When was the New Testament written?

Pastor Mike’s Answer (edited)

The New Testament books were written in the first century, not assembled as new compositions hundreds of years after Jesus. Several independent lines of historical evidence make a fourth- or fifth-century origin impossible.

Early Christian leaders in the late first, second, and third centuries preached from and quoted New Testament books. Their surviving writings—often collected as the Ante-Nicene Fathers—contain so many quotations that nearly the entire New Testament can be reconstructed from them. They could not quote books that had not yet been written.

We also possess New Testament manuscript fragments dated by paleography to the early and middle second century. Handwriting styles, letter forms, and manuscript conventions can be compared with other dated ancient documents. These copies necessarily point to earlier originals; the Rylands fragment of John is commonly dated to the early second century.

The claim that Constantine or the Council of Nicaea created the New Testament in the fourth century conflicts with both the manuscripts and the earlier sermons, letters, inscriptions, and quotations. Nicaea did not invent a divine Christ or compose the canonical Gospels; Christians had been reading and proclaiming these texts long before the council.