How does one date the gospels? Did they not precede the fall of the temple, since one would expect them to have mentioned the Roman victory if they appeared after 70 CE? The scholarly consensus is that Mark was the first gospel, after Q, and was probablly written right before the fall of the temple in Jerusalem, so around 65 to 70. Matthew and Luke wrote after this catastrophe, around 80, since they made extensive use of Mark and Q, As for John, it dates back to the end of the first century. The four gospels are anonymous and got their names in the second century. There are many arguments for these rough dates, beginning with the obviously complex theological framework of Matthew, Luke, and John, part of which was shaped to answer the urgent questions asked by the early Christian communities. More on this urgency below. In terms of theological development, Mark appears to be the exception. This much shorter gospel would be earlier as it has rougher edges and is quoted at length by Matthew and Luke.

One way to gain some sense of the question is to use a synopsis of the gospels and compare the four versions of events reported about Jesus’s presence at the temple. So, to begin to understand the interrelations between the four gospels, one can read for example the account of Jesus’s cursing of the fig tree, right before the pericope of the cleansing of the temple. The story about the fig tree is found in Mark 11:12-14 and 11:20-26, Matthew 21:18-19, and Luke 13:6-9. In Mark, the cleansing of the temple episode is sandwiched between the initial move to see if the tree has fruit and the withering of the tree. The author is implying that the tree’s fate is that of the temple, since the fig tree served as a metaphor for the temple. It represented the temple’s power to sustain the people miraculously. But Mark is the only synoptic gospel who, after telling that Jesus is hungry and goes to the tree hoping to find figs, adds “for it was not the season for figs” (Mark 11:13c). How does one interpret that odd sentence? Ignorance on Jesus’s part of the seasons, or, much more likely, the thought that the miraculous possibilities of the fig tree were exhausted and replaced by another source of life? In other words, the temple’s destiny was destruction by fire, like the fig tree and its abundant foliage. Now, how is one to date this kind of thought? Was it a prophecy made before or after the event (ex eventu)? I think the latter.

Such passages (there are many) allow the possibility that the author of Mark’s gospel was writing during the war or immediately after. Matthew has a short version of it and drops this crucial sentence. Luke has dramatically changed the story and turned it into a story of hope. Both Matthew and Luke are clearly responding or commenting on Mark, and therefore come from a later point. In other words, the three synoptics—and a fortiori John—were well aware, as were the communities they lived in, that the temple fell to the Romans. Mention of it is made all over the gospels in apocalyptic terms.

It is important to remember that the followers of Jesus who were using these gospels were mostly Judaeans or Galileans. The fall of the temple to Rome was a religious and political catastrophe of the first order of magnitude and no one needed to be reminded of it as an event. It is the meaning of the catastrophe that was of the essence. The crux of the matter was that the belief in the messiahship and divinity of Jesus was partly developed as an explanation of such events. It set his followers on a difficult path. How could they dare believe in his divinity when other Jews, Judaeans or not, thought that such an event at the very least signified the falseness of messiahs? So, it took a while for gospels to integrate theological views of the fall of the temple that made sense to them.