New Testament 101 (or, in my case, New Testament for Dummies)
Perhaps, like me, many of you are running out of things to read. At least things which are mind calming and help one deal with the current “new life” we are facing during this pandemic.
Looking for something different to read, I came across my old papers written while at Concordia University and then St. Andrew’s College in Saskatoon.
Many of them dealt with the New Testament and I thought that, during the coming weeks, it might be interesting to share a little of the “stuff” we were required to lean about over the course of both the theological and religious aspects of the programs. For those of you who remember Marco, he would refer to this three-year program as “Jesus Camp” and, for all intents and purposes, the truth so often contained in his humor is not lost on me as I look back over those three years.
As the weeks wear on into this “no time”, I am scratching my head to provide a less “personal” perspective on the crisis. Each of us is facing these endless days in their own way and I thought the blog time might be better spent in some bible related facts. It’s never too late to learn or re-learn some things about the “book” or writings on which our faith relies.
So, I thought we might start with a little historical background on what the New Testament is and, as the weeks pass, take a brief look at some of the books, a description of their significance and perhaps a passage from each one.
The New Testament is a collection of 27 books and letters, originally written in Greek. All accounts were initially delivered in the oral tradition and would have been committed to parchment (or dried and stretched animal skin) as the eyewitnesses began to die off and it was apparent that the stories would soon be lost.
The New Testament is arranged into four categories:
1. The word “Gospel” or “good news” originally meant the Christian message itself but, somewhere in the 2nd century, it came to mean the books or the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This section also contains the book of Acts, (or Acts of the apostles) which tells how the “good news” was shared and spread after Jesus died and rose from death.
These Gospels were probably written between 66 and 100 years AD (I always referred to AD as “after death”)* and were written anonymously. Names were attributed to authors sometime in the 2nd century and such “authors” were almost certainly not eyewitnesses to the events as they occurred.
Written over the course of almost a century after Jesus' death, the four gospels of the New Testament, though they tell the same story, reflect very different ideas and concerns. It is important to note that a period of forty years separates the death of Jesus from the writing of the first gospel.
As a point of interest is the “two-source hypothesis”. As students, we had no idea what this meant when the term was first presented. However, it goes like this: Most scholars agree that Mark was the first of the gospels to be composed, and that the authors of Matthew and Luke used it plus a second document called the Q source when composing their own gospels. To make this more confusing, Q source is a hypothetical written collection of primarily Jesus' sayings common in the material found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke but not in the Gospel of Mark.
2. The letters of Paul are made up of Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon. There remains to this day discussion as to which letters were actually written by Paul himself, and which were written “in the style of Paul”. (see number 3)
These letter were originally called “epistles” and each one was named for the groups or persons it was directed to; e.g. “to the disciples or brethren in Roman” or “to the brothers and sisters of Corinth”, etc.
3. This section contains letters written by people other than Paul such as Hebrews, James 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John and, of course Jude. The Letter to the Hebrews does not reveal its author’s name but each of the other letters is named for the person who wrote it.
4. The Book of Revelations is quite different from the other New Testament books because it is a book of visions and prophecies.
As a point of interest, while there is no guarantee that the events described in the New Testament are historically accurate, it is viewed as a quest for the historical Jesus and scholars believe that it is possible to differentiate Jesus’ own personal views from those of his later followers.
Next week, we will focus on the Book of Matthew, the first included in the Gospels, but not the first Gospel to be written.
I hope you will stay tuned.
In peace,
Beryl
*AD of course stands for “Anno Domini” or “in the year of our Lord” and is counted from an approximation of the year of Christ’s birth, not his death.