CHAPTER 2

THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS: THEIR DATE AND ATTESTATION

1. What are the New Testament documents?

THE NEW TESTAMENT AS WE KNOW IT consists of twenty-seven short Greek writings, commonly called ‘books’, the first five of which are historical in character, and are thus of more immediate concern for our present study. Four of these we call the Gospels, because each of them narrates the gospel — the good news that God revealed himself in Jesus Christ for the redemption of mankind. All four relate sayings and doings of Christ, but can scarcely be called biographies in our modern sense of the word, as they deal almost exclusively with the last two or three years of his life, and devote what might seem a disproportionate space to the week immediately preceding his death. They are not intended to be ‘lives’ of Christ, but rather to present from distinctive points of view, and originally for different publics, the good news concerning him. The first three Gospels (those according to Matthew, Mark and Luke), because of certain features which link them together, are commonly called the ‘Synoptic Gospels’.6

The fifth historical writing, the Acts of the Apostles, is actually a continuation of the third Gospel, written by the same author, Luke the physician and companion of the apostle Paul. It gives us an account of the rise of Christianity after the resurrection and ascension of Christ, and of its extension in a westerly direction from Palestine to Rome, within about thirty years of the crucifixion. Of the other writings twenty-one are letters. Thirteen of these bear the name of Paul, nine of them being addressed to churches7 and four to individuals.8

Another letter, the Epistle to the Hebrews, is anonymous, but was at an early date bound up with the Pauline Epistles, and came to be frequently ascribed to Paul. It was probably written shortly before AD 70 to a community of Jewish Christians in Italy. Of the remaining letters one bears the name of James, probably the brother of our Lord; one of Jude, who calls himself the brother of James; two of Peter; and there are three which bear no name, but because of their obvious affinities with the fourth Gospel have been known from early days as the Epistles of John. The remaining book is the Apocalypse, or book of the Revelation.9 It belongs to a literary genre which, though strange to our minds, was well known in Jewish and Christian circles in those days, the apocalyptic.10 The Revelation is introduced by seven covering letters, addressed to seven churches in the province of Asia. The author, John by name, was at the time exiled on the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea, and reports a series of visions which symbolically portray the triumph of Christ both in his own passion and in the sufferings of his people at the hand of his enemies and theirs. The book was written in the days of the Flavian emperors (A