The primary undisputed facts are the existence of certain documents, and there is no significant dispute about when those documents, in their extant form, were written. But none of them is original, and for some of them there is much dispute about when and by whom the originals were written. There is also disagreement about how closely some of the extant copies match their originals. On some of these issues there is a scholarly consensus, but facts are not established by consensus, not even by expert consensus.
Christianity is the predominant religion of the Western world, and for as long as Westerners can collectively remember, Christians have believed that their religion was founded by one Jesus of Nazareth, a man who lived in Galilee during the first three to four decades of the first century CE. Four books called the gospels tell of his brief career as an itinerant Galilean preacher accompanied by 12 disciples, his execution by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and some posthumous encounters with him by the surviving disciples (one reportedly committed suicide after betraying him) and certain others of his followers.
Another book, called the Acts of the Apostles, also describes a posthumous encounter. It then reports the subsequent activities of the disciples, now called apostles, starting in Jerusalem about seven weeks after Jesus' death. It also describes the conversion of one Saul of Tarsus, afterward known as Paul, and thereafter focuses on his missionary travels around the eastern Mediterranean. The book ends with Paul in Rome awaiting trial on charges of inciting to riot.
The gospels are known by the names of the men who, according to Christian tradition, wrote them: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. According to the tradition, Matthew and John were two of Jesus' 12 disciples, Mark was a friend of another disciple known as Peter, and Luke was a companion of Paul and also the author of Acts.
So far as I am aware, it is not disputed by any serious scholar that Luke's gospel and Acts were written by the same person, although there is much debate about who that person might have been. He does not give his name in either book. Certain passages in Acts imply that he occasionally traveled with Paul, but we need not assume that he actually did. Tradition has it that he was a physician to whom Paul referred a couple of times in his letters.
More than a dozen letters attributed to Paul have survived, and about half are considered almost certainly his actual writings, which he produced probably between 50 and 60 CE. The earliest surviving copies were made about 150 years later. The authorship of the gospels and Acts is less certain in the minds of most scholars. The majority consider the traditional attributions doubtful, but there is a general agreement that they were written during the 70s, 80s, and 90s CE, beginning with Mark and ending with John.
This sets the stage for what we will, for rhetorical convenience, call the orthodox and conventional theories of Christianity's origin.
This page last updated on August 4, 2010.