Few issues are as germane to the historical study of the New Testament as the question, “When was this written?” Yet perhaps no other issue is so irreducibly complex and fraught with controversy in the modern scholarly guild. Answering the question with integrity requires careful evaluation of both internal and external evidence and involves nailing one’s colors to the mast on a whole range of historical matters. For precisely this reason, overly ambitious PhD students are frequently advised by their (much wiser) supervisors not to even think about touching issues of dating as a dissertation topic. But later in their careers, many scholars––both conservative and critical––still simply parrot dates gleaned from a New Testament introduction. Not since J. A. T. Robinson’s Redating the New Testament (London: SCM, 1976), almost fifty years ago, has there been a full-length, comprehensive treatment of the dates of the NT writings.

In this bombshell of a book, Jonathan Bernier aims both to fill the gap in the secondary literature and, more generally, to overturn the scholarly apple cart. In an improvement on Robinson, Bernier offers a methodologically rigorous synthetic assessment of the relevant evidence for each NT book and four early Christian writings (1 Clement, Didache, Shepherd of Hermas, and the Epistle of Barnabas), and strikingly, like Robinson so many decades before, he argues that the balance of evidence suggests most of the NT texts were composed between 40 and 70 CE.

In a substantial introduction, Bernier surveys his methodology, organizing data according to authorial biography (situating a book in relation to relevant details known about the author’s life), synchronization (positioning a text relative to other texts or events––e.g., the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE), and contextualization (the tricky task of fitting a writing within a particular developmental framework of early Christianity). Bernier then arranges the book into five sections by corpus: 1) the Synoptic Gospels and Acts, 2) the Johannine writings, 3) the Pauline corpus, 4) Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles, and 5) early extracanonical writings. As Bernier progresses through the relevant data, he frequently summarizes his conclusions and offers steadily more detailed timelines (the number of summarizing charts, however, is excessive and could have been scaled back). Bernier concludes with a comprehensive timeline and a few suggestions where further work needs to be done.

Positively, Bernier writes with clarity, charity, and balance. While the cumulative force of his argument is nothing less than iconoclastic, his individual judgments are typically judicious and restrained. He rarely makes extreme or illogical claims, and he nearly always provides a range of dates for composition. Indeed, one of my biggest takeaways was coming to grips with just how little probative evidence is actually available. If nothing else, Bernier has categorically demonstrated that many assertions about dating are based upon slender shreds of evidence.

At the same time, the controversial nature of the subject matter ensures that a book like this will stir up no little discussion (a good thing!). In what follows, I will interact with just a couple of Bernier’s conclusions where they touch on my own interests.

In his chapters on the Synoptic Gospels, Bernier concludes that the most likely relative compositional sequence consists of Mark (42–45 CE), followed by Matthew (45–59 CE), then Luke (59 CE). If indeed the sequence of Mark–Matthew–Luke is accurate, one wonders whether these timescales are sufficient (on the Farrer Hypothesis) to allow for the transmission of Mark to the Matthean Evangelist, the composition of Matthew, and its subsequent transmission and incorporation into the Gospel of Luke. And despite the potential implications for chronology, Bernier appears to dismiss the possibility of Matthean posteriority in just one sentence on pp. 37–38, though he does soften that conclusion with some equivocation on p. 80 (“it could have been written as late as 70”). More importantly, Bernier’s very early dating of Mark requires him to reinterpret or write off patristic testimony which appears to link Mark’s Gospel to Peter’s (and Paul’s) “departure,” a term which most naturally refers to death (see pp. 76–77). While his attempt to construct a plausible case in this section is often intriguing, at times his conclusions feel forced.

Likewise, in his chapters on the General Epistles Bernier makes several curious judgment calls. Two examples will suffice. First, he refuses to adjudicate the relation of James to the Synoptic Gospels (p. 197), despite the near-universal recognition in recent scholarship of James’s widespread use of Jesus traditions. This reluctance is nigh-inexcusable given his early dating of Matthew. If Matthew was composed ca. 47 CE, it could quite plausibly serve as a literary source of Jesus traditions for James (which Bernier argues was composed prior to 62 CE). This solution would elegantly resolve a longstanding conundrum in Jamesian studies. In contrast to his earlier reticence, in the very next chapter Bernier (unexpectedly?) relies on a single study by Ora Foster (“The Literary Relations of ‘the First Epistle of Peter’: With Their Bearing on Date and Place of Authorship,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 17 [1913]: 363–538) to posit the literary dependence of 1 Peter on Romans and Ephesians (pp. 214–15). Not only does Bernier not acknowledge that significant arguments were raised by John Elliott and others later in the twentieth century for 1 Peter’s independence from “Pauline bondage” (cf. Elliott, “The Rehabilitation of an Exegetical Step-Child: 1 Peter in Recent Research,” JBL 95 [1976]: 243–54) but he also overlooks the much more recent work of David Horrell (Becoming Christian: Essays on 1 Peter and the Making of Christian Identity, LNTS 394 [London: T&T Clark, 2013]) and Travis Williams (“Intertextuality and Methodological Bias: Prolegomena to the Evaluation of Source Materials in 1 Peter,” JSNT 39 [2016]: 1–19), who offer a renewed case for Petrine dependence on Paul.

These critiques aside, there is no doubt that Bernier has done the academic guild a service by mounting a consistent and thorough-going defense of a low/early chronology for the composition of the NT. Future scholarly treatments of dating will have to engage this work and give its arguments due consideration.