Introducing the New Testament

The New Testament is a simply a collection of the writings of the early Christian community, who believed that Jesus the Messiah was the son of God, the “Word made flesh”. Convinced that Jesus was the hope for the world,

Two types of documents can be broadly identified from the New Testmanet. Gospels are the four narratives of the life of Jesus named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Luke was probably originally a much longer work that also covered the life of the early church. This section on the early church has since been separated from Luke and is now titled ‘Acts of the Apostles’. The other category of documents in the New Testament are Epistles or ‘Letters’. These are written from leaders of the early church to Christian communities or individuals from around the Roman Empire. The book of Revelation is considered a letter (to seven churches in ancient Turkey), but it also has the features of an ‘Apocalypse’, like the book of Daniel in the Old Testament.

The books of the New Testament came together over four centuries in a process known as canonisation. ‘Canon’ was a Greek word meaning ‘measuring stick’… so the canonisation of the New Testament was basically ‘measuring up’ which Christian documents should be regarded as scripture alongside the older books of the Hebrew Bible, which had been ‘canonised’ in the early second century. For the early church, the process was one of working out which books held the most authority and communicated God’s message best. This meant that some books that were written very early (such as the Gospel of Thomas, or Shepherd of Hermes) were ultimately not included in the New Testament, while others that were originally questionable (such as the book of Revelation) were eventually incorporated into the Bible.

The New Testament was written by a number of different authors. While many of the documents have names of authorship attached, scholars recognise that many of these names were either added much later (in the case of the Gospels) or were written by ‘ghost writers’ using the name of well-known apostles (apostles being the key leaders of the early church—Jesus’ disciples, and Paul). There is general historical agreement that Paul definitely wrote 7 of the Epistles, while the rest rely on church memory and tradition.

It may be interesting to know that the books of the New Testament were written in a different order than the way we currently place them in modern Bibles. Paul’s letters were the earliest documents (First Thessalonians in 50 A.D., according to Marcus Borg) with the first gospel being that of Mark, probably around 70 A.D. The last books of the New Testament were probably written in the early part of the second century (100-120 A.D.). This means that although all of our information about Jesus comes from the Gospels—and it is this information that we need to make sense of the rest of the New Testament—Paul was actually the first Christian writer! However, the stories about Jesus were being shared by word of mouth even while he was alive. The Gospels represent the efforts of the early church to make sure that the meaning of Jesus’ life and death was written down before all of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life passed away... some time after the events surrounding his life, death and resurrection actually happened!

Differences in the Gospels??

 It is important for us to recognise this dating of the Gospels (late in the first century, even after the ministry and letters of Paul) as it goes a good deal of the way to explaining some of the differences between the accounts that we shall see as we interact with them. Not all Gospels share the same viewpoints about Jesus, and they tell the stories in different ways. This is because each Gospel author saw something different in the significance of Jesus, reflecting in turn the way that different communities around the Empire saw Jesus.

That we have four Gospels rather than just one is an encouraging sign that there was room for diversity in the early church! However, it also raises questions about the order of events take at different times… something we will have to grapple with as we explore Jesus’ life. What is important for us to think about in looking at not only the events of Jesus’ life, but at the Bible as a whole. The Bible is full of authors who have different ideas about God, even as they share faith in the same God. Difference and disagreement does not mean ‘argument’. Instead, we should simply note that the way that authors have put their stories together leads us to recognising the different emphases and value they place on different aspects of Jesus’ personality and character.

In a later chapter, we talk about the diversity of scripture in detail. But since we can’t avoid discussing diversity when we discuss Jesus and the four gospels, I’ll make a summary comment here.

When we look at the Bible, we are looking at people’s memories. The Biblical authors were not concerned with writing history in a modern sense. Rather, they used history, poetry and theology (what they thought about God) to construct a narrative to carry across a message. In the New Testament, this message is about the life and significance of Jesus. With each author understanding Jesus’ significance differently, each author constructs a different narrative—with different events, order of events, and even some of the details surrounding identical events.

These narratives complement each other, but not in a historical sense. Rather than trying to put the four gospels into a single story, we should instead consider each story on its own and ask “What can we learn about Jesus from this gospel?” Then we bring the Gospels together and ask how the different pictures of Jesus can work together to give us a stronger sense of who Jesus is. “How does Matthew’s view of Jesus compare with Luke’s?” or “What does John tell us about Jesus that Mark misses?”

This brief outline hopefully gives you a sense of the complexity involved in compiling (and then reading!) the 27 books known as the New Testament. None of its texts were written while Jesus was alive, and all rely on the memories and knowledge of people operating some years after his death. This matters, because we need to remember that as Christians, we are not actually following “the Bible”. We follow Jesus. While we learn about Jesus through the New Testament, the New Testament is written after Jesus. We read through the Bible to see God, through the life of Jesus.

I consider the relationship between Jesus, the New Testament and us as twenty-first century Christians something like communicating with someone who is a long way off, and the only tool you have is a telescope. Jesus is the one we want to communicate with… somewhat distant (almost 2000 years distant) from where we are today. We want to follow Jesus’ life, so look through the Bible (the telescope) to see where Jesus is. The telescope is a really useful instrument, and makes seeing Jesus much easier. However, it is also a really old instrument and it can have trouble focusing. Sometimes, our reading and use of it can focus on the wrong things, and we get confused or distracted from its actual purpose. We therefore need to use the glimpses of Jesus we can get through scripture to help us focus on what really matters. The words and life example of Jesus, that we see through the lens of the gospel, helps us as Christians put our priorities and faith into perspective. It is to Jesus’ life and experiences—seen from the viewpoint of first century Christians in the Gospels—that we must turn.