New Testament

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The New Testament is a canonical collection of ancient Christian documents.

Overview

The "New Testament" is the traditional name given to the second part of the Christian Bible, containing the writings of the early Christian community. The term New Testament distinguishes this section from the “Old Testament” (or Hebrew Bible), which contains the texts that early Christians inherited from the previous Jewish tradition.

The word “Testament” derives from the Latin (testamentum); it means, “covenant”.

The New Testament is not a single book, but a collection of 27 books. Although all of them refer to Jesus of Nazareth, none of them was authored by Jesus himself. Jesus was a preacher, not a writer; he did not leave any writings, nor dictated any texts.

The texts in the New Testament were written by disciples and believers in Jesus. None of them was written by independent witnesses or non-Christians. In this sense, they are biased: the goal of the authors of the NT texts was to preach the Christian message.

The documents in the New Testament are very different from one another (different literary form, or genres). There are biographies of Jesus (the Gospels), letters, a survey of Church history, one apocalypse. What they have in common, is the reference to Jesus and to the religious movement he initiated. The NT is a collection of Christian religious texts.

The most represented author in the NT is Paul, to whom 13 letters are attributed.

The documents in the New Testament were written roughly between 50 and 150. The new Testament does not include all Christian documents written during that time. The New Testament is a “canon”, i.e. an authoritative collection, or better, selection of documents.

The formation of the New Testament was a gradual process. It took three centuries before the leaders of the Church defined the accepted canon of the New Testament. The first evidence of the canon of 27 books comes from a letter of the bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, in 367 CE.

Before the fourth century the situation was rather fluid. Each Christian community had its own “canon” that often included either a limited number of texts or texts later rejected. Each canon reflected the theological diversity of the Church. There was a great deal of diversity in the early Church. Groups such as the Marcionites or the Gnostics or the Jewish Christians had their own distinctive canon in competition with other Christian groups. For example, the Nag Hammadi Library was a Gnostic Library, discovered in 1945 in Egypt. It contains some fifty-two documents written in Coptic. It gives us an idea of the canonical writings of a Christian Gnostic Community in the first four centuries of the Common Era—documents that were later rejected by the Church.

The creation of a unified canon was prompted in the fourth century by historical factors. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Emperor required unity of Christian organization and belief.

In order to define the canon of the New Testament the Church used two major criteria:

  • apostolicity, or antiquity (in order to 'canonical a text had to be written by an apostle, or in the name of an apostle)
  • recognition, or orthodoxy (the authority of a text had to be recognized by the majority of the Churches)

The apostles were considered the eyewitness of Jesus. Among the apostles were reckoned not only the Twelve but also the members of the family of Jesus (James, Jude) and Paul. According the early Christian tradition the risen Christ appeared not only to the Twelve but also to James, the brother of Jesus. Paul also was considered an apostle because of his authority and importance in the early Church, even though he had never met Jesus. However, according to the early Christian tradition Paul saw the risen Jesus in a vision; he was then considered to be an apostle.

Many authors of the text in the New Testament were neither apostles nor eyewitnesses. Authors such as Mark or Luke were disciples of the apostles; their works were included because they were believed to reflect the teaching of an apostle.

In some cases the authority of an ancient text was recognized but not its apostolicity. Because of this, texts such as the Letter of Clement, the letter of Barnabas, etc. were not included in the NT but continued to be used in the Church. They are known as the “Apostolic Fathers”

In some cases the apostolicity of an ancient text was recognized but not its authority. Because of this, texts such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Peter, etc., which were attributed to Jesus’ apostles but whose authority was not universally recognized, were excluded and their usage in the Church discouraged. These texts are known as “New Testament Apocrypha”.

In addition, not all potentially canonical texts have been preserved. Some were lost. For example, in 1 Corinthians Paul says that he had previously written a letter to that Church—letter that is no longer extant.

Within the canon of the New Testament, texts were not arranged according to the chronological order of composition, but according to their content: first, the Gospels; than, the historical book (the Acts) and Paul, and then the letters (including, at the end, Revelation). The order of the New Testament was modeled after the Hebrew Bible, which is also divided in three parts: Torah, Prophets and Writings (including the apocalyptic Daniel).

The earliest texts in the New Testament are not the Gospels, but the Letters of Paul. The earliest extant letter of Paul is the so-called First letter to the Thessalonians, written around 50 CE.

Language and translation

All NT texts are written in Greek; occasionally they contain some Aramaic words.

The spoken language in 1st century Israel, the language spoken by Jesus and his first disciples, was Aramaic. Hebrew was the language of the ancient Scripture of Israel and was also known. Greek was the international language of communication of the ancient world (like English today, or Latin and French in the past). This explains why the NT texts were written in Greek, even though Jesus preached in Aramaic.

The originals of all books of the New Testament are all lost. What we have, are only copies of copies. The earliest fragments goes back to the 2nd century. Most of the around 5,000 extant manuscripts of the NT are from the Middle Ages.

NT manuscripts contain a lot of careless mistakes. Words are either misspelled, or repeated, or skipped. Copying was a very difficult and tiring job.

In addition, many times Christian scribes had the tendency to transfer back their theology on the text, generating some theologically motivated “corrections”. For instance, as some Christian scribes of later times did not approve of the high profile women occasionally enjoyed in the early churches, they changed the text accordingly. In many manuscripts, the “prominent women” of Acts 17:4 became “the wives of prominent men”, etc. In order to save the omniscience of Jesus, some ancient manuscripts deleted the reference to the Son in Mt 24:36, where is written: “About that day and hour [of the End] no one knows… not event the Son, but the Father alone.”

Scholars reconstruct the “original” text by comparing the many manuscripts between themselves and with ancient translations and quotations by ancient authors, and critically assessing the many variants. Not necessarily the majority reading or the reading attested in the earliest manuscript is the closest to the original.

In antiquity ordinary Christians did not "read" the New Testament. Most people were not educated and copies of the NT were very rare and expansive. Only the richest Monasteries and Parishes could afford to produce or purchase manuscripts. The NT was read by priests and preached in sermons. NT scenes were painted on the walls of the churches for instruction.

The New Testament was known neither in the original Greek nor in the everyday language, but in Latin, which in the West had became the language of the Church, and the reading of the holy texts was restricted to the clergy.

It was only in the 16th century that the NT was translated into modern languages. The Reformation promoted the translation of the Bible. Martin Luther was the author of the first German translation (1522-1534). Around the same time the invention of printing made finally the NT available and affordable to ordinary Christians. But not everybody agreed. When in 1525, William Tyndale translated for the first time the New Testament in English he was tried for heresy and burned at the stake. In the Catholic Church, the reading of the New Testament by ordinary Christians was openly encouraged only after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

The King James Version is an English translation published in 1611 for the official use in the Anglican Church. Is a poetic masterpiece but his language is now largely outdated and his text is not always reliable as it was based on a limited number of ancient manuscripts.

In the 16th century also began the tradition of dividing the text in chapters and verses, which was popularized by the printed editions of the Bible.

External links

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