ARE THE GOSPELS AUTHENTIC ?
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR, Mr. Smith ends up his long letter on the above question with the words " Mark cannot be placed much, if at all, earlier than A.D. 70." It is true that some critics date it as late as this but it can be placed much earlier as, indeed, it was by Professor Harnack in his Date of the Acts and of the Gospels.
He argued that the Acts ends with St. Paul still in prison and says nothing of his first release and subsequent martyrdom, for the simple reason that they had not taken place when the author, whom he holds to be St. Luke, wrote. This would be about the year 62. But the Acts is the continuation volume of St. Luke's gospel, which would therefore be still earlier. When St. Luke wrote many had already " taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us," and St. Mark's Gospel seems to have been among these as St. Luke, like St. Matthew, uses it as a base for his fuller narrative. This would date St. Mark considerably earlier, say, in the middle or early fifties. If we adopt the theory that there was an earlier draft of St. Luke's Gospel, a proto-Luke this would, of course, have been earlier still. To quote Professor Harnack's work (p. 126) :
" Internal indications, therefore, place no impediment in the way of assigning St. Mark at the latest to the sixth decade of the first century, as is required by the date we have assigned to St. Luke."
2 Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn, 117.C. r.
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