Can We Trust the New Testament?

John A.T. Robinson (1919-1983) was an author and former Anglican Bishop, as well as Dean of Trinity College until his death from cancer. He first achieved fame as the author of the book Honest to God, which was written in 1963 while he was still serving as a bishop in the Anglican church in Woolrich, England; there were rapidly more than 350,000 copies in print. The book championed Tillich, Bultmann, and Bonhoeffer, and suggested that "The Bible speaks of a God 'up there,'" and of a "three-decker universe" consisting of "the heaven above, the earth beneath and the waters under the earth." Interestingly, in later life, he became---if not a "religious conservative," at least someone that religious conservatives loved to quote---as with his 1976 book Redating the New Testament, which argued that ALL of the New Testament books had been written before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. This brief 1977 book is along his later focus; he states in the Introduction, "This book is an invitation to trust, to go hand in hand with the scholar to the New Testament, to see what he is up to and watch him as he goes about his work." Here is an excerpt from the book: "Moreover, if the story of the empty tomb had really been invented to convince doubters, the Church would surely have made a better job of it. Except in the Fourth Gospel, it rested entirely on the testimony of women .... and it did not involve the Apostles. In Mark ... they did not tell them. In Luke they told them, but they disbelieved the report. In Matthew the women told them on Jesus's own instruction to leave for Galilee, and this they did without taking any action about the tomb. You do not develop---or even include---stories merely to throw away their point."