There’s a new best-seller out there which claims to give us “the real story” on Jesus.
It’s called Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, and it is one in a long line of books challenging the portrait of Jesus given in the gospels.
The author is giving interviews in the major media, promoting his book, and people are asking questions about it and how to respond.
I fully expect the book to be useless, but it should be noted that Jimmy Akin is far from correct about reporting the dates that scholars — even unimpeachable Roman Catholic scholars — assign to the gospels. The dominant position among scholars who participate in the shared work of the academic community holds that Mark dates from around the time of the Jewish War, Matthew and Luke a dozen or so years later, and John from the area of 90-100.
I have questions about some of those judgments and would be pleased to find convincing reasons to date the texts earlier, but for now Akin has grossly misstated the prevalent position in RC, and Protestant, scholarship.