The dating of the crucifixion of Jesus; not so much its historicity, but its positioning at a fixed point in time, in either 30 or 33 AD. Of course we know that the primary sources for this are the gospels, and Christian scholars have built an interesting timeline using that date as a starting point:
30’s AD – Crucifixion
40’s – early oral sources of gospels
50’s – Paul’s letters and early written sources of gospels
60’s – Mark’s gospel
70’s – Matthew’s gospel
80’s – Luke and Acts
90’s – John
At first glance this actually makes the crucifixion look like a legitimate historical event, since there are about thirty years between the event and the first surviving source, and that source has no end of errors and inconsistencies, so it would appear to make sense that an interval of 30 years has passed. At second glance, this timeline is actually the same one that has been provided by the Christian church (not scholarly establishment) in one form or another since the early 3rd century, and it’s all based on that fixed point of 30-33 AD; everything flows naturally from that.
Our earliest datable Christian source for the crucifixion is Justin Martyr. He’s remarkably vague about the event, for someone so dedicated to his religion. He mentions the census of “Cyrenius” and the procuratorship of Pilate, but then gives us a smorgasbord of nonsense about Jewish prophecies fulfilled by Jesus’ birth, and then adds details about Jesus that aren’t even in the gospels, like the fact that he made certain kinds of wooden tools as a carpenter.
Irenaeus famously tells us that Jesus lived to be 50 and was crucified during the reign of Claudius. As Edwin Johnson wrote, to these two church writers, “’twas a hundred years and hence” since the life of Jesus.
As for Tacitus, the earliest datable non-Christian source: it’s an interpolation (fake), notice that Tacitus gives us no information about the event that we don’t get from the gospels themselves.
The early Christians themselves don’t appear to know the dates for Jesus’ life, “There is no age that is non-apostolic”. That is, the entire religion began as a sectarian group. There was no founder. There was certainly some sort of spiritual, logos-like, ‘son of god’ figure at the center of the religion, but the historical founder was not added until much later.
Jesus’ death is put in 30 or 33 AD for two reasons:
- For the same reason that the interpolation about Jesus appears where it does in Josephus: Pilate was the “bad” procurator. The gospel writers wanted to blame the Jews for Jesus’ death but obviously couldn’t because the ‘tradition’ that had formed insisted he had been crucified, hence killed by the Romans. Well, in that case Pilate would be the best Roman to pin it on, even if they did still try to whitewash the shit out of him.
- It was far enough in the past to be out of the reach of the memory of living people, yet close enough in time to where Jesus could have interacted with the direct forebears of the Jewish communities that the Christians were arguing with. This would postulate an origin date for Christianity at about 70 AD.
Christianity was formed from ideas that had begun to circulate in 1st century Judaism and its true genesis came with the destruction of the Temple. There is a clear tendency in the Jewish apocrypha and other first century BC and first century AD writings that point to a more ‘spiritual’ understanding of each facet of Judaism (rituals, circumcision, obeying God’s commandments, the centrality of the Temple cult) and a clear line can be drawn from those developing ideas to the early Christian writings like the Didache, Barnabas, Hermas, and the Gospels and Paul’s letters.
One of the most important examples, though, was the personification of the logos as the “son of God”, who was foretold in obscure passages in the Old Testament. Once this figure was established all the other ‘midrash’-like readings of the OT were developed: i.e., that this son of God was of the seed of David, that he would suffer for mankind, that he would rise after three days, etc. The name “Jesus” isn’t pegged to any particular individual; rather, it just follows the above trends: “Jesus” or Joshua is the spiritual analogue of Joshua in the OT. Just as Moses (who received the Torah) preceded Joshua who went on to conquer the Promised Land, so to the true, ‘spiritual’ Torah that was revealed by God (and which Christians claimed to be able to see between the lines of the OT) precedes a “spiritual” Joshua who performs the celestial equivalent of conquering the promised land.
The existence of an earthly Jesus who taught his twelve or seventy disciples (who apparently didn’t even listen to him or understand his teachings, if we’re to believe the gospels), and who after his death began this cagey succession of apostolic teaching that can’t be reconstructed at all without the Acts of the Apostles, is not just insufficient to explain Christian origins, it just doesn’t make sense. In other words, a sectarian movement developed, it was enriched and increased through literature and the midrashic and haggadic interpretations of scripture, spread by itinerant preachers who claimed to have the Holy Spirit speaking through them, and this movement should be traced to the destruction of the Temple because only in such an environment could you have a belief system that could produce something like Barnabas, or Hebrews in the NT, where the Temple can just be completely blown off and replaced with a complete spiritual analogue.
As far as the Gospel of Mark, it’s an entirely literary construction, which Werner Kelber demonstrates in Mark’s Story of Jesus.