Some time ago in my Nina Livesey essays I wrote about Detering and Price placing the abomination of desolation reference to the time of Bar Kokhba in the second century (a pagan statue erected in a Jewish holy site) – providing a late date for the Gospels.  Vridar has extended the commenter list who make such an argument to include Baur and Nodet.  There have been similar efforts by Livesey, Price, and Berman to date Canonical Paul into the second century. This would make sense for many reasons such as all seem dependent on Josephus.

With Paul’s letter to the Romans, we seem to have a Substitutionary Atonement (like 4 Maccabees)  with Jesus paying our sin fine, and later in Romans a Moral Influence Cross (like in Luke-Acts, the story of Jonah, and the penitential psalms), where the evil entity Sin’s spell on us is broken when we see ourselves in those who wrongfully tortured and killed sinless Jesus and our moral compass is shocked into “awakedness.”  Moral Influence is like when a cruelty to animals video causes us to have revulsion and nausea when we smell a plate of chicken wings. We see something similar in the killing of noble Socrates (e.g., Socrates last prayer in the Phaedo), and the impaled just man in the Republic: the death of Socrates which taught the world society could do better– we no longer kill people for being Socratic gadflies.  The connection between penal substitution legal fine payment and moral influence forgiveness is shown in Aristotle’s Rhetoric where a slave can’t afford to pay a master for the slave’s wrongdoing, and so the servant’s repentance makes the figurative payment and so addresses a master’s wrath and so the slave is not brutally punished but is forgiven.

It would makes sense to place the Gospels and Paul’s letters into the second century because it would allow time for influence by Plutarch Parallel Lives of Clemones with the crucified dead Cleomenes converting onlookers, like with the Gospel’s Roman soldiers at the cross and Jewish High Council member Joseph of Arimathea, and also influence from Josephus with a different doomsayer Jesus where Jewish elite enlist Rome to torture this other Jesus.  Joseph of Arimathea seems to have been converted by the shockingly quick death of Jesus, showing God is sovereign over death not Pilate.  The known cruel Pilate is depicted in the gospels as fair, but Pilate as a lazy administrator who kills Jesus without a confession because it would have been more of a nuisance to leave him alive, a satire like with the Jewish elite and their trial of Jesus, with transgression after transgression of Jewish custom (eg., meeting on Passover eve), with the legal experts, like lawyers today, finding loophole after loophole.

Jesus saw beyond the letter of the law to the spirit of the law (e.g., “you have heard it said …., but I say to you …), which is the sense in which Jesus was sinless (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus’ sinlessness was he had a sinless disposition that guided him through morally ambiguous situation, such as when the devil tried to tempt him by quoting scripture. He was like Socrates with his spirit/Daemon guiding him. The daimonion (or daimon) of Socrates was a personal, divine inner voice or “sign” that appeared throughout his life to warn him against making wrong decisions. Described as a “divine something” rather than a god, it acted only as an internal veto (preventing action) rather than providing advice on what to do. In Edouard Tahmizian’s words Jesus had an allergy/revulsion to sin.

The end result, of course, were the resurrection appearance claims, which really could have been anything, since Paul talks of God revealing Jesus “in Paul,” and Paul goes on to list resurrection appearances with the same word used in Luke 3:6 (“all flesh shall see the salvation of the lord”) and so need not refer to the visual senses. Practically, as Goicoechea and Ehrman after him note, Jesus was a catalyst for seeing even your enemy as more important than yourself and so a societal disposition to be altruistic toward even those you have no connection with, like starving people half a world away.