I was searching for a copy of the out-of-print, Redating the New Testament by J.A.T. Robinson, and found a PDF copy at the Preterist Archive site. (Here I should point out that the site contains some “hyper-preterist” articles, while I am a partial preterist.) The preterist position not only refutes the “goofy” false doctrine of dispensationalism, but also the damnable heresy of modernism. Yet few Christians have ever studied the preterist position, which contends that most so-called “end-times” prophecy actually refers to events in Judea and Jerusalem just prior to 70 A.D. I’ll write more on this idea later.

It turns out that Anglican Bishop John Robinson’s book is the refutation of the late date theory —the idea that most books of the New Testament were written under an assumed name after 70 A.D. This is one of the books that that influenced the conversion of Anne Rice.

Even the extreme liberal Robinson, when forced to look at the data objectively, decided that there is no proof that the entire New Testament could not have been written from 40 to 65 A.D. He started to write his book “as a joke” to argue against the conservative viewpoint from a reducto ad absurdum point of view. But when considering the other side, he came to take it more seriously and eventually became convinced of the conservative, traditional point of view even though he himself was a liberal and didn’t believe in the inspiration and inerrancy of scripture.