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Origin of New Testament
Several requests have been submitted for a general outline discussing the origin of the New Testament. A basic narrative based on the historical record, not the traditions of the church. Therefore the following outline may be an entirely new perspective for some readers, regarding the sacred writings cherished by Christians.
When we are first introduced to the Canon of Scripture, most of us have the perception that it was precisely written by Jesus' followers for the sake of creating the Bible. However, none of the authors of the books which constitute the New Testament were conscious that they were compiling documents to create the body of New Testament Scripture. They were writing to communities of Christians which they knew, telling them about Jesus or commenting about the Christian life in the light of Jesus' teaching.
The New Testament is sometimes called the Greek New Testament or Greek Scriptures, or the New Covenant or the New Law. The title “New Testament” is taken from the Latin Novum Testamentum which was first mentioned by Tertullian around 200 AD. In all versions of the New Testament, the order of the books which make it up are the same. First the Gospels or ordered, then the Acts of the Apostles follow. The letters written by Jesus' first followers, Paul, James, Peter, John and Jude, are placed next, and the Book of Revelation, which is sometimes called The Apocalypse, comes at the end.
An exception to order is the "Original Bible" distributed by York Publishing, where the 27 New Testament books are in the original order. It should be noted, that the New Testament books are ordered differently in different church traditions. For example most Protestant Bibles follow the Roman Catholic order, but the Lutheran order is different. Outside the Western European Catholic/Protestant world there are different orders in the Slavonic, Syriac and Ethiopian Bibles.
However, based on what we consider a typical Bible, the order may indeed be natural, but it does not reflect the sequence in which the books were actually written. Without any debate of fact, the earliest New Testament writings were the letters which are attributed to Saint Paul. Enough is known about Paul's life, coupled with the date of his death, to be certain that he had been executed before any of the Gospels —with the possible exception of the Gospel of Saint Mark — had been composed.
Paul's letters, therefore, constitute the earliest witness to the faith of first-century Christians about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And they are of particular interest because of what Paul has to say about the manner in which Christian teaching was communicated.
Sometime between 54 AD and 57 AD, Paul wrote to the Christian community at Corinth, which he had established a few years before. It is clear from the letter that there had been some unacceptable behavior during the celebration of the Lord's Supper. He recalled for the Corinthians what he had himself established as being taught to him.
“Brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, the gospel that you received and in which .you are firmly established; because the gospel will save you only if you keep believing exactly what I preached to you — believing anything else will not lead to anything. Well then, in the first place, I taught you what I had been taught myself, namely that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” (1 Corinthians 15:1-3)
This passage is a creedal statement. That is to say, it may have been a very early formulation of the basics of the faith which Christians were expected to profess. 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 appears to recount the central section of the ritual of the Lord's Supper, or Eucharist. Both quotations from the letter are precise instructions which, as Paul quite clearly says, had been handed on to him, and which he had handed on to those whom he had taught. In other words, both were accepted traditions. And they had come into being by the middle of the first century, within two decades after the death of Jesus.
This method of passing on Jesus' teaching by word of mouth, or oral tradition, reflects the conditions of the time. Parchments or scrolls were scarce in first-century Palestine, less available were those who could write. Therefore teachers conveyed their instruction in such a way that their hearers might easily remember it. There were frequent repetitions. Poetical forms were used. Readily recalled stories, such as the parables, were employed to make a point in a narrative fashion.
The degree to which this formal type of oral teaching affected the construction of the Gospel narratives is much disputed, but it can scarcely have failed to make some impact. The four Gospels are very different from one another, each reflecting the context in which it was written. They were composed at different times and in different places. They would therefore have reflected different versions, perhaps even different stages, of the oral tradition.
They were, moreover, written for different kinds of audiences. Matthew was composed for a Jewish-Christian group, and is comprised of links between the Old and the New Testaments. Luke's audience was a group of converts from paganism, and therefore stresses the universality of the offer of salvation. Mark's Gospel was also written for an audience drawn from a mainly pagan, rather than from a Jewish, background, and likewise emphasizes the widespread nature of the Christian message. Mark makes great play with the idea that Jesus' identity as messiah remained hidden until the crucifixion, at which point he was recognized as the son of God by the Roman centurion who was, of course, a pagan.
On the authorship of the Gospel attributed to Mark, the tradition is unanimous. It claims that the Gospel was written for a Roman audience by John Mark, a disciple of Saint Peter. It was composed after Peter's death, but probably before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, which dates its final form to between 65 AD and 70 AD.
Matthew's Gospel, on the other hand, was written in full knowledge of what had occurred in Jerusalem in 70 AD, namely Titus Flavius Vespasianus destroying the temple in 72 AD as Christ had accurately prophesied. The author of Matthew was familiar with Palestinian traditions in general, and parts of the discourses of Jesus seem to reflect an Aramaic source — that is to say, a source in the language spoken in Palestine. There are even traces of an Aramaic style. But the Greek text as it has been preserved is exquisitely written, in a much better style than might be expected from the tax collector named Levi whom Jesus renamed Matthew. The authorship of the Gospel, then, remains something of a mystery.
In the year 185 AD, Saint Irenaeus, who was the Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul (Now Lyons in southern France), attributed the third Gospel to Luke, the 'beloved physician' mentioned in the letter to the Colossians 4:14, and a companion of Paul on many of the Apostle's journeys. Whoever composed the Gospel of Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, a book explicitly intended by its author as a sequel to the Gospel, and there is a modest degree of evidence to suggest that he was a student of medicine. The text is written in fluid Greek, and may have been written in southern Greece.
Most controversial is the authorship of the fourth Gospel of John. Saint Irenaeus attributed it to John, the disciple of Jesus. His authority for that was his acquaintance with Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna who, he says, as a young man, had known John personally. He adds that the Gospel was written at Ephesus. Bishop Polycrates of Ephesus, writing to Bishop Victor of Rome about the year 190 AD, claims that John lived and died at Ephesus, although he does not mention the Gospel itself.
There is no real reason to doubt that the Gospel was written at Ephesus. The supposition fits the facts as far as they are known historically. The identity of the author, however, is much more problematic. It seems likely that the book was composed in about the year 100 AD. By that time the apostle John would have been a very old man. He is, moreover, extremely unlikely ever to have achieved the high standard of Greek that the text of the Gospel displays. Nor could the same person — particularly one who had begun life as a non-literary Galilean fisherman — have compiled all the books attributed to him: the Gospel, the Book of Revelation and three Epistles. The differences between them are very considerable and clearly not the penmanship of the same writer as traditionally attributed.
Behind the fourth Gospel there is someone who remembered Palestine very well. A possible, indeed likely, explanation is that the Gospel came out of a community of which the apostle John had been a member, and which preserved his tradition and his reflections, but which did not feel the need to recount once again the full story of Jesus because the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke were already known to them.
The first three books are called 'synoptic Gospels'. Synoptic is from the Greek 'syn,' meaning "together," and 'optic,' meaning "seen". Taken together they present a complication of their own, which is known, not surprisingly, as `the synoptic problem'. The word 'synopsis' in its original meaning signifies a table or chart. In this context it refers to the presentation of the three Gospels in parallel columns. If this is done, it rapidly becomes clear that they are very similar in content. About 90 per cent of what is in Mark can be found in Matthew, and more than half of what is in Mark is repeated in Luke. This could, and probably does, mean that Mark was the first Gospel and that the material which he gathered from the oral tradition is repeated, in a slightly different fashion, in the two other synoptic Gospels.
The real problem centers on the material which is not found in Mark but is recorded in Matthew and Luke. It is possible that both drew heavily upon the same oral tradition. But it is fairly evident that Matthew and Luke came from very different backgrounds, and that their Gospels were written in quite different places. It is unlikely that a purely oral tradition could have produced such startling similarities.
To account for these similarities it has been suggested that, quite apart from Mark, there was another written source for Matthew and Luke. This source, if there was one, no longer exists — or has never been found; it remains a theoretical solution to a real problem. It is called 'Q' by the scholars, from the German word Quelle which means 'source'. It is thought to have consisted of the sayings of Jesus, though there are some who argue that it must have contained narrative material as well.
Because the similarities between Matthew and Luke are so great, it is said that 'Q' must have been written in Koine Greek. That is the language in which the Gospels have come down to us, and it is the language in which, in all probability, they were written. Although many scholars believe that "Q" was a real document, no actual document or fragment has been found.
There may have been other sources that no longer exist. It is possible, though unlikely, that a document might be unearthed which turns out to be a primitive form of one of the Gospels. Indeed there is already the Gospel of Thomas, as it is called, which was found at the beginning of this century, although the complete version only came to light as recently as 1945. This contains versions of some of the sayings and stories found in the synoptics —the parable of the sower, for example — in a form which indicates that Thomas was contemporaneous with the synoptics, if not somewhat earlier. Or there is the mysterious Gospel of the Hebrews which may, just possibly, have been composed about the middle of the first century, even before Mark. It is a lost gospel preserved only in a few quotations of the Church Fathers written in Aramaic.
Right at the start of his Gospel Luke seems to be hinting at the existence of these collections of Jesus' sayings. He begins:
“Seeing that many others have undertaken to draw up accounts of the events that have taken place among us, exactly as these were handed down to us by those who from the outset were witnesses and ministers of the word, I, in my turn, have decided to write an ordered account...” Luke 1:1-4
Whatever other writings there may have been, as time went by, and the events recorded by the Gospels became increasingly remote, the Gospels took on the status of being authentic accounts of Jesus' life. It should be remembered, however, that none of the evangelists were chiefly concerned to recount the details of those events. They were not writing biographies. They were, it is true, especially interested in the events of the Passion, but beyond that their primary purpose was to record their Master's teaching, and to show how it applied to the particular situation in which those for whom they were writing were living out their Christian faith.
When we are first introduced to the Canon of Scripture, most of us have the perception that it was precisely written by Jesus' followers for the sake of creating the Bible. However, none of the authors of the books which constitute the New Testament were conscious that they were compiling documents to create the body of New Testament Scripture. They were writing to communities of Christians which they knew, telling them about Jesus or commenting about the Christian life in the light of Jesus' teaching.
The New Testament is sometimes called the Greek New Testament or Greek Scriptures, or the New Covenant or the New Law. The title “New Testament” is taken from the Latin Novum Testamentum which was first mentioned by Tertullian around 200 AD. In all versions of the New Testament, the order of the books which make it up are the same. First the Gospels or ordered, then the Acts of the Apostles follow. The letters written by Jesus' first followers, Paul, James, Peter, John and Jude, are placed next, and the Book of Revelation, which is sometimes called The Apocalypse, comes at the end.
An exception to order is the "Original Bible" distributed by York Publishing, where the 27 New Testament books are in the original order. It should be noted, that the New Testament books are ordered differently in different church traditions. For example most Protestant Bibles follow the Roman Catholic order, but the Lutheran order is different. Outside the Western European Catholic/Protestant world there are different orders in the Slavonic, Syriac and Ethiopian Bibles.
However, based on what we consider a typical Bible, the order may indeed be natural, but it does not reflect the sequence in which the books were actually written. Without any debate of fact, the earliest New Testament writings were the letters which are attributed to Saint Paul. Enough is known about Paul's life, coupled with the date of his death, to be certain that he had been executed before any of the Gospels —with the possible exception of the Gospel of Saint Mark — had been composed.
Paul's letters, therefore, constitute the earliest witness to the faith of first-century Christians about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And they are of particular interest because of what Paul has to say about the manner in which Christian teaching was communicated.
Sometime between 54 AD and 57 AD, Paul wrote to the Christian community at Corinth, which he had established a few years before. It is clear from the letter that there had been some unacceptable behavior during the celebration of the Lord's Supper. He recalled for the Corinthians what he had himself established as being taught to him.
“Brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, the gospel that you received and in which .you are firmly established; because the gospel will save you only if you keep believing exactly what I preached to you — believing anything else will not lead to anything. Well then, in the first place, I taught you what I had been taught myself, namely that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” (1 Corinthians 15:1-3)
This passage is a creedal statement. That is to say, it may have been a very early formulation of the basics of the faith which Christians were expected to profess. 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 appears to recount the central section of the ritual of the Lord's Supper, or Eucharist. Both quotations from the letter are precise instructions which, as Paul quite clearly says, had been handed on to him, and which he had handed on to those whom he had taught. In other words, both were accepted traditions. And they had come into being by the middle of the first century, within two decades after the death of Jesus.
This method of passing on Jesus' teaching by word of mouth, or oral tradition, reflects the conditions of the time. Parchments or scrolls were scarce in first-century Palestine, less available were those who could write. Therefore teachers conveyed their instruction in such a way that their hearers might easily remember it. There were frequent repetitions. Poetical forms were used. Readily recalled stories, such as the parables, were employed to make a point in a narrative fashion.
The degree to which this formal type of oral teaching affected the construction of the Gospel narratives is much disputed, but it can scarcely have failed to make some impact. The four Gospels are very different from one another, each reflecting the context in which it was written. They were composed at different times and in different places. They would therefore have reflected different versions, perhaps even different stages, of the oral tradition.
They were, moreover, written for different kinds of audiences. Matthew was composed for a Jewish-Christian group, and is comprised of links between the Old and the New Testaments. Luke's audience was a group of converts from paganism, and therefore stresses the universality of the offer of salvation. Mark's Gospel was also written for an audience drawn from a mainly pagan, rather than from a Jewish, background, and likewise emphasizes the widespread nature of the Christian message. Mark makes great play with the idea that Jesus' identity as messiah remained hidden until the crucifixion, at which point he was recognized as the son of God by the Roman centurion who was, of course, a pagan.
On the authorship of the Gospel attributed to Mark, the tradition is unanimous. It claims that the Gospel was written for a Roman audience by John Mark, a disciple of Saint Peter. It was composed after Peter's death, but probably before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, which dates its final form to between 65 AD and 70 AD.
Matthew's Gospel, on the other hand, was written in full knowledge of what had occurred in Jerusalem in 70 AD, namely Titus Flavius Vespasianus destroying the temple in 72 AD as Christ had accurately prophesied. The author of Matthew was familiar with Palestinian traditions in general, and parts of the discourses of Jesus seem to reflect an Aramaic source — that is to say, a source in the language spoken in Palestine. There are even traces of an Aramaic style. But the Greek text as it has been preserved is exquisitely written, in a much better style than might be expected from the tax collector named Levi whom Jesus renamed Matthew. The authorship of the Gospel, then, remains something of a mystery.
In the year 185 AD, Saint Irenaeus, who was the Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul (Now Lyons in southern France), attributed the third Gospel to Luke, the 'beloved physician' mentioned in the letter to the Colossians 4:14, and a companion of Paul on many of the Apostle's journeys. Whoever composed the Gospel of Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, a book explicitly intended by its author as a sequel to the Gospel, and there is a modest degree of evidence to suggest that he was a student of medicine. The text is written in fluid Greek, and may have been written in southern Greece.
Most controversial is the authorship of the fourth Gospel of John. Saint Irenaeus attributed it to John, the disciple of Jesus. His authority for that was his acquaintance with Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna who, he says, as a young man, had known John personally. He adds that the Gospel was written at Ephesus. Bishop Polycrates of Ephesus, writing to Bishop Victor of Rome about the year 190 AD, claims that John lived and died at Ephesus, although he does not mention the Gospel itself.
There is no real reason to doubt that the Gospel was written at Ephesus. The supposition fits the facts as far as they are known historically. The identity of the author, however, is much more problematic. It seems likely that the book was composed in about the year 100 AD. By that time the apostle John would have been a very old man. He is, moreover, extremely unlikely ever to have achieved the high standard of Greek that the text of the Gospel displays. Nor could the same person — particularly one who had begun life as a non-literary Galilean fisherman — have compiled all the books attributed to him: the Gospel, the Book of Revelation and three Epistles. The differences between them are very considerable and clearly not the penmanship of the same writer as traditionally attributed.
Behind the fourth Gospel there is someone who remembered Palestine very well. A possible, indeed likely, explanation is that the Gospel came out of a community of which the apostle John had been a member, and which preserved his tradition and his reflections, but which did not feel the need to recount once again the full story of Jesus because the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke were already known to them.
The first three books are called 'synoptic Gospels'. Synoptic is from the Greek 'syn,' meaning "together," and 'optic,' meaning "seen". Taken together they present a complication of their own, which is known, not surprisingly, as `the synoptic problem'. The word 'synopsis' in its original meaning signifies a table or chart. In this context it refers to the presentation of the three Gospels in parallel columns. If this is done, it rapidly becomes clear that they are very similar in content. About 90 per cent of what is in Mark can be found in Matthew, and more than half of what is in Mark is repeated in Luke. This could, and probably does, mean that Mark was the first Gospel and that the material which he gathered from the oral tradition is repeated, in a slightly different fashion, in the two other synoptic Gospels.
The real problem centers on the material which is not found in Mark but is recorded in Matthew and Luke. It is possible that both drew heavily upon the same oral tradition. But it is fairly evident that Matthew and Luke came from very different backgrounds, and that their Gospels were written in quite different places. It is unlikely that a purely oral tradition could have produced such startling similarities.
To account for these similarities it has been suggested that, quite apart from Mark, there was another written source for Matthew and Luke. This source, if there was one, no longer exists — or has never been found; it remains a theoretical solution to a real problem. It is called 'Q' by the scholars, from the German word Quelle which means 'source'. It is thought to have consisted of the sayings of Jesus, though there are some who argue that it must have contained narrative material as well.
Because the similarities between Matthew and Luke are so great, it is said that 'Q' must have been written in Koine Greek. That is the language in which the Gospels have come down to us, and it is the language in which, in all probability, they were written. Although many scholars believe that "Q" was a real document, no actual document or fragment has been found.
There may have been other sources that no longer exist. It is possible, though unlikely, that a document might be unearthed which turns out to be a primitive form of one of the Gospels. Indeed there is already the Gospel of Thomas, as it is called, which was found at the beginning of this century, although the complete version only came to light as recently as 1945. This contains versions of some of the sayings and stories found in the synoptics —the parable of the sower, for example — in a form which indicates that Thomas was contemporaneous with the synoptics, if not somewhat earlier. Or there is the mysterious Gospel of the Hebrews which may, just possibly, have been composed about the middle of the first century, even before Mark. It is a lost gospel preserved only in a few quotations of the Church Fathers written in Aramaic.
Right at the start of his Gospel Luke seems to be hinting at the existence of these collections of Jesus' sayings. He begins:
“Seeing that many others have undertaken to draw up accounts of the events that have taken place among us, exactly as these were handed down to us by those who from the outset were witnesses and ministers of the word, I, in my turn, have decided to write an ordered account...” Luke 1:1-4
Whatever other writings there may have been, as time went by, and the events recorded by the Gospels became increasingly remote, the Gospels took on the status of being authentic accounts of Jesus' life. It should be remembered, however, that none of the evangelists were chiefly concerned to recount the details of those events. They were not writing biographies. They were, it is true, especially interested in the events of the Passion, but beyond that their primary purpose was to record their Master's teaching, and to show how it applied to the particular situation in which those for whom they were writing were living out their Christian faith.
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