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The evidence on dating is largely circumstantial, drawn from internal analysis of the books, but there are a few external dates to go by. Historians learned decades ago that Gallic was proconsul of Achaia in A.D. 51-52, and Paul stood trial before him (Acts 18), so much of the chronology of Paul's career has fallen into place. A much larger event was the wave of terror against Christians that occurred between the burning of Rome (July 64) and the suicide of the Emperor Nero (June 68), during which both Peter and Paul probably died. Robinson thinks this is the logical context for New Testament books that deal with persecution, such as I Peter and Revelation. (A tantalizing detail: Revelation 17:10 says that five kings "have fallen." The sixth Roman Emperor, Galba, was the one who succeeded Nero.) Many scholars relate these books to the persecution under the Emperor Domitian (A.D. 81-96), but Robinson says this later persecution has been much exaggerated.
By similar arguments, Robinson dates other books by what they omit. Because Acts breaks off without mentioning Nero's purge and the deaths of Peter and Paul, Robinson thinks it must have been written around A.D. 62. Although the Letter of James has often been dated in the 2nd century, Robinson insists that it is the earliest book of all. Since it expresses no division between Christianity and Judaism, he figures that it must predate the first ecumenical council in A.D. 48, where the church worked out its policy toward Paul's new mission to the Gentiles.
No Mark. Dating is intermingled with authorship, and here Robinson proves equally idiosyncratic. Rejecting his former views that many of the books were later reconstructions, he now thinks Peter and Paul, or aides following their instructions, wrote all 15 letters attributed to them, and that John wrote John, James, James, and Jude, Jude. Otherwise, Robinson writes, one must believe in the existence of "totally unrecorded and unremembered figures in early Christianity who have left absolutely no mark except as the supposed authors of much of its greatest literature." Also, he finds it probable that the Apostles, though Aramaic-speaking peasants, would have been bilingual enough to have written in Greek.
Robinson is the first to grant that his theory is by no means "conclusive." but he challenges his colleagues to try to prove him wrong. If scholars reopen the question, he is convinced, the results will force "the rewriting of many introductions to—and ultimately, theologies of—the New Testament."