Scriptures & Texts

New Testament

Christian Scriptures

The New Testament is 27 books written in Greek within roughly a century of the crucifixion: four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, 21 letters and Revelation. Christians hold it to be inspired scripture and the record of the new covenant. On authorship and dating, tradition and critical scholarship diverge sharply. Most scholars date Mark to around 70 CE and hold that Matthew and Luke used it, that seven of the letters attributed to Paul are certainly his and six are disputed, and that the gospels were named later. The 27-book list appears complete for the first time in a letter of Athanasius in 367, but the collection settled by use rather than by decree.

Facts

Disputed

Attributed Author / Compiler

Apostles and their associates (traditional) 1

Mark Goodacre's The Case Against Q: Studies in Marcan Priority and the Synoptic Problem, Trinity Press International, 2002, argues against the widely assumed hypothetical Q source, a document no manuscript of which has ever been found, that is traditionally posited to explain material shared by Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark. Goodacre's method is close literary and redaction-critical comparison of the parallel passages across the three Gospels, and he argues the same pattern of agreement is explained at least as well by Luke having read and directly edited Matthew, removing the need to posit a lost source at all. That argument sits within the wider, still-live Synoptic Problem of how Matthew, Mark and Luke relate to one another; what is not in dispute, and what Goodacre's own study takes as its starting point, is that the Gospels are themselves anonymous, their traditional author-names being second century ascriptions rather than the writers' own signatures, while Paul's undisputed letters, whose authorship is secure, remain the earliest Christian writings.

Attributed Author / Compiler

Pauls undisputed letters earliest (c. 50s CE), the Gospels anonymous (c. 65-100 CE) 1

Attributed Author / Compiler

With the Synoptic Problem debated (critical) 1

Origins

Era of Composition

50 to 100 CE 1

Language

Koine Greek 2

Attestation

Historicity

Historically attested 4

Status

Canonical Status

Canonical 3Christianity

Text

Literary Form

Text collection / anthology 2

Structure

27 books: 4 Gospels, Acts, 21 Epistles, and Revelation 2

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Twenty-Seven Books in Four Kinds

The New Testament divides into four groups. The four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, narrate the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. The Acts of the Apostles continues Luke's account into the spread of the movement from Jerusalem to Rome. Twenty-one letters follow, thirteen bearing Paul's name, one anonymous (Hebrews), and seven attributed to James, Peter, John and Jude and known as the catholic or general epistles. Revelation closes the collection with an apocalypse addressed to seven churches in Asia Minor.

Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the synoptic gospels because their material can be set out in parallel columns and read together; they share wording, order and episodes to a degree that requires a literary explanation. John stands apart: different structure, different chronology, a ministry centred on Jerusalem rather than Galilee, and long discourses in place of short sayings and parables.

The whole was written in Koine Greek, the common language of the eastern Mediterranean, though Jesus and his first followers spoke Aramaic and the gospels preserve occasional Aramaic words. The letters are the earliest layer and are not general essays but occasional writing, answers to disputes in specific congregations about food, sex, money, status, worship and the standing of gentile converts, from which doctrine was afterwards drawn. Read in canonical order the collection begins with a life of Jesus; read in order of composition it begins in the middle of an argument in a Greek city about what his death and resurrection meant.

The Synoptic Problem and the Dating of the Gospels

The overlaps between Matthew, Mark and Luke are too close for coincidence and too uneven for simple copying. The dominant solution is Markan priority: Mark was written first and used independently by Matthew and Luke, who also drew several hundred verses of shared material, mostly sayings, that Mark lacks. That common material is conventionally attributed to a lost source labelled Q, from the German Quelle. Matthew and Luke each additionally carry material unique to them.

Q is a hypothesis, not a manuscript. No copy has ever been found and no ancient writer mentions it. The main alternative, the Farrer hypothesis, keeps Markan priority but dispenses with Q by proposing that Luke read and reworked Matthew; it has been argued at length by Michael Goulder and Mark Goodacre and has a real following. A minority still defends Matthean priority, the traditional order. Markan priority itself is close to consensus; Q is majority opinion with active dissent.

Dating rests largely on internal evidence. Most critical scholars place Mark around 65 to 75 CE, near the Jewish revolt and the destruction of the Temple in 70; Matthew and Luke in the 80s or 90s; and John in the 90s or slightly later. Conservative scholars argue for earlier dates, in some cases before 70, noting among other things that Acts ends with Paul alive under house arrest in Rome and says nothing of his death or of the Temple's fall.

The gospels are formally anonymous. The names attached to them are not in the texts and appear in the manuscript tradition from the later second century. Traditional attribution holds that Matthew the tax collector, Mark the interpreter of Peter, Luke the companion of Paul and John the beloved disciple wrote them; most critical scholars regard the titles as second-century ascriptions and the authors as unknown.

Paul's Letters, and How Twenty-Seven Became the List

Seven letters are accepted by virtually all textual scholars as written by Paul himself in the 50s CE: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. These are the earliest Christian documents in existence, predating the gospels. Six more bearing his name are disputed. Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians are argued over, with scholars divided on whether they are Paul's, a secretary's, or a disciple's work in his name. The pastoral epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are judged by most critical scholars to be later, on grounds of vocabulary, style and the developed church offices they assume; traditional and conservative scholarship maintains Paul's authorship of all thirteen. Hebrews carries no author's name and is not now ascribed to Paul by anyone; Origen said in the third century that only God knew who wrote it.

The oldest surviving fragment of any New Testament book is Papyrus 52, a scrap of John's gospel in the John Rylands Library, usually dated to the first half of the second century, though Brent Nongbri has shown the palaeographic method allows a range extending later. Complete Bibles survive from the fourth century in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.

The canon formed under pressure. Around 144 Marcion rejected the Hebrew scriptures and proposed a Christian collection of one gospel and ten Pauline letters, forcing the wider church to say what it accepted. The Muratorian fragment, a Latin canon list usually dated to the late second century though Albert Sundberg and Geoffrey Hahneman argued for the fourth, names most of the 27. Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation were disputed longest. The first surviving list of exactly the 27 books is the 39th festal letter of Athanasius of Alexandria in 367. No council imposed it; the churches had largely converged on it already through what they read aloud.

Passages from This Text

1 Corinthians 13:4-7The Holy Bible, American Standard Versionethics, love

Love suffereth long, [and] is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil; rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.