Since completing this manuscript I have found a letter from Dodd,
whose contents I had entirely forgotten.
It was written evidently in response
to a first intimation of my rethinking the date of the gospel of John, in which
I must have adumbrated the implications as I began to see them for the
chronology of the whole New Testament.
Since I have presumed to put some
questions to Dodd's own views —
he did not live to see these -
I thought it
would be fair, as well perhaps as interesting to others,
to reproduce a letter
which reveals what, at the age of eighty-eight,
openness of mind in a very
great scholar can mean.
Could any author ask for more?
Wellington
Road, St Giles\ Oxford
19 June, 1972
My dear Robinson,
It is a long time now since I received from you a letter,
very
kindly written, which gave me much pleasure, a
nd also aroused no little
interest.
In the meantime I have been through a rather rough patch,
when I was
not much in the way of serious letter-writing.
I had to go into hospital for an
operation, and came out to lead a semi-invalid existence.
That however has not
prevented me from thinking much about the challenging views on the Fourth
Gospel which you put forward.
For all I know, you may already have published
these in some form, but I am simply going on your letter.
Your volte face takes one's breath away, though you may well say that you prepared the way by
various articles, starting with the 'New Look'.
As you know, I am very much in
sympathy with a view which makes it possible to derive from John not only
valuable light on the primitive church, but even authentic information about
the Jesus of history.
But I can't help thinking that you will find it difficult
to persuade people of the very early date which you now wish to assign.
It is
true that Bultmann was prepared to date it early, but that was on his
presupposition that Christianity began as a kind of gnosticism, and was only
later Judaized' and so historicized.
For myself, with every motive for assigning an early date, I found this encountered
too many difficulties for me to get over.
However, I am open to conviction.
You are certainly justified in questioning the whole structure of the accepted
'critical' chronology of the NT writings, which avoids putting anything earlier
than 70, so that none of them are available for anything like first-generation
testimony.
I should agree with you that much of this late dating is quite
arbitrary, even wanton, the offspring not of any argument that can be
presented, but rather of the critic's prejudice that if he appears to assent to
the traditional position of the early church he will be thought no better than
a stick-in-the-mud.
The whole business is due for radical re-examination,
which
demands argument to show, e.g., that Mark must be post-70 - or must be so because anything earlier than that could not present such a plain,
straightforward story: that would be to neglect the findings of the fashionable Redaktionsgeschichte.
It is surely significant that when historians of
the ancient world treat the gospels, they are quite unaffected by the
sophistications of Redaktionsgeschichte, and handle the documents as if
they were what they professed to be (Sherwin-White, with all his limitations, is
the latest instance).
But if one approaches them in that way, does not the case
for late dating collapse?
I look forward therefore to your damaging assault on
the system of late date.
But I still feel that the Fourth Gospel has reasons of
its own for resisting attempts to place it very early in the time-scale.
But
you will be airing the whole discussion in published form -
or may already have
done so; I am so out of touch.
I hope I have not darkened counsel by words
without knowledge,
or wearied you with the product of muddled thinking
(for I
am conscious that I do get muddled nowadays).
With kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
c.h.dodd