book of the early Christian Church and out of which they claimed to prove the birth, death, and resurrection of our Lord.
At the time of the Continental Reformation Luther and the other reformers rejected the books of the Old Testament which were found only in Greek, and not in Hebrew, and which still form part of the Bible of the Church of Rome and the Eastern Churches. The English Church, as often, took a middle position. Removing these books from their usual order, it placed them together in a group between the Old and the New Testament and labelled them the Apocrypha, declaring that they were to be read for example of life and instruction of manners, but not for the establishment of any doctrine. Parts of them are among the most beautiful and helpful passages in the whole Bible and will repay a careful reading.
The earliest Christian writings, so far as we know, were testimonia, or collections of Old Testament texts supposedly predicting the events in our Lord's life, which were used in controversy with the Jews. Next come collections of our Lord's sayings. Both of these, as well as the forms into which oral preaching had become stereotyped, were made use of later when men began to draw up accounts of the good news that salvation had come to the world through Jesus Christ—the writings which we call Gospels. The earliest of these is the Gospel according to St. Mark, written by him in Greek about the year 65 in Rome for the use of the Church there and, according to an early tradition, based on the reminiscences of St. Peter. St. Mark aims chiefly to give an outline of the major events of our Lord's ministry; to prove that He was the Son of God, and to show why, nevertheless, it was necessary for Him to be put to death; and to encourage Christians by His example to endure the sufferings to which they were subjected.
Another Gospel was written for a Church in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, possibly Antioch, about the year 80, based chiefly on the Gospel according to St. Mark and a lost collection of sayings of our Lord which scholars call Q (from the German Quelle, “source”), with some additional material of its own. This is known as the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and was written to prove that Jesus was the promised Messiah as foretold by Scripture.
St. Luke, the Gentile companion of St. Paul, wrote a Gospel about the year 85 for some Gentile Church, based on St. Mark and Q, with additional material of his own. His work shows particular interest in the Holy Spirit, in prayer, in the poor, in women, and in works of mercy. About the year 100 another Gospel was written, possibly for the Church in Ephesus, called the Gospel according to St. John, which was composed around seven great miracles, or signs, to show that Jesus was the Christ, the heavenly Son of God, and that those who thus believe might have life through His Name. Although the most spiritual in its interpretation of the Person and meaning of Christ, it is not the most historical as to the actual events of His life, and the speeches there attributed to Christ are almost invariably the composition of the unknown author himself. These four Gospels were the first to be accepted by Christians as inspired sacred writings equal in authority to the Hebrew Scriptures, and they form the first part of our New Testament.
The next part is an account of the activities of two of the chief followers of our Lord, St. Peter and St. Paul, showing how Christianity spread from Jerusalem to Rome, or in other words, how it became a universal as opposed to a local religion. It was written by St. Luke about the year 95 as a continuation of the Gospel composed by him and is called the Acts of the Apostles.
Long before the Gospels were written, however, apostles, absent from their Churches, sent them letters of encouragement and advice which were treasured in their archives and copies of which were sent to other Churches. The earliest and best known collection of these is the Epistles of St. Paul, which form the next section of the New Testament, although some of the fourteen letters included therein are now known not to be his work. Most of them were written to meet some particular need in the local Church, and are not to be taken as complete statements of either Christian doctrine or practice at that time, or as St. Paul's entire views on the subjects mentioned. The two Epistles addressed to St. Timothy and the one to St. Titus are commonly known as the Pastoral Epistles, and are in all probability the work of a Pauline disciple. The Epistle to the Hebrews is the work of an unknown teacher, worried about the erroneous doctrines his pupils were absorbing in his absence, who sent them this letter to confirm them in the Faith.
The next group of writings is the seven Catholic Epistles, so called because supposed to be addressed to the Church as a whole, although this is only partly true. The last book of the New Testament is the Revelation of St. John the Divine, modeled on similar Jewish apocalypses. It was written during the persecution under Domitian, about 96, to encourage Christians to remain true to the Faith and to refuse to join in the worship of the Roman Emperor, by showing them under well-known symbols the blessed reward of the saints and martyrs in heaven and the destruction and future punishment of Rome.
Although the above outline of dates is fairly conventional, it should be pointed out that there are scholars who hold other dates, and even some who believe that all of the New Testament was written before the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
The latest book of the New Testament to be composed, the so called Second Epistle of St. Peter, was written about 150, but it was not until the second half of the fourth century that the canon of the New Testament, that is, the list of writings which were to be esteemed sacred and inspired alongside of the ancient Jewish Scriptures, was finally decided upon as we now have it. The Church was in existence, then, for some three hundred years before it finally made a definite decision as to just what books were to comprise its Bible. Long before this time a large part of its members could no longer understand Greek. Consequently, translations were made in the third century into languages which they could comprehend: Syriac for the Eastern Churches, Coptic for the Egyptian, and Latin for the Western. This last was the common Bible in the West, particularly in the translation made by St. Jerome and known as the Vulgate, down to the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, when various translations into the common vernacular tongues were made. Of these Luther's translation into German is the most famous.
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