The New Testament is the second,
shorter part of the Christian Bible. Unlike the Old Testament, which
covers hundreds of years of history, the New Testament only covers
several decades, and is a collection of the religious teachings
and beliefs of Christianity. The New Testament is not a single book
written by one person, but, rather, a collection of twenty-seven books
written in Greek by people from various places. There
are many ways to interpret the New Testament. Millions of people
view it as absolutely true scripture, and use its teachings as the
basis of their belief systems. Some biblical scholars interpret
it as a work of literature that uses beautiful poetry to describe
religious myths. Others study its ethical and philosophical ideas,
as its stories of the faithful attempt to instill certain values
and outline an appropriate way to live.
The books of the New Testament were written in first-
or second-century Palestine, a region that at the time was under
the rule of the Roman Empire. Many of the stories are based on the
rituals and beliefs of Judaism, as Jesus Christ and his disciples
were all Jews. As a result, both Greco-Roman culture and Judaic
traditions dominate the political, social, and economic scene of
the New Testament. Judaism at that time was not a single tradition
or set of beliefs, but contained many different divisions within
itself. These divisions figure prominently in New Testament stories.
The strictest Jews, the Sadducees, were the upper class of priests.
They interpreted scripture literally and adhered to rituals strictly.
They were opposed to oral tradition and to the concept of eternal
life, since the latter is not discussed in the Hebrew Bible, or
Old Testament. The Pharisees, in contrast to the Sadducees, interpreted
Jewish law for laypeople and established Jewish life outside of
the temple. They were more liberal in their acceptance of scripture,
regarding oral tradition and the words of prophets as scriptural
as well.
Judaism at the time of Christ involved a rigid social
hierarchy. The temple and the high priests who worked there were
considered to be pure, holy, and closer to God than anyone else.
The hierarchy continued with people who were Jews by birth, followed
by converts to Judaism. Gentiles, or non-Jews, were considered by
Jews to be ritually impure and not in the service of God. The New
Testament documents a shift in this hierarchy. Christians
challenged the system in which birth into the Israelite community
determined a person’s level of purity. They said, instead, that
repentance and acceptance of the teachings of Jesus Christ determined
a person’s purity.
The writers of the books that now comprise the New Testament did
not intend for their writings to replace or rival the Old Testament.
The Christian scriptures were originally intended to be utilitarian
documents, responding to specific needs of the early church. It
was only with the passage of more than a hundred years after Jesus’s
death that Christians began to use the term “New Testament” to refer
to the scriptures that the fledgling church was beginning to view
as a single sacred unit. Early Christians viewed the New Testament
as the fulfillment of promises made in the Old Testament, rather
than as the replacement of the Jewish scriptures.
The historical context of the New Testament greatly influences the
way we interpret it as literature. Many of the speakers in the Bible
address issues and problems unique to their moment in history, and
a knowledge of the various cultural forces of biblical times provides
a basis for understanding the characters’ motivations and reactions.
Furthermore, the New Testament’s role as influential religious doctrine
is another context. Just as historical situations shaped the development
of the New Testament, the New Testament has also influenced the
progress of history. Reading religious documents as literature requires
an unusual understanding of the events surrounding the writing of
the text.
Structure and Composition
Only in the second century a.d. did
Christians begin to use the term “New Testament” to refer to their
collection of scriptures. The New Testament as we now know it is
comprised of twenty-seven books, but it was not originally written
as a coherent whole. Jesus himself did not produce any written record
of his work. The books that comprise the New Testament were mostly
written in the century following his death, in response to specific
needs of the early church and its leaders. At the time of Jesus’s
crucifixion in approximately 30 a.d.,
most of the first generation of Christians believed that the end of
the world was imminent. They therefore considered it unnecessary
to compose records of Jesus’s life. By the mid-60s a.d., however, most
Christians who had known Jesus and witnessed his actions firsthand
were dying. It became necessary, then, to produce works that
would testify to Jesus’s life. As it became clear that the second
coming of Jesus would be delayed, the leaders of the church began
to compose works that would enable the nascent Christian Church
to survive.
The books that comprise the New Testament can be separated into
three broad categories. First are the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John. “Gospel” literally means “good news.” The “good
news” to which these gospels refer is the life, teachings, crucifixion,
and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospels usually appear
first among the texts of the New Testament, with Matthew placed
first of all. But the order of the New Testament is based on importance,
not chronology. The Gospels were probably written between 65 and 110 a.d., with Mark written first and John last.
The second category of texts in the New Testament are
the letters from Paul. Paul of Tarsus was an early church leader
and energetic missionary who spread the Gospel of Jesus across
the Roman Empire, preaching to Gentiles as well as to Jews, who
were the earliest targets of missionary activity. Paul wrote many
letters to various Christian communities throughout the Mediterranean,
settling points of doctrine and instructing new Christians in matters
of faith. By the end of the second century a.d.,
Christian communities had collected thirteen letters that they attributed
to Paul, and each letter became known by the name of the community
or individual to whom it was addressed: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians,
Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy,
Titus, and Philemon. A fourteenth letter, Hebrews, long accepted
by Eastern churches, was accepted by Western churches in the fourth
century a.d. The actual authorship and date
of composition of many of these letters is seriously disputed, but
it is generally agreed that Paul wrote some of them in the 50s a.d.,
making them the oldest existing Christian texts.
Other books in the New Testament are somewhat harder
to classify. Acts of the Apostles (known simply as Acts) is a continuation
of the Gospel According to Luke, giving the history of the church
in the years after Jesus’s crucifixion. Acts traces the expansion
of the church, as it moves out from Jerusalem and spreads throughout
the Gentile world. The protagonists of the book are Peter, the chief
of the Twelve Apostles, who were Jesus’s closest disciples, and Paul
of Tarsus, the greatest early Christian missionary. Also included
in the New Testament are seven letters, known as the Letters to
all Christians, or the Catholic—in its literal sense, meaning “universal”—Letters,
which resemble extended homilies. These letters are generally understood
to have been written after the Pauline letters: James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John,
and Jude. Finally, the Book of Revelation, written in the closing
years of the first century, is an extended vision predicting the
events of the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus.
In its early centuries, the church was highly decentralized.
Each individual church community collected its own sacred documents. The
fragmented nature of the church was complicated by the difference
in intellectual tradition between the East, which spoke Greek as
its scholarly language and was ruled from Byzantium following the
division of the Roman Empire, and the West, which spoke Latin and
was centered in Rome. The process by which individual church communities
came together to decide on a canon of sacred works, and the process
by which they preserved those works, is not entirely clear. Criteria
that seem to have been important in canonization include the authorship
of the texts—texts presumed to have been written by apostles, such
as Matthew, or by those who witnessed Jesus’s revelation firsthand,
such as Paul, were given priority—and the importance and wide acceptance
of the doctrine expressed in the texts. It is known that in the
decades just before and after 200 a.d., church
leaders widely accepted the sacred nature of a collection of twenty
works, including the four Gospels, thirteen Pauline letters, Acts, 1 Peter,
and 1 John. The remaining seven works—Hebrews, Revelation,
James, 2 and 3 John,
Jude, and 2 Peter—were cited from the second
to the fourth centuries and accepted as scripture in some, but not
all, churches. Finally, by the late fourth century, there was wide,
but not absolute, agreement in the Greek East and the Latin West
on a canon of twenty-seven works.
It is generally agreed that the books of the New Testament
were originally written in Greek, the scholarly language current
at the time, and divided into chapters and verses. It is possible
that a few books of the New Testament were originally written in
Aramaic, a dialect popular among the Jews of Palestine, and most
likely the language that Jesus himself spoke.
