Previous article:The Historical Validity of the Resurrection

Posted on Nov 29, 2025 by Mike LeDuke

We don’t actually know who wrote the gospels. Have you ever noticed that when reading through them? They’re completely anonymous. Tradition states that the writers were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, respectively, but there’s really no way for us to check that.

But why does that matter?

Well, it’s important because various scholars make different claims about when the gospels were written, many of them dating these gospels to many decades after the events. If this were the case, it would make the gospels somewhat unreliable witnesses. It would be challenging to listen to someone who wrote about something from which they were separated by a century.

When it comes to dating the gospels, the typical approach is to say that the Gospel of Mark came first, then Matthew and Luke, and finally John, with many placing the Gospel of John into the second century. Nevertheless, internal evidence in the gospels suggests earlier dates than this.

Let’s start with the gospel of Luke. The book was written to “most excellent Theophilus” (Luke 1:3), with “most excellent” being a term that the writer uses later in reference to Roman officials (Acts 23:26; 24:2,3; 26:25). Acts is written to the same person as the gospel of Luke, and the two books together serve as a chronicle of the life of Jesus, and then the spread of Christianity (Acts 1:1). But, Acts ends abruptly with Paul awaiting his trial (Acts 28). Why? It seems likely that Luke and Acts were written to explain Christianity to a Roman official, and primarily to serve as a highly accurate (Luke 1:3) document describing Christianity’s origin for Paul’s defense before Caesar. If this is the case, Luke would have been written in the 50s or 60s, within 20 to 30 years of Christ’s death.

With that said, consider how Luke begins:

“Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us…” (Luke 1:1).

In other words, Luke acknowledged that other gospelshad already been written. Which were those? Probably the ones that record the same stories, but leave out some of the details that Luke includes — most likely Matthew, and maybe also Mark. Adding support to this early date for Matthew, Ignatius, a first-century Christian, appears to quote the gospel of Matthew in some of his letters.

But what about John? Consider John 5:2; there the author describes a place that appears to still exist at the time of writing. That would mean that John would have had to have been written before 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.

Bringing all of this together, the evidence supports dating the gospels to within a couple of decades of the resurrection. In other words, the gospels become a reliable historical document. As already noted, the Gospel of Luke appears to make that claim for itself — seeking to be a piece of legal evidence. And yet, if the resurrection had not happened, these documents would have simply crumbled before those who would have opposed them. Even more, with the synoptics containing Jesus’s prophecy about the Temple’s destruction (Matthew 24,25; Mark 13; and Luke 21), these documents further prove their validity. Indeed, these books contain historical truth, further validating the fact that Jesus rose from the dead.

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Jason Hensley, PhD