It's interesting to me that the significance of the date of a given book of the Bible seems most often to come into question when people view it as most directly related to the coming of the Lord. That statement may seem awkward, as indeed the whole Bible is about Him, but not too many Bible skeptics seem all that concerned about when Job was written, for example. Look at the Psalms. Moses wrote the 90th Psalm long before David lived. How important is that? For those concerned with who Jesus is or isn't, the Psalms don't seem to grab that much attention.

However, the date of the writing of some books can be very important. There are some liberal scholars that would like for people to believe that Biblical prophecy is nearly or completely non-existent. They would have us believe that the prophecies of the Bible are instead, written records of what had already occurred.

As I understand it, for many years, liberal scholars tried very hard to discredit the Book of Isaiah by re-dating it. The genuineness of Chapters 40 through 66 has been the focus of many Bible critics, so much so that a German author in the late 1800s suggested that Isaiah was actually written by two authors, both named Isaiah. This theory was jumped on by a lot of liberal scholars and they have taken it for a ride ever since, but they weren't satisfied with just two authors. They often suggest that seven or even more unknown prophets were involved in the writing of the Book.

They just will not believe that Isaiah, a man living 700 years before Jesus was born, could speak out for God, foretelling future events. They site things like the difference in the style of the language of Chapters 40 through 66, and the chapters which came before. To me, that's always been a weak argument at best. The life experience, the tumultuous events of the life of a man like Isaiah would be more than enough to make such a representative change.

The biggest problem that the Isaiah skeptics have is that when the Greek translation of the original Hebrew Old Testament, known as "the Septuagint" was made in about 250 B.C., the Book of Isaiah existed in it as the very same Book of Isaiah that we have in our laps on Sunday mornings, and many of the prophecies that have been in dispute for a hundred or so years were quoted in the New Testament as the very words of Isaiah. They must have overlooked some of these things. I don't see how the date or authorship of Isaiah can seriously be called into question.

There are those who state they believe the Bible is fiction, and they want to find a way to deny its truth. So, leaving predictive prophecy behind, they attack the date of Books of the New Testament. This makes the date of an epistle pretty important, because it's another way that some will use to pull people away from the truth of God's word.

Knowing theparticular position of a book in history can help us to understand the condition from which the author may have been writing. Was the book written prior to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., or was it written after that event? Was it written before the meeting of the believers in Jerusalem, written of in Acts 15, or afterwards? Knowing the date that a New Testament epistle of was written can shed more accurate light on not only a refuted error or heresy, (gnosticism, for example) but also on the stated or reputed relationship of the writer, to the Lord Himself.

We should be able to point out to people who ask, why false, "later" dates for the writings of Paul for example, are inaccurate, using the knowledge that we have. Having said that, we also need to be careful not to make statements we can't back up with biblical facts. I believe that when the actual date of authorship is truly important, that God will clearly indicate it. If a clear time frame is not supplied by Him through the writing, forcing a date onto the text would be wrong, and we should interpret it without worrying about it.

The date of a book can be important to know when you are talking with somebody who has doubts, but I believe that the Bible is its own best commentary, and that extra-biblical sources, while interesting, aren't essential to understanding it or to making a godly interpretation of it. We just need to read it and study it.