Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [133]
The difficult adjustment for Christians who have grown up with the merging of the Four Gospels into a historical “biography” of Jesus is that the word “history” must be used cautiously when speaking about the Gospels. While they may be divinely inspired, the Gospels are not works of history or biography. They are not even personal memoirs. They were written by zealous believers as a call to faith for their own day, not as documents for some historical accounting. The authors of the Gospel weren’t journalists “covering” Jesus and eager to capture all the details of his daily life and report them in a larger historical context. They were devoted followers who wanted to give the world a version of the “Truth” as they had witnessed it.
The four Gospels are followed by the Acts of the Apostles, a brisk narrative recounting how a group of “apostles,” Jesus’ followers, began to spread the word of Jesus, essentially beginning the Christian church. In the face of deadly persecution by Jewish and Roman authorities, the earliest followers of Jesus were basically an outlaw “cult” until Emperor Constantine converted in 313 CE and Christianity became Rome’s dominant religion.
Acts also introduces the New Testament’s second most important figure, an educated, pious Jewish tent-maker named Saul, later changed to Paul. Born in what is now Turkey, Saul vigorously persecuted the followers of Jesus. But after a miraculous conversion, his name was changed, and this short, bow-legged, balding Jewish man—the one description of Paul makes him sound a bit like “George Costanza” of Seinfeld fame—became the most significant advocate of Christianity in the Roman world. If Jesus “invented” Christianity, Paul “marketed” it to the world. His missionary journeys undertaken to establish and then shore up early communities of believers took Christianity from an offshoot sect of Judaism to a separate, dynamic religion that transformed history. When arrested in Jerusalem for his “heretical” views, Paul demanded a trial in Rome before the emperor, his right as a Roman citizen—the equivalent of that imaginary modern air traveler who wanted a hearing from the U.S. President.
Following the Gospels and Acts, the next twenty-one books fall into the second major New Testament form, a collection of letters, or “epistles,” written either to individuals or communities of early Christians. All of them were probably written before the Gospels were composed, and the majority of these letters are attributed to Paul. Two letters are credited to Jesus’ first disciple, Peter. Two of the letter-writers, James and Jude, were thought to be Jesus’ brothers. Three other letters are credited to the author of the Gospel of John. John was also thought to be the author of Revelation, the New Testament’s final book, an apocalyptic vision of God’s will for the future, a mysterious prophetic oracle that has fueled speculation and prophecies about the “end of the world” and the “Last Days” since it was written. In particular, its references to the passage of two eras of a thousand years each before Judgement Day arrives has many people wondering if 2000 might be the Big One!
BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
The Gospels
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
The Acts of the Apostles
Letters or Epistles of Paul
Romans
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
1 Thessalonians
2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy
2 Timothy
Titus
Philemon
General Letters
Hebrews
James
1 Peter
2 Peter
1 John
2 John
3 John
Jude
Revelation (Apocalypse)
Who wrote the New Testament?
On the face of it, questions about the Christian New Testament should be much easier to answer than similar queries about the Hebrew scriptures, or the Old Testament. Unlike the Hebrew scriptures, whose composition was spread over more than a thousand years, the “books