argues that “until the invention of antibiotics in the 1930s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good.” Christianity might have set modern medical science back centuries.
How many diseases has faith cured? How many have reasoning and evidence? Smallpox killed 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. Today, zero. Thank you, science.
Catholic hospital systems are today busy gobbling up independent hospitals in the United States. This appears to have nothing to do with providing improved health but rather to be an opportunity to impose Catholic moral attitudes in areas such as abortion and euthanasia. And note that “Catholic” hospitals are publicly funded, just like all the rest.

For religious hospitals, 46 percent of all revenues came from Medicaid or Medicare, 51 percent was patient revenue from other third-party payers, such as commercial insurers, and only 3 percent was classified as non-patient revenues.
Of those non-patient revenues, the majority came from county appropriations (31 percent) and income from investments (30 percent). Only 5 percent derived from unrestricted contributions, such as charitable donations from church members. So, at best, charitable contributions made up a tiny faction of religious hospitals’ operating revenues. (Source: “No Strings Attached: Public Funding of Religiously-Sponsored Hospitals in the United States”)

The few billion dollars that religion spends on good works in the United States is insignificant compared to the nearly trillion dollars that we as a society spend on health care through Medicare and Medicaid.
I’ll conclude with an observation about Mother Teresa’s charity, a modern throwback to medieval Christian hospitals. Speaking about her stance against condoms, which replaced science with Catholic prudery and removed a barrier against sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, one source said, “More people died as a result of dangerous Church beliefs than Mother Teresa could ever have hoped to save.”
Related posts:

• “Christianity Is a Hospital, and Sinners Are Ill (Or Not)”
• “The Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science”
• “Why Does the Bible Have No Recipe for Soap?”

Do you know what they call alternative medicine
that’s been proven to work?
Medicine.
— Tim Minchin, “Storm”

There was a time when religion ruled the world.
It is known as The Dark Ages.
— Ruth Hurmence Green

Image credit: MilitaryHealth, flickr, CC

(Happy Groundhog Day! I’ve written about the religious foundation of Groundhog Day here.)
As the world’s superpower, the United States is sometimes criticized for its foreign policy, but we often forget one of America’s greatest gifts to the world, the secular constitution. Paul Kurtz of the Center for Inquiry has said that 94 national constitutions are explicitly neutral on religion, with the U.S. Constitution being the very first. It’s frustrating that the secular nature of the Constitution is now being second guessed, when that trait is the friend not only of the atheist and non-Christian but also of the Christian.
Don’t Like History? Rewrite It!
History revisionists like David Barton (whose 2012 book The Jefferson Lies was recalled by its Christian publishing house for historical inaccuracies) imagine that America was founded on biblical principles.
The Constitution is full of biblical inspiration, he says:

You look at Article 3, Section 1 [sic], the treason clause. Direct quote out of the Bible. You look at Article 2, the quote on the president has to be a native born? That is Deuteronomy 17:15, verbatim. I mean, it drives the secularists nuts because the Bible’s all over it! … [We Christians] think it’s a secular document; we’ve bought into their lies. It’s not.

The Constitution not secular? There is no mention of deities, and the only mention of religion is to prohibit religious tests for public office in Article 6. But let’s investigate Barton’s claims.
First, the treason clause. In another video he makes clear what “direct quote” he’s talking about:

On the testimony of two or three witnesses a person shall be put to death, but no one shall be put to death on the testimony of only one witness (Deut. 17:6).

Compare that with the Constitution:

No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court (Art. 3, Sect. 3).

That’s the great wisdom that the founding fathers had to consult the Bible for—that you need at least two witnesses for an important crime? And that’s hardly a direct quote.
Consider what the Bible is talking about in this chapter: if anyone worships a god besides Jehovah, you are to stone them to death, with the witnesses the first to cast the stones. Death penalty for worshipping the wrong god? Uh, no—that’s about as unconstitutional as it comes.
In Barton’s second point, he compares

Be sure to appoint over you a king Jehovah your God chooses. He must be from among your fellow Israelites. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not an Israelite (Deut. 17:15).

With

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States … shall be eligible to the Office of President (Art. 2, Sect. 1, Clause 5).

That’s not a “verbatim” copy. That’s not even a rough approximation. The United States is to pick a king that God chooses?!
Not … even … close.
No, David, what “drives the secularists nuts” is your blatant lies. Do you assume your audience is too ignorant to know the truth? Or that they’re too stupid to care about it?
What Would a Religious Constitution Look Like?
There are lots more false Barton statements, but he’s a waste of time. If the founding fathers had wanted America to be governed by Christian or biblical principles, they would have said so in the Constitution.
Compare it with the constitution of the Philippines, which implores the aid of “the Almighty God,” or Malaysia, which makes Islam the official religion, or Nigeria, which declares that it is a “nation under God,” or even the new constitution of Egypt, which makes Islam the official religion and Islamic Sharia the “principle source of legislation.”
The signers of the Constitution knew full well how to make religious constitutions since these same founding fathers helped to create constitutions in their states. Maryland granted religious protection for Christians only, New Jersey referred to “the inestimable privilege of worshipping Almighty God,” Pennsylvania required office holders to acknowledge that the Bible was divinely inspired, and Vermont required all men to declare “by the ever living God” that they will honorably carry out civic responsibilities such as voting.
That’s what the Constitution would’ve looked like if the founding fathers had wanted it to be religious. By contrast, the U.S. Constitution begins “We the People.” By not referring to God, it says volumes.
Related post: “The U.S. Constitution is 100 Percent Secular—or Is It?”

The likelihood that America is a Christian nation
is directly proportional to the number of occurrences
of the words “Jesus,” “Christ,” “God,” “Bible,” and “Christianity”
in the US Constitution.
— Richard S. Russell

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/4/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

In part 1, we looked at the conservative Christian argument for an early dating of the gospels (using a blog post from Jim Wallace to represent that position). These Christians are eager to minimize the time from events to the chronicling of those events in the gospels. With a little sleight of hand, they can reduce this time gap for the gospel of Mark to about twenty years.

Now let’s turn to the scholarly consensus. Bart Ehrman says, “Scholars debate [whether Mark was written before or after the Jewish War with Rome], but the majority (outside of fundamentalists and very very conservative evangelicals) think the answer is ‘afterward.’” We will explore some of the ideas that support that conclusion.

Maybe the gospel authors did know about the Temple

The gospels show Jesus alluding to the Jewish-Roman War and the destruction of the Temple.

Jesus said [referring to the Temple], “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another which will not be torn down” (Mark 13:1–2).

When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is near…. There will be great distress upon the land and wrath to this people; and they will fall by the edge of the sword, and will be led captive into all the nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. (Luke 21:20–24)

The Parable of the Great Banquet (Matthew 22:1–14) and the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen (Mark 12:1–12) tell of a king and a landowner, respectively, who play the role of God. After being treated unfairly, the king/landowner destroys those who wronged him.

Each of these examples sound like they were written from a time when the extent of the destruction was known because it had already happened.

Do you really want to leave a prophecy unfulfilled?

The early daters cling to the idea of an accurate Jesus prophecy, but this falls apart when we analyze it. Consider two options. Option one: Jesus foretold the destruction of the Temple, and the author of Mark knew that this had already happened. This is the scholarly consensus.

With option two, Jesus foretold the destruction of the Temple, but the author of Mark didn’t know this had happened. Wallace picks this option because he can’t imagine that the author wouldn’t have turned down the chance to brag about it, but it’s not smart to add an unfulfilled prophecy that could look embarrassing in the future.

And why expect that the gospel authors would underscore the obvious? If the Temple had been destroyed just a few years earlier, why bother adding, “and, as you know, this indeed happened”? Good writers don’t explain the punch line.

Clues to late dating in the gospels

The gospels themselves argue that the gospels were late. Luke begins, “Many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” The phrase “from the beginning” suggests a good amount of time has passed. And what about the reference to “many” prior accounts? Even with the hypothetical lost gospel of Q, the first century didn’t have many gospels (as far as we know). This sounds more like the second century, when “many” would accurately describe the number of gospels.

At the end of Matthew, we read, “So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day” (Matt. 28:15). This phrase also suggests a good amount of time, not shortly.

Other clues

• Bart Ehrman calls Paul “extraordinarily well-traveled and well-connected” and yet says that the lack of any hint of the gospels in his epistles suggests that they came after his time. Wallace imagines that there were several gospels to choose from, but Paul wouldn’t have bothered to guide his flock through the question of which were accurate.
• Mark writes about an Israel that didn’t yet exist in the time of Jesus. He writes about a handwashing ritual in Mark 7:1–4 that was accurate around 70 CE but wasn’t true in the time of Jesus (see Randel Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels? p. 10). Mark also refers to synagogues being common and the title “Rabbi,” each of which was only true decades after Jesus (see the Bible Geek podcast for 9/17/13 @19:00).
• The author of Luke is often praised as a historian. He’s said to be accurate because the facts in Luke match those in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews (93 CE), but one easy explanation is to suppose that the author of Luke copied Josephus. After all, the author had no problem copying nearly 80% of Mark.
• Acts has clues that point to a late date. In it, Paul says, “After my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock” (Acts 20:28–9). This could refer to heretical teachings such as those from Marcion (mid-second century).

How close to a date can we get?

Randel Helms in Who Wrote the Gospels? (p. 7–8) makes a compelling argument for a date for Mark.

Mark includes obvious apocalyptic* elements, and the “Little Apocalypse” in Mark 13 refers to the “abomination of desolation” from Daniel. Daniel pretends to be written in the sixth century BCE and prophecies the end of the world in 164 BCE, but, like other apocalyptic books, things are best explained if we imagine it written a few years before this point.

Mark puts into the mouth of Jesus a prediction of the war that will be the “birth pains” of the new godly age. This war is one that the author of Mark has just experienced, and he predicts the imminent end this way:

[Jesus said:] But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven…. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.… You too, when you see these things happening, recognize that He is near, right at the door. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. (Mark 13:24–30)

If the book of Daniel is the template, Mark would have used its end times dating method. During the last week of years (that is, seven-year period), the “abomination of desolation” happens halfway through, and then three and a half years later comes the end of this age. The destruction of the Temple in 70 would be the abomination of desolation, so the end predicted by Mark—the one with the stars falling to earth—should happen in roughly 74. That places the authorship of Mark between those two dates.

The takeaway here is that there are a handful of indefinite clues for dating the gospels. You’re on solid ground if you say that they could have been written as early as the mid-first century or as late as around 150 when Justin Martyr quotes from the four gospels (though there’s even debate here about whether those quotes had to have come from the gospels). To reduce this range from a century to a decade, all you can manage is an educated guess.

Even giving the apologists their earliest date for the authorship of Mark, that still leaves two decades of oral history, plenty of time for legend to grow.

When he [asked] what separates Hitler from Mother Teresa,
 I really wanted to say a mustache.
— Rachal Davidson

*Apocalypticism sees two time periods, the evil one that we’re living in now, and the good one that God will violently usher in any day now. This belief had been an element within Judaism for a couple of centuries by the time of Mark.

Photo credit: liz west, flickr, CC

Christian apologists are eager to date the gospels as early as possible to minimize the period of oral history. Less time for oral history means less time for legends to develop, and this points to a more reliable gospel message.

I must confess that the conservative calculations sound reasonable in parts. This thinking places at least some of the gospels well before the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. I’ll use a post from Jim Wallace’s Cold Case Christianity blog to represent this argument.

1. First note that the destruction of the Temple isn’t mentioned anywhere in the New Testament, but Matthew 24:1–3 has Jesus predicting it. Matthew likes to write about fulfilled prophecies (Jesus was born of a virgin, as foretold in Isaiah, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as foretold in Micah, and so on). If Matthew was written after the destruction of the temple, how could Matthew resist bragging about yet another fulfilled prophecy?
2. The destruction of the Temple was just one event during the First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE). Josephus claims that 1.1 million people were killed during the destruction of Jerusalem. This war is also not mentioned.
3. Before that are the deaths of Peter (65 CE), Paul (67), and James (62 or 69), also not mentioned. The last half of Acts is a diary of Paul’s activities, ending with his house arrest in Rome. If Paul had already been martyred, wouldn’t that story be both powerful and relevant? Acts must precede these deaths, and Wallace dates it at 57–60 CE.
4. Evidence for an early authorship of Luke is this verse from Paul’s epistle of 1 Timothy: “The Scripture says … ‘The laborer is worthy of his wages’” (1 Tim. 5:18), which quotes Luke 10:7. Wallace gives 53–57 for the authorship of 1 Timothy. Scholars agree that Luke preceded Acts, and Wallace gives 50–53 for Luke.
5. But Luke wasn’t the first gospel—that was Mark. Luke plagiarizes heavily from Mark, and Wallace gives 45–50 for Mark.

With Mark written in 50 or before, we’re less than twenty years from the traditional death of Jesus in around 30.

Another look at this argument

Let’s take another look to see how well it stands up.

1. Matthew likes fulfilled prophecy from the Scriptures—that is, the Old Testament. He has no examples of fulfilled prophecy from Jesus. Maybe that just doesn’t do it for him. And is prophecy really the right word for what was likely inevitable? The Jews had had a difficult relationship with ruling empires and had even revolted against and broken away from the Seleucid empire less than two centuries earlier. Anticipating violent conflict with Rome didn’t require supernatural insight.
2. Suppose Luke were written after the war with Rome and the destruction of the Temple. Why would it be surprising if it didn’t mentioned them? The gospel of John also didn’t mention them, and even most conservative scholars agree that John was written after 70 CE.
3. The date of Paul’s death comes from tradition from the second century. The deaths of Peter and James are also poorly evidenced.
4. While Wallace gives 57–60 as the date for 1 Timothy, Wikipedia gives an earliest date of the mid-60s. It could also have been written as late as the mid-second century because it seems to be responding to second-century heresies. If it does copy Luke, it would be surprising to see it elevate Luke to the status of Scripture just a few years after its composition, as Wallace claims.
5. Even if we accept twenty years from the time of Jesus until Mark rather than forty, as other scholars say, doesn’t help much. If it were written the next day, its claims of the supernatural would still be highly suspect. Early dating doesn’t help much.

And note the juggling that Wallace must do. He wants to argue that legend couldn’t creep in over a few decades, so we can be confident that the gospels are an accurate biography of Jesus. But he must argue that legend did happen when given a few additional decades to justify why he can dismiss the Gospels of Thomas, of Judas, of the Ebionites, and others, many of them written in the late first or second centuries. (More on the development of myth through oral history here.)

Another challenge is that by reducing the time from events to originals, he’s increased the time from originals to our best manuscript copies. This centuries-long Dark Ages means lots of time for the story to change.

Continue with a look at the scholarly consensus for the dating of the gospels in part 2.

There is no apologetics in science, as there is in theology,
where unquestioned presumptions are made and then explanations sought
to make the data conform to those presumptions.
— Vic Stenger

Photo credit: Wikimedia