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I believe Meyrat has understood best why I've written this piece. I object very strenuously against presenting as truth something which is merely conjectural, and then basing theological conclusions upon it. I see this at work in the notes of the New American Bible (which could be worse, but which are pretty bad), and so I no longer assign the NAB to my students, because I care for their faith. Let me give you another thing to chew on. It seems clear that Saint Luke wrote both his gospel and Acts, and it seems clear from the prologue and the first chapter of Acts that Acts follows after the gospel -- as would be only natural. Now then, Acts ends before the death of Saint Paul in Rome. A natural conclusion would be that Saint Paul had not yet died. That would put the writing of Acts somewhere at about 60 AD, with Paul's death, or even preparatory events before Paul's death, the terminus ad quem. All right -- but that means that the Gospel was written earlier than that. And since Luke does seem to depend upon Matthew and Mark, and since tradition holds that his gospel depends upon them, they must in turn have been written earlier. I hear the objection, "But Saint Paul does not refer to them in his letters!" But that doesn't persuade. We can't conclude anything from the absence of clear allusions (though there are allusions). We simply cannot require Saint Paul to treat the gospels as we expect a literatus of our own time to treat them. The fact is, the supposedly late letters of Saint Peter don't refer to them either, or James, or John, or Jude, or Hebrews, of all things. So we can't say that the gospels could not have existed when Paul wrote Ephesians, using as evidence that he doesn't refer to them, when we know quite well that the other epistle writers don't refer to them either, even though they are supposed to have written much later, when everybody is quite sure that the gospels are roundabout. Chastity -- that's what I'm asking for here. A little more chastity in drawing conclusions, and a lot more in basing anything theologically substantive upon those conclusions. - Tony