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grabbed your attention? Why do these discoveries always get worldwide headlines?
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    Many liberal scholars are being forced to consider earlier dates for the New Testament. The late Anglican bishop John A. T. Robinson’s conclusions in his book Redating the New Testament are startlingly radical. His research led to his conviction that the whole of the New Testament was written before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. 5
    Today the form critics, scholars who analyze the ancient literary forms and oral traditions behind the biblical writings, say that the material was passed by word of mouth until it was written down in the form of the Gospels. Even though they now admit the period of transmission to be much shorter than previously believed, they still conclude that the Gospel accounts took on the forms of folk literature (legends, tales, myths, and parables).
    One of the major charges against the form critics’ concept of oral tradition development is that the period between the New Testament events and the recording of them is not long enough to have allowed the alterations from fact to legend that these critics allege. Speaking of the brevity of this interval, Simon Kistemaker, professor of New Testament emeritus at Reformed Theological Seminary, writes:
Normally, the accumulation of folklore among people of primitive culture takes many generations; it is a gradual process spread over centuries of time. But in conformity with the thinking of the form critic, we must conclude that the Gospel stories were produced and collected within little more than one generation. In terms of the form-critical approach, the formation of the individual Gospel units must be understood as a telescoped project with accelerated course of action. 6
    A. H. McNeile, former Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Dublin, challenges form criticism’s concept of oral tradition. He points out that form critics do not deal with the tradition of Jesus’ words as closely as they should. In the Jewish culture it was important that a teacher’s actual words were carefully preserved and passed down. For example, 1 Corinthians 7:10, 12, and 25 show the existence of a genuine tradition and the careful preservation of it. It was customary for a Jewish student to memorize a rabbi’s teaching. A good pupil was like “a plastered cistern that loses not a drop” (Mishna, Aboth, ii, 8). If we rely on Anglican Bible scholar C. F. Burney’s theory in The Poetry of Our Lord, we can assume that much of the Lord’s teaching is in Aramaic poetical form, making it easy to memorize. 7 It is impossible that in such a culture a tradition of legends that did not conform to actual facts could have developed in such a short time.
    Other scholars concur. Paul L. Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, writes: “Arguments that Christianity hatched its Easter myth over a lengthy period of time or that the sources were written many years after the event are simply not factual.” 8 Analyzing form criticism, Albright writes: “Only modern scholars who lack both historical method and perspective can spin such a web of speculation as that with which form critics have surrounded the Gospel tradition.” Albright’s own conclusion was that “a period of twenty to fifty years is too slight to permit any appreciable corruption of the essential content and even of the specific wording of the sayings of Jesus.” 9 Jeffery L. Sheler, religion writer for US News & World Report, writes, “The Bible and its sources remain firmly grounded in history.” 10
    Four Gospels or Twenty Gospels?
    In his wildly successful thriller The Da Vinci Code, author Dan Brown makes the audacious claim that “More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them.” 11 In the 1990s, the Jesus Seminar published a book entitled The Complete Gospels that claims