The date can hardly be later than A.D. 80, unless the evangelist wrote in extreme old age. And the date must be earlier than Acts, as the Gospel is referred to in that work (Acts i. 1, 2). Can we fix the date more accurately than this? Many critics think that we can. They say that it must be later than the fall of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. It is said that the Gospel presupposes that Jerusalem was already destroyed. The arguments for this are: (1) In Luke xxi. 20-24 the utter destruction of Jerusalem is foretold with peculiar clearness. We have already seen that a similar argument is employed by many in speaking of Matt., an argument which seems to imply that our Lord did not foretell that destruction because He could not. This argument must be dismissed. (2) In Luke xxi. 20 there is no editorial note like that in Matt. xxiv. 15, to emphasize the necessity of paying peculiar attention to our Lord's warning about the coming destruction, and in Luke xxi. 25 the final judgment is not so {68} clearly connected with the fall of Jerusalem as in Matt. xxiv. 29, where it is foretold as coming "immediately, after the tribulation of those days." Moreover, xxi. 24 suggests that the writer was well aware that an interval must elapse between the two great events. This is the only good argument for placing Luke later than Matt., and it certainly deserves careful attention. At the same time, we must observe the following facts: (a) St. Luke probably did not know St. Matthew's Gospel, otherwise he would not have given such very different, though not contradictory, accounts of the infancy and the resurrection of our Lord; (b) St. Luke may perhaps owe the superior accuracy of his report of the eschatological discourse of Christ to persons whom he knew at Jerusalem in A.D. 56; (c) St. Luke himself possibly thought that the end of the world would follow soon after the destruction of Jerusalem, for in xxi. 32 he seems to connect the final judgment with his own generation. But the statement is not so strong as in Matt. and Mark. For St. Luke says, "This generation shall not pass away till all be accomplished," while Matt. and Mark say, "until all _these_ things be accomplished," evidently including the final judgment. On the whole, it seems reasonable to date the Gospel according to St. Luke soon after A.D. 70, but it contains so many primitive touches that it may be rather earlier. It has been urged that both the Gospel and Acts betray a knowledge of the _Antiquities_ of Josephus, and must therefore be later than A.D. 94. This theory remains wholly unproved, and the small evidence which can be brought to support it is far outweighed by the early features which mark St. Luke's books. [Sidenote: Literary Style.]