[Right Wing Professor]

No contemporary scholar of any reputation claims that more than 3-5% of the canonical NT text dates from after 100 AD.

Do you claim the pastoral epistles date to the first century?

[wideawake]

Do you claim the pastoral epistles date to the first century?

Absolutely. The evidence against their 1st century provenance is extremely tenuous, consisting of quibbles over vocabulary, the perceived "tone" of the letter and circular reasoning - i.e. "They must have been written later because my preconceived timeline of Paul's career excludes them from being written earlier, and my timeline of Paul's career is based on my assumptions about the dating of the Pauline corpus."

The historical argument that the community addressed is too "organized" to be a 1st century community is easily refuted, as I pointed out earlier.

[familyop]

"Do you claim the pastoral epistles date to the first century?"

You might be interested in the following about the origins of the "Gospels" and writings attributed to Paul. The "they" in the quote below refers to the Ascetics (who many say were also essentially the Essenes).

Eusebius wrote, in his Ecclesiastical History (History of the Christian Church), Book II, CHAPTER XVII of Philo's Account of the Ascetics of Egypt
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2501.htm

"But it is highly probable that the works of the ancients, which he says they had, were the Gospels and the writings of the apostles, and probably some expositions of the ancient prophets, such as are contained in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in many others of Paul's Epistles."