• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1304 0

” of the New Testament were probably written within a space of about fifty years, from around 60 to 110 CE. Everything that happened in the New Testament took place in the days of the Roman empire, a fairly well documented bureaucracy, during a “civilized” rea when writing was quite sophisticated. A substantial body of “literature”—most of it Greek drama, poetry, essays, philosophy, and law—was available to the educated elite of the Roman world. The Romans were creating their own literature, which lives on in the names of Ovid, Horace, Seneca, Juvenal—a few of the first-century Roman poets and playwrights. Roman historians were recording their own versions of the great empire, and one of them, Tacitus, mentioned the early Christians in his accounts of the period. The Western world’s great storehouse of knowledge was in Alexandria, a cosmopolitan Mediterranean seaport in Rome’s Egyptian province, where the wisdom of the entire ancient world was supposedly kept on scrolls. That centuries-old knowledge was preserved until 391 CE, when Emperor Theodosius, a Christian convert, ordered all non-Christian works eliminated. The Library at Alexandria, storehouse of the world’s knowledge, was burned, the first of many book-burnings “inspired” by Christianity.

Another eyewitness to the events in first-century Jerusalem was a Jewish rebel-turned-writer named Joseph ben Matthias (c. 37-100 CE). After fighting the Romans during a Jewish revolt, Joseph decided, if you can’t lick them, join them. Befriended by some of his Roman enemies, he adopted the Roman name Flavius Josephus and wrote The History of the Jewish People and an account of the Jewish uprising that led to the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple by Rome in 70 CE. His colorful and very personalized versions of life and times in Roman Palestine are among the few key documents available for understanding the history of this turbulent period. In one of his books, Josephus makes a brief—and somewhat controversial—mention of Jesus, one of only a few references to Jesus outside the New Testament. One reason for Jesus’ absence from traditional “history” is simple. While Jesus and his first followers are so overwhelmingly important today as the founders of Christianity, at that time, they were merely a band of insignificant troublemakers in a far-flung corner of the great empire.

For this and other reasons, despite all the available information, the high degree of civilization in Roman times, and all these learned writers, the authorship of the New Testament books remains clouded in mystery. Just like the unsolved puzzles of Hebrew scripture, there are open questions about the identities of writers, place of writing, and dates of composition for most New Testament books.

Although much shorter than the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament still has its own complex history. Many of the books began in the oral tradition, and because many early Christians expected the “Second Coming” of Christ to happen any day, there seemed to be little need for a written version of the “good news.” Eventually, as the first generation of “apostles” who were spreading the “good news” started to die off—either from old age or as the result of persecutions by the Romans—it seemed like a good idea to set these words down. The letters of Paul were the first to be collected, around 90 CE, and sometime after 100 CE there was a collection of the four Gospels. There are no “originals” of these writings. As the early Christian church grew, the Gospels and letters were widely copied to be spread from one Christian community to the next in a day when there was no Kinko’s or corner copy shop. Thousands of hand-copied versions of fairly early New Testament documents exist, and they aren’t always in agreement. Often composed under pseudonyms, the earliest Christian writings were first written on papyrus or leather scrolls, but around the second century CE the codices (plural for “codex”), or first bound books, began to be used in the early church. Parchment or vellum (calfskin) pages eventually replaced papyrus.

The concept