The New Testament: An Introduction

The Christian Bible consists of two main sections: the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Christian Old Testament is the Hebrew Bible of the Jews. The Jews do not believe in the New Testament.

The New Testament is a central and influential collection of texts in Christian theology and the Christian faith as a whole. Its significance is multi-faceted. It is considered the foundation of Christian theology. It includes the teachings of Jesus, the works and messages of his apostles, and the early development of Christian communities. The texts provide guidance on moral and ethical conduct, outline the nature of God and Jesus, and discuss salvation and the afterlife. It reflects the social, cultural, and religious contexts of the time and provides information about the early Jewish and Christian communities. Over the centuries, the New Testament has profoundly influenced Western literature, art, music, and philosophy. Its stories, parables, and teachings have been a source of inspiration for countless works of art, literature, and music. The New Testament texts were crucial in the development of Christian doctrines, including the nature of the Trinity, the role of Jesus as the Messiah, and the concept of salvation through redeeming atonement. For various Christian denominations, the New Testament is a common ground for theological discussions, helping in ecumenical dialogues and inter-denominational understandings. For believers, the New Testament is a source of spiritual guidance, personal growth, and a means to connect with the divine. Its teachings are often used for personal meditation, prayer, and as a moral compass. Its significance extends far beyond its religious context, influencing culture, art, ethics, literature, and historical understanding. Its impact on individual lives and broader societies has been profound and enduring.

The New Testament consists of twenty-seven books made up of the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Book of Revelation. It is highly valued by all divisions of Christianity – Roman Catholic, Protestant, Eastern, and Orthodox. The term New Testament stands in contrast to the term Old Testament to denote the inauguration of “a new covenant that has made the first old” (Hebrews 8:13). Christians refer to the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament because, to them, it is associated with the history of the “old covenant”, made by Yahweh in the past with the Israelites in the wilderness. Christians refer to their specific portion in the present Bible as the New Testament because, they believe, they are the foundation documents of the “new covenant”, the covenant inaugurated and fulfilled by the works of Jesus, Christ. The central pivot of all New Testament writings is Jesus Christ. However, although crucial information about his life, teachings, death, and resurrection, are contained in the books, none of them were written by him or under his commandment.

As stated, the New Testament is composed of twenty-seven books written by different authors at various places, communities, and times. It consists of the four widely known Gospels (the three Synoptic Gospels – the term commonly used for Matthew, Mark, and Luke since the nineteenth century – and the Gospel of John); the Acts of the Apostles; fourteen Pauline Epistles (the Greater as well as Pastoral) i.e., Romans, Corinthians I & II, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians I & II, Timothy I & II, Titus, Philemon and Hebrews; and the seven “Catholic” (meaning “universally accepted”) Epistles i.e., the letters of James, Peter I & II, John I, II & III, Jude; and finally the book of Revelation.

The New Testament in its present shape, number, and order, was not available to the early Christians for centuries after the departure of Jesus and his disciples. The New Testament writings were written for the special needs of particular groups of people, and the idea of combining them into one authoritative volume was late and not in the mind of the authors. Christians, therefore, and the Christian Church might conceivably have gone on indefinitely without Christian scriptures. One of the leading factors may have been the existence of an already compiled Hebrew Bible. Throughout the whole patristic age, as indeed in all subsequent Christian centuries, the Old Testament was accepted as the word of God, the unimpeachable sourcebook of saving doctrine. The compilation, collection, and identification of this particular group of writings (the canonization process) as a distinct and authoritative entity resulted from a complex development within the Christian Church. It took the Church 367 years to produce a list of writings and a canon that would contain all the present-day (New Testament) canonical writings.

The oldest indisputable witness to the New Testament canon is Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, known for his role at the First Council of Nicaea. In his Easter letter of 367 AD, he wrote: “Forasmuch as some have taken in hand, to reduce into order for themselves the books termed apocryphal, and to mix them up with the divinely inspired scriptures... it seemed good to me also... to set before you the books included in the Canon, and handed down and accredited as Divine.”

The list that follows this prologue contains the twenty-seven books of the present New Testament though not in the same order. According to Athanasius these books were, “the springs of salvation, so that he that is thirsty can fill himself with the (divine) responses in them; in these alone is the good news of the teaching of the true religion proclaimed.”

New Testament scholars differ widely over the process of the compilation and history of the New Testament canon – authors, places, sources, and dates. However, traditional or Orthodox scholars declare the New Testament to be the authentic and inspired work of the disciples, attributing almost all the New Testament writings to either the disciples or the immediate apostles. The time in which they lived is known as the Apostolic Age, the first century CE. For instance, R. L. Harris states: “It seems clear that the New Testament books arose in the latter half of the first-century A.D., and almost all of them were clearly known, reverenced, canonized, and collected well before a hundred years had passed.” Philip Schaff is more specific regarding the issue: “Nearly all the books of the New Testament were written between the years 50 and 70, at least twenty years after the resurrection of Christ, and the founding of the church; and the Gospel and Epistles of John still later.” He concludes that “Hence seven and twenty books by apostles and apostolic men, [were] written under the special influence and direction of the Holy Spirit.”

Scholars following this line of thought claim that Jesus was the personal Word of God, the eternal Logos, and hence the ultimate authority. Further, Jesus assigned this divine authority to his twelve disciples (Matthew 10:2–5) after his resurrection (Matthew 28:19–20, Mark 16:15–16); the Church was “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets” (Ephesians 2:20) whom Christ had promised to guide unto “all the truth” (John 16:13) by the assistance of the Holy Spirit. The apostles, like Luke and Mark, derive their authority from their masters who for their part represent the authority of Christ. Therefore, the entire collection of the New Testament is said to derive its authenticity and authority from the ultimate divine authority of Jesus Christ himself. Harris points out that: “The Lord Jesus did not, in prophecy, give us a list of the twenty-seven New Testament books. He did, however, give us a list of the inspired authors. Upon them the Church of Christ is founded, and by them the Word was written.” In the words of H.T. Fowler: “Jesus strove to set religion free from the tyranny of the written law, meticulously interpreted by the scribes. He left no written word, but instead, living men whom he had inspired by his own life and word to claim direct access to God as Father and to trust in the power and guidance of the Spirit.”

In short, argues Geisler, “God is the source of canonicity.” This view of apostolic authority and New Testament authorship was common among the early Christian Fathers.

Contemporary critical scholars, following form criticism, redaction criticism, literary criticism, and a historical approach to the New Testament, disagree with the traditional view of the authenticity and divine nature of New Testament writings. They contend that the New Testament books are not the works of the immediate disciples of Jesus, but rather writings compiled long after their lifetimes by authors mostly unknown to us. Hans Conzelmann for example states that “the circumstances of composition (author, time, place, occasion, and any of the more specific circumstances) are not known for any of the New Testament writings other than Paul’s letters.” They further assert, that Jesus never asked his disciples to put anything in writing. After his resurrection the disciples were occupied with preaching to those around them, concerning the end of the world and the arrival of the Kingdom of God, and therefore were least interested in writing the words of Jesus: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15). The first Christians, states R. L. Fox, were people of faith, not textual fundamentalists: to hear Peter or Paul was to hear a man with a conviction, not a Bible, and a new message which old texts were quoted to back up. We can take this message back to within four years of Jesus’ death through the personal testimony of Paul: he ‘received,’ he tells the Christians in Corinth, that ‘Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scripture, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scripture,’ and he then appeared to Peter and then to others in a sequence which does not match the stories of the appearances in our Gospels.”

In the words of J. D. Crossan, “Jesus left behind him thinkers not memorizers, disciples not reciters, people not parrots.” The disciples also waited for the second coming, the ‘Parousia’ of the risen Lord and expected Jesus’ return at any moment. D. Nineham notes: Since the early Christians thus believed themselves to be living in a comparatively short interim period before the end of the world, their energies were naturally concentrated on practical tasks, on bringing others to a realization of the situation and on the attempt to maintain and deepen their own relationship with the exalted Lord so that when he came to establish his kingdom finally, they would be worthy to be members of it. Consequently, they will have had little leisure, even had they had aptitude, for antiquarian research into Christ’s earthly life; nor would they have thought it worthwhile, seeing that they do not look forward to any posterity who might be expected to profit from the result of it.  

Moreover, the belief that the eschatological and prophetic Spirit of God was operative among them, led the first Christians to focus more on oral transmission and preaching rather than writing of the message. Even Paul, who actually did write the letters attributed to him, did so because he could not personally reach the places they were being sent to (see 1 Thessalonians 2:17, 3:10 or 1 Corinthians 4:14–21). Otherwise, he appears to have valued spoken words and personal presence over the written word. Consequently, the word or the tradition, was orally transmitted until the second generation, when with time enthusiasm concerning Jesus’ second coming cooled. When his delay caused several problems, the books began to be written. F. R. Crownfield remarks that even when they were compiled, “it was not with any thought that they would eventually become a part of Scripture, in supplement to the ancient Scriptures which Christians now call the Old Testament.” J. Jeremias observes that “It was more than thirty years after his death before anyone began to write down what he [Jesus] said in an ordered sequence, and by that time his sayings had long been translated into Greek. It was inevitable that during this long period of oral transmission, alterations took place in the tradition...” During this interval, new sayings came into being and were added to the old corpus. Jeremias notes: The seven letters of Christ to the seven churches in Asia Minor (Rev. 2–3) and other sayings of the exalted Lord handed down in the first person (e.g. Rev. 1.17–20; 16.15; 22.12 ff.) allow the conclusion that early Christian prophets addressed congregations in words of encouragement, admonition, censure and promise, using the name of Christ in the first person. Prophetic sayings of this kind found their way into the tradition about Jesus and became fused with the words that he had spoken during his lifetime. The discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of John provide an example of this development; to a considerable degree they are homilies on sayings of Jesus composed in the first person.”

In Hans Kung’s opinion, the Gospels emerged in a process of about fifty to sixty years… The disciples at first passed on orally what he had said and done. At the same time, like any narrator, they themselves changed the emphasis, selected, clarified, interpreted, extended, in each case in the light of their own personal inclination and the needs of their hearers. There may have been from the beginning a straightforward narrative of the work, teaching and fate of Jesus. The evangelists – certainly not all directly disciples of Jesus, but witnesses of the original apostolic tradition – collected everything very much later: the stories and sayings of Jesus orally transmitted and now partly fixed in writing, not as they might have been kept in civic archives of Jerusalem or Galilee, but as were used in the religious life of the early Christians, in sermons, catechetics and worship.”

John Hick puts the point in a nutshell: “None of the writers was an eye-witness of the life that they depict. The Gospels are secondary and tertiary portraits dependent on oral and written traditions which had developed over a number of decades, the original first-hand memories of Jesus being variously preserved, winnowed, developed, distorted, magnified and overlaid through the interplay of many factors including the universal tendency increasingly to exalt one’s leader-figure, the delight of the ancient world in the marvelous, opposition to the mainstream of Judaism from which the church had now been separated, an intensification of faith under persecution, factional polemics within different streams of the Christian community itself, and a policy of presenting events in Jesus’ life as fulfillments of ancient prophecy or as exemplifying accepted religious themes.”

Clearly, explains Hick, “the attempt to form a picture of the life that lay forty to sixty or seventy years behind the written Gospels cannot yield a great deal in the way of fully assured results.” Howard Kee observes that unlike our times the historians and writers of the first century, “were not interested simply in reporting events of the past, but saw their role as providing the meaning of those past events for readers in the present.” Therefore, during these sixty years or so, the Gospels were developed, in the words of Paula Fredricksen, “from oral to written; from Aramaic to Greek; from the End of time to the middle of time; from Jewish to Gentile; from Galilee and Judea to the Empire...”

The Gospels were changed and modified to respond to the situations at hand.

To be continued.