All four canonical gospels and half of the epistles were written after this time, and thus were very likely written by later followers. To give the best benefit of the doubt, I have assumed the typical disciple was only 20 during Jesus’ ministry, giving an average year of death at about 50 AD. Nominal expectancy was 25-30 years, but this lengthened to 47 years for those who lived to be 10 hence, the 50-year timeframe shown here. The age of the disciples was based on typical life expectancy during the classical Roman period. Kingdom imagery gradually rotated from a horizontal this age-next age temporal expectations to a vertical earthly-heavenly orientation. Eschatology appears to have adapted and morphed, since Jesus did not return within the lifetime of “this generation”. Christology appears to have continually escalated as time went by, gradually filling in features of virgin birth, then divine conception, then incarnation and the range of “I am” statements finally found in John.

Different features, like the empty tomb and the virgin birth, emerged only in later documents – 35 years or more after the death of Jesus. When surveying the letters of Paul and the gospel accounts, it is interesting to note the development of historical claims, as outlined in the orange numbered callouts on the timeline. He was regarded as occupying the center ground in the field of biblical studies, opposing the literalism found among many fundamentalist Christians while not carrying his conclusions as far as many other scholars.

(– August 8, 1998), was an American Roman Catholic priest, a member of the Sulpician Fathers and a prominent Biblical scholar of his era.īrown was one of the first Roman Catholic scholars to apply historical-critical analysis to the Bible. The following is a brief excerpt from Wikipedia on Raymond E. Brown’s Introduction to the New Testament (RC) and I found it in a post by Jared Anderson at (LDS). The core timeline – which consisted of only the books and their dates – was drawn from Raymond E. (please do advise if you find any errors) My hope is that this may serve as a fairly rich “info-graphic” to help outline the development of Christology and “historical” information about Jesus as contained in the gospels. Thus, the following timeline, which combines information from several resources.

While timelines can be found from a number of sources, I had trouble finding any that were annotated with other significant events of the period.

Using a range of textual clues, scholars have developed approximate dates for the books. Dating of documents was also not undertaken. Some of the books were written anonymously and did not specify an author. One of the many difficulties the New Testament presents for scholars is dating and sequencing the books in order.

Timeline of bible books infographic