New Testament

• 1. Introduction

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  The New Testament is a collection of 27 texts written in Koine Greek that forms the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It sits alongside the Old Testament, which draws primarily on the Hebrew Bible, and together they are regarded as Sacred Scripture by Christians. What makes this collection remarkable is not just its contents but the story of how it came together. Who actually wrote these books? When were they composed? And how did these particular 27 texts, out of dozens of competing early Christian writings, come to be accepted as authoritative across centuries and continents? Those are the questions that have occupied scholars, church councils, and ordinary believers for nearly two thousand years.

• 2. What the Word Testament Means

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  The word testament in the phrase "New Testament" carries a complicated history that most readers never notice. It refers to a covenant that Christians believe Jesus established, one they see as completing the earlier covenant described in the books of the Hebrew Bible. The original Hebrew word for that earlier covenant is brit, which means alliance, covenant, or pact. It never carries any sense of inheritance instructions left after death. When Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, they chose the Greek word diatheke to render brit. In the Greek world, diatheke was virtually never used for a covenant or alliance between parties. Instead it referred almost exclusively to a will left after someone's death. One exception appears in a passage from Aristophanes, but that was the outlier, not the rule. This choice of diatheke then passed into Latin as testamentum, meaning a will left after death, which is how English speakers arrived at the word testament. Christian theologians have understood this word choice to imply that the older covenant between God and Israel carried the character of a will made valid by the death of Jesus. The Jewish understanding of brit, by contrast, treated covenants as pacts between living parties. The scholarly debate over why the Septuagint translators chose diatheke over another available Greek term for alliance or covenant has never been fully resolved.

• 3. The Books and Their Authors

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  Four gospels sit at the heart of the New Testament, each narrating the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The word gospel itself comes from the Old English gōd-spell, meaning good news, which translates the Greek euangélion and the Hebrew besorah. Irenaeus of Lyon was the first author to explicitly name the four canonical gospels, doing so in his book Against Heresies around 180 AD. The gospels are technically anonymous texts; ascribing them to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is a matter of church tradition rather than the texts themselves stating their authorship. Most scholars believe none of the gospels were written in the region of Palestine, and scholarly opinion holds that the names were attached to them by the mid second century AD. The Gospel of Mark is generally considered the first gospel written, a position called Marcan priority. Many scholars argue the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark and a hypothetical second source called Q, though alternative theories continue to gain ground. John was written last, drawing on a different tradition and body of testimony. Scholars generally agree that the author who wrote the Gospel of Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, treating both as two halves of a single work called Luke-Acts. Both books were addressed to a figure named Theophilus, and the preface to Acts references a former book about the ministry of Jesus. Beyond the gospels and Acts, the New Testament contains thirteen letters presenting Paul the Apostle as their author. Seven of these are classified as undisputed by modern scholars: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Six others are disputed. Among the letters to individuals, those addressed to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon are known as the Pastoral epistles; most scholars regard the first three of these as pseudepigrapha, meaning works attributed to Paul but likely not written by him. The anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews is grouped with the Pauline corpus by tradition, though as early as the 3rd century Origen wrote that men of old attributed it to Paul, but "who wrote the Epistle God only knows." The final book of the New Testament is the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse of John. The author identifies himself as John and states he was on the island of Patmos when he received his first vision. The date of writing has been placed by some scholars at around 81-96 AD and by others at around 68 AD. The book opens with letters to seven local congregations in Asia Minor and then unfolds as an apocalypse, a revealing of divine prophecy, a genre popular in ancient Judaism and Christianity.

• 4. Forming the Canon

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  Early Christianity did not arrive with a fixed list of authoritative books. In the first few centuries, many writings circulated among Christian communities, and different communities regarded different texts as inspired. One of the earliest attempts to define a fixed collection was made by Marcion around 140 AD. Marcion accepted only a modified version of the Gospel of Luke and ten letters of Paul, while rejecting the Old Testament entirely. His proposal was largely rejected by other Christian groups, and scholars including Adolf von Harnack and John Knox have argued that the church's push to form its own defined canon was in part a response to the challenge Marcion posed. Justin Martyr, writing in the mid 2nd century, mentions memoirs of the apostles being read on Sundays alongside the writings of the prophets. The Muratorian fragment, dated somewhere between 170 and the end of the 4th century, may be the earliest surviving canon list attributed to mainstream Christianity. It resembles but is not identical to the modern New Testament canon. By the early 200s, Origen had assembled information from his extensive travels about which texts were accepted across churches around the known world. Eusebius of Caesarea drew heavily on Origen's knowledge when compiling his own account around 300 AD. In his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius distinguished between writings that were universally accepted, writings that were disputed but recognized by many, and writings he called rejected or spurious. He placed the Book of Revelation in both the accepted and the disputed categories, noting that some churches accepted it and others did not. The decisive step toward a fixed 27-book list came from Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his Easter letter of 367. He named all 27 books and used the word canonized to describe them. The first council to accept that canon may have been the Synod of Hippo Regius in North Africa in 393 AD, though the records of that council have been lost. A summary was accepted at the Council of Carthage in 397 and reaffirmed at another council there in 419. In the West, Pope Damasus I commissioned the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible around 383, a move that helped fix the canon in Latin Christianity. Formal dogmatic statements spelling out the canon did not arrive until much later: the Council of Trent in 1546 for Roman Catholicism, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 for the Church of England, the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 for Calvinism, and the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 for the Greek Orthodox.

• 5. Languages, Manuscripts, Variants

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  1 Thessalonians is widely considered the earliest of Paul's letters, written around 52 AD, making it likely the earliest surviving New Testament text. The books that would form the collection were all written in Koine Greek, the common dialect spoken across the eastern Mediterranean world. The major languages of Jewish and Greek communities in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus were Aramaic and Koine Greek, along with a colloquial form of Mishnaic Hebrew. It is generally agreed that Jesus himself primarily spoke Aramaic. Some Church Fathers claimed that Matthew was originally composed in Hebrew or Aramaic before being rendered into Greek, though scholars have debated what to make of that claim given that the surviving Greek text of Matthew shows no signs of being a translation. The style of Koine Greek used in the New Testament differs noticeably from the Greek of other educated writers of the same period. One explanation holds that the New Testament authors, nearly all Jews and steeped in the Septuagint, wrote in a Jewish-Greek dialect shaped by Aramaic and Hebrew influence. Another explanation points out that the educated writers of the era deliberately imitated classical Attic style, whereas the New Testament authors wrote in everyday spoken Koine, the same dialect found in private letters, receipts, and petitions discovered in Egypt. As Christianity spread, the texts were translated into Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and eventually Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Persian, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, Arabic, and Nubian. The New Testament has been preserved in more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and around 9,300 manuscripts in other ancient languages. Even if all original Greek copies were lost, the entire text could theoretically be reconstructed from these translations. Beyond that, the volume of New Testament quotations in early church documents is so large that the text could also be reassembled from those citations alone. The earliest surviving manuscripts date from the late 2nd to early 3rd centuries AD, with the possible exception of Papyrus 52, whose early dating has recently been called into question. Among the most significant manuscript discoveries are Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, which may be among the fifty Bibles commissioned by the Emperor Constantine I in 331 for the Church of Constantinople.

• 6. Textual Criticism and Variants

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  Bart D. Ehrman observed that scribal additions are often found in late medieval manuscripts of the New Testament but not in earlier ones, a pattern that textual criticism works to unravel. Ancient scribes made errors and sometimes introduced deliberate alterations. The New Testament has accumulated more manuscript witnesses than any other text from antiquity, and that abundance creates both problems and opportunities for scholars. As Bruce Metzger noted, the more copies agree across different geographical regions, the more confidently scholars can reconstruct an original by tracing the family tree of manuscript descent. Norman Geisler and William Nix concluded from this evidence that the New Testament has survived in a form that is 99.5 percent pure compared to its earliest recoverable state. At the same time, a study of 150 Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke alone revealed more than 30,000 different readings, and scholars note that not one sentence of the New Testament exists in a form that is wholly uniform across all manuscripts. Most of these variants are trivial: differences in spelling, punctuation, or word order. In Greek, word order often carries no change in meaning, so variants of that kind do not affect interpretation. A few variants carry more significance. The two most commonly cited are the final verses of the Gospel of Mark and the story of the woman taken in adultery in the Gospel of John. The Johannine Comma, a phrase in the First Epistle of John that explicitly supports a Trinitarian doctrine, is also widely believed to be a later addition. Modern translations typically include footnotes flagging passages with disputed manuscript histories, and the scholarly process of textual criticism continues to refine which readings stand closest to the original Greek.

• 7. How Christians Interpret It

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  The Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1997, states that the Church does not derive certainty about revealed truths from Scripture alone, and that both Scripture and Tradition must be honored with equal devotion. Roman Catholic theology holds that the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority, interprets both. Bishop Kallistos Ware describes the Orthodox position differently: for the Orthodox, there is only one source of the Christian faith, Holy Tradition, within which Scripture exists rather than alongside it. Protestant traditions following the principle of sola scriptura, meaning Scripture alone, place their own practice and doctrine under the authority of the biblical text, treating tradition as always open to revision in light of what the scriptures teach. That openness has extended in some liberal Protestant traditions to questioning whether the Bible is historically inerrant at all. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, adopted in the United States in 1978, articulates the evangelical position: Scripture is without error in all its teaching, including statements about God's acts in creation and the events of world history. The Presbyterian Church USA distinguishes between inerrancy and infallibility, affirming that Scripture teaches truth faithfully without requiring that every historical detail or prescientific description be literally accurate. The Seventh-day Adventist Church holds to what its theologians call thought inspiration: God influenced the thoughts of the apostles, and the writers then expressed those thoughts in their own words. Adventist theologians A. T. Jones and E. J. Waggoner interpreted the problem Paul addresses in Galatians not as a matter of the ceremonial law but as the wrong use of the law, a position contested by Uriah Smith and George Butler at the 1888 Conference. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accept the New Testament as accurate insofar as it has been translated correctly, acknowledging that transcription and translation may have introduced errors into the texts as currently available.