The New Testament Handbook

(From my eldest son)

A while ago, whilst looking on a popular internet bookstore for a digital version of the Bible, I found several listings of, ’The Bible, by Jesus’. On one level, this is of course correct. However it did make me wonder how widely, outside Christian Circles, the nature of the Bible was known.

The New Testament was not written at one time, or as one document. The people, who wrote it, in most cases, did not expect what they wrote to become part of a Holy Book. It is a collection of letters and histories from the first decades of Christianity, judged by the church over hundreds of years to be genuine, in which judgement one can hope it was guided by the Holy Spirit. It was not written as an encyclopedia of Christian Teaching, but in response to local crises - much of the New Testament consists of letters, and most of those letters are sent to particular churches to warn against false teaching.

In this post, I have used solely the traditional views on the authorship and the dating of the documents. This is partly because I generally agree with them, and partly because otherwise the blog would be several times as long. I will try to discuss the questions regarding authorship when I look at the different books on their own.

There are several ways I have seen of categorising the New Testament. For the purposes of this blog I will use the following:

·         The four Gospels

·         The Acts of the Apostles

·         The Pauline Letters (and Hebrews)

·         The General Letters

·         The Book of Revelations

The Gospels are accounts of the earthly life of Jesus. Two of them, Matthew and John, are written by disciples of Jesus, and contain their own eyewitness accounts. Mark and Luke were written by companions of the Apostles, who collated various testimonies into a single document. The Acts of the Apostles (or just, ‘Acts’) was written by Luke, as a sequel of sorts to his Gospel, and describes the growth of Christianity in the first few decades.

The Pauline letters are letters written by the Apostle Paul, usually to the churches which he founded in various cities across the Roman Empire. They are named after the places they were written to. As an example, ‘Romans’ was written to the church in Rome, whereas, ‘Galatians’ was written to the different cities in Galatia (part of modern Turkey). There are also the three Pastoral Letters, which Paul wrote to specific people - his companions Timothy and Titus. Finally there is the Letter to the Hebrews. Its authorship was much debated in the early church - suggestions included Paul himself, the Apostle Barnabus, St. Luke and Apollos, a Christian teacher who lived at the same time as Paul, but it is included in the Pauline Epistles by tradition.

The General Letters are letters written not to a specific church, but to The Church in general. There are two written by St. Peter, three by St. John, one by St. James, the brother of Jesus, and a final one by one Jude, who calls himself, ‘the brother of James’, usually taken to refer to St. James. They are sometimes called the, ’Catholic Epistles’. This is due to the original meaning of Catholic as, ‘Universal’, or, ‘General’, rather than because they have any particular association to Catholic theology.
Finally, Revelations, also written by St. John, is a series of prophetic visions showing the end of the world.

In terms of the dating of the Bible, I was surprised to discover that the order in which the books of the Bible were written is almost the opposite of the order in which they generally appear. The first parts of the Bible to be written were the Pauline letters, and the Gospels were written later (I had naturally assumed the reverse). As Peter and Paul were both put to death in AD 67, after Nero blamed the Fire of Rome on the Christians, then if the letters attributed to them are genuine, they must have been completed before this date.

A similar argument can be used for the letter written by James, who was killed in AD 63. With the Gospels, the three, ‘Synoptic Gospels’ (see a later blog, or use Wikipedia), Matthew, Mark and Luke, are thought to have been written between AD 60 and AD70, when the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. The final part of the Bible to be written was the Gospel of John, in about AD 90-100.

So that is an overview, as far as I am aware, of the traditional view of the authorship and date of the New Testament. In the next blog post, I will look at how the New Testament was formed, i.e., how the Church decided which of the various documents they had were genuine, which were divinely inspired, and which were merely useful and profitable reading.