For Pip: A not so short history of the New Testament

Unlike the Old Testament (see my previous post), the books of the New were written over less than fifty years. The earliest was perhaps Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, written in 48 or 49 AD, and the last was Revelation, written around 95 AD.

The history of the New Testament raises two important questions. First, how and when did its 27 books come to be written? Second, how and when did they come together as our New Testament?

How and when were the New Testament books written?

The New Testament claims to tell us about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus—the most important set of events in world history—so the answer to this question is crucial. Happily, modern attempts to discredit the gospel story by spinning fabricated tales around the very early church pale into insignificance against evidence that the New Testament does more than claim to tell a story: it gives a reliable report of real happenings, however much some of these events offend twenty-first century sensibilities.

Peter Williams, head of Tyndale House,¹  recently published Can we trust the Gospels? (Wheaton IL: Crossway 2018), a book for ordinary readers setting out evidence that the gospels are trustworthy. A number of basic facts from the gospels and about the early church are confirmed by non-Christian Roman writers. What is more, the gospel writers know Palestinian geography and placenames intimately. People who are named have characteristically Palestinian Jewish names, and the writers know Palestinian Jewish religious and cultural practices in detail. If the gospels were later fabrications, this evidence wouldn’t be there—as there was no Wikipedia to provide the information.

The books of the New Testament fall into

1. The synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke—and The Acts, the sequel to the gospel of Luke
2. The gospel of John
3. The letters of Paul, James, Peter, John and Jude, and the Letter to the Hebrews
4. Revelation

Because of their centrality to the Christian message this post focusses on the gospels.

The synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke — and Acts

It is often said that Matthew, Mark and Luke were written 40 years or more after the events they recount, were based on traditions passed on by word of mouth within the early church, and are thus perhaps not very reliable. Quite apart from the fact that oral history is often reliable (see my previous post), it is inconceivable, comments Nick Page,²  that early Christians waited so long to write down eyewitness testimonies. At the latest, as an eyewitness died, someone would have written down that person’s testimony. But it seems unlikely that people waited that long.

Matthew, Mark and Luke are known as the ‘synoptic’ gospels because they share at least one source in common. The inference is that Mark was written first, followed by Matthew and Luke, which use Mark as a source: 97% of Mark is reflected in Matthew, 57% in Luke. But some 230 sayings of Jesus that are not recorded in Mark are shared between Matthew and Luke. They point to at least one other collection of sayings and parables.

In Mark 13:1-2, one of the disciples comments on the magnificence of the Temple. Jesus responds, ‘Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.’ He is prophesying the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD which followed the Roman siege and conquest of Jerusalem that he predicts in Luke 19:41–44 and more obliquely in Matthew 23:35-39. Skeptical scholars have argued that since we ‘know’ prediction of this kind to be impossible, the synoptic gospels must have been written after 70 AD. This doesn’t make sense: if this event of such appalling significance in Jewish history had taken place before the synoptic gospels were written, then it would be mentioned somehow in those gospels. It isn’t. But if we think such predictions from Jesus’ mouth are possible, then the synoptic gospels could have been written at any point after the resurrection.

Indeed, in an enormous piece of scholarship (a hard read), Richard Bauckham³  argues that the gospels are close to being direct eyewitness accounts of the events they depict. Bauckham’s arguments have evoked controversy among Bible scholars, but they often seem very plausible, at least to me, a layman.

Bauckham writes that where individuals are mentioned by name in the gospels, this is probably because they were still alive, associated with the Jerusalem church, known to the gospel-writer’s readers, and known to have been eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry. When the odd name turns up that is not mentioned (or hardly mentioned) anywhere else, this is probably because they have contributed information about the event with which they were associated.

A major source of Bauckham’s is Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, who wrote a large collection of Jesus’ sayings⁴ as he heard them from people who had accompanied Jesus. Papias was born around 60 AD and died a very old man in 163 AD. His location at a major crossroads⁵  in Asia Minor allowed him to interview various travellers who had known Jesus. Sadly his great work is known only in fragments quoted by Irenaeus of Lyon around 180 AD and by Eusebius of Caesarea in his History of the Church around 325 AD, but the fragments are informative. Bauckham notes that Jesus must have been accompanied by many disciples other than the Twelve, and one of these was John the Elder, a major source for Papias.

Papias says John the Elder told him that Mark’s gospel had come into existence as Mark accompanied Simon Peter, writing down events and sayings of Jesus in the order in which Peter recounted them. In Matthew’s gospel, on the other hand, says Papias, these events and sayings are placed in chronological (?) order. Matthew also drew on his own memories and those of others of the Twelve to flesh out his account and to record Jesus’ words in detail. Tradition says that Matthew the tax-collector, one of the Twelve, is the author of this gospel, and its orderliness, knowledge of events and the precise recounting of Jesus’ words (Matthew 5:3–7:27) all reflect the mind of an accountant, who would have been literate in Greek, the language of the New Testament.⁶

Luke’s gospel alone has a preface (Luke 1:1–4). Luke says that there are various accounts (‘gospels’) in circulation that are based on eyewitness testimony, and that he has carefully investigated this testimony (whether by talking to eyewitnesses or to people who knew eyewitnesses, he doesn’t tell us). Bauckham refers to an interesting fact: almost all Luke’s references to the Twelve are in material borrowed from Mark (in which he retains Mark’s focus on Simon Peter). In his own material Luke often refers to a wider group of itinerant disciples, sometimes as a group (a crowd in Luke 6:17 and 19:37; the seventy-two in 10:1-20; women from Galilee in 23:49; the 120 in Acts 1:15; ‘men who have been with us the whole time’ in Acts 1:21) and sometimes by name: Mary Magdalene and Joanna (Luke 8:1-3; 24:9), Susanna (8:1-3), James’ mother Mary (24:9), Cleopas (24:18), Mnason (Acts 21:16). This suggests that Luke supplemented the material from Mark with his own evidence based on individual testimonies, including those of the named women disciples, whom he introduces earlier than the other gospel writers do.

The opening words of The Acts read, In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. (1:1–2). So Acts is the sequel to Luke’s gospel. Acts is mainly a history of the spread of the gospel. Its major figures are first Peter, then Paul. Luke, a medical doctor, was not an eyewitness of the events of Jesus’ ministry, but it seems he travelled with Paul, at least after Paul’s split from Barnabas. The pronoun ‘we’ slips into the narrative (Acts 16:10) and presumably includes Luke himself, an inference supported when Paul mentions him in Colossians 4:14.

Luke doesn’t mention Paul’s trial, which took place sometime in the 60’s AD, nor does he mention in Acts the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. This implies that Acts was completed in the early 60’s at the latest. Luke’s gospel must have been written earlier. Indeed, I wonder whether Luke wrote his two-part work, apparently addressed to a ranking Roman official, because his friend Paul was sitting in prison, and Luke was supplying defence material for Paul’s upcoming trial.⁷

If Luke and Matthew both took material from Mark, then Luke and Matthew were perhaps written at much the same time, in the early 60’s or earlier. Mark must already have been available, dating it perhaps to the 50’s.

The gospel of John

The gospel of John is strikingly different from Mark, Matthew and Luke. Mark is a somewhat unordered collection of Simon Peter’s memories. Matthew and Luke are regular first-century biographies with an evangelical axe to grind. The gospel of John, on the other hand, is a literary masterpiece. It has the most stunning opening in the New Testament (John 1:1–5). Its In the beginning … looks backward to Genesis but it does so to take us forward into new birth (John 3:3). In Bauckham’s opinion John offers the tightest narrative of Jesus’ ministry, and other scholars comment on the simple beauty of John’s prose. The brilliant farewell discourses (John 13:31 onward) culminate in Jesus’ astounding prayer to his Father heralding the new world that his death and resurrection will bring about (John 17). John glorifies Jesus to a degree greater than the synoptic writers. There is a probable reason for this. The synoptic gospels were written at a time of persecution in Jerusalem when there was a need to protect whose eyewitnesses who were still alive and the church as a whole. John evidently wrote his gospel later, after 75 AD, when most eyewitnesses had died and there was no need to be so careful about the narrative of Jesus’ life.

The writer of John’s gospel was the person referred to as ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ (John 13:23, 19:25, 20:2, 21:7 and 21:20). John 21:24 tells us the author was an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry.⁸  He is also evidently the unnamed disciple of John the Baptist who follows Jesus along with Andrew (John 1:35–40), who was with Peter just before the denial (18:15-16) and who raced him to the empty tomb and ‘saw and believed’ (20:8). He was also perhaps the ‘man who saw’ the flow of blood and water from Jesus’ pierced side (19:35).

So who was ‘the disciple Jesus loved’? Confusingly there are two or three New Testament authors called John.⁹  Their writings are John’s gospel, John’s three letters, and Revelation. Church tradition has held that the author of all of them was John, son of Zebedee (John Z for short), one of the Twelve, but this has been debated since around 200 AD. Eusebius says that John’s gospel and John’s first letter were widely agreed to be by John Z. 1 John 1:1-2 certainly echoes the opening of John’s gospel and sounds as if it is by the same author. Eusebius also says there was a consensus that the second and third letters of John were written by some other John. They are different in style, and both begin ‘From the Elder…’, suggesting that they may have been written by John the Elder, an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry and later an associate of Papias.¹⁰  On the other hand, says Eusebius, there was no consensus as to the authorship of Revelation: all we know is that he is called John (Revelation 1:1-2).

When I was learning a little classical Greek in school my parents gave me a Greek New Testament. I recall being shocked by the Greek of Revelation. Even to my teenage eyes it seemed barbarous in comparison with the rest of the New Testament. Many scholars have felt that the Greek of this John is influenced by Aramaic or Hebrew. Others argue that it is within the normal spectrum of common Greek (see previous post) but further from the Athenian style of educated common Greek than other New Testament books. Either way it is different from the language of John’s gospel and John’s letters.

To summarise then, the paragraphs above infer three authors: (1) John Z, ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ (John’s gospel and 1 John); (2) John the Elder (2 & 3 John); and (3) John, writer of Revelation.

But there are opposing views about ‘the disciple Jesus loved’, with quite compelling evidence on both sides. View One says that he was indeed John Z. View Two says that he was John the Elder, i.e. John the Elder wrote John’s gospel and all three letters of John. Both views agree that John’s gospel was not written before 75-80 AD and that the writer was an old man. This is implied in the curious exchange in John 21:22–23.

The evidence for View One is that ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ was right in the middle of events in Jesus’ ministry and therefore seems to have been one of the Twelve (see the list of references above), and John Z is the obvious candidate.

The evidence for View Two, argued for afresh by Richard Bauckham, is more complicated. He accepts that the gospel’s author was an eyewitness, but points out that the author could be among the many disciples beyond the Twelve who witnessed Jesus’ ministry. Indeed, in John’s gospel the Twelve play a minor role, and those of them whom John refers to by name (because he knew them well) are—apart from Peter—named in Mark, Matthew and Luke only in lists of the Twelve. In other words, ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ moved in somewhat different circles from the Twelve. Some scholars think he lived in Jerusalem and did not travel with Jesus. Given the author’s determination not to name himself, Bauckham thinks the one mention of ‘the sons of Zebedee’ in John’s gospel (21:2) shows that John Z was not its author. The evidence that the author was John the Elder is thus circumstantial.

Not surprisingly, I don’t know what to do with the two views (for more discussion, see here). As far as we know, John Z was a fisherman. Did he somehow acquire the education to write such a glorious work as John’s gospel? On the other hand, ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ seems to have been in the thick of Jesus’ ministry, and this points to John Z. But the mystery does not affect the fact that John’s gospel is a breathtaking document.

The letters of Paul, James, Peter, John and Jude, and the Letter to the Hebrews

I have not read up on the historical background to the letters, but their genre is obvious. They are letters written by church leaders to churches in various locations¹¹  and to individuals.¹²

Paul’s letter to the Galatians is probably the earliest document in the New Testament, written after his visit in 48-49 AD and before the Jerusalem Council in 49. Paul’s other letters were written between 50 AD and his death in the mid 60s.

Revelation

An unidentified John probably wrote Revelation on the tiny island of Patmos around 95 AD, under the persecution of Christians by the Emperor Diocletian. Revelation belongs to the genre of Jewish apocalyptic literature that flourished from sometime after the return from Babylon (after 538 BC) to perhaps 100 AD.¹³ ‘Apocalyptic’ in this context does not mean ‘to do with the end times’. It means ‘revelatory’, using graphic imagery to lift the lid on what is going on under the surface of things, often expressing a political view. One reason Revelation nearly didn’t make it into the New Testament was its political stance against ‘Babylon’, a nickname for Rome. By the time the content of the New Testament was finally settled, Rome was no longer Christianity’s enemy but its protector.

How and when did the New Testament books become our New Testament?

Ironically, although the New Testament books were apparently all written in the period 48 to 95 AD, it took much longer for them to become the New Testament. Nick Page tells the story.

For 300 years no ‘New Testament’

For at least the first 300 years of Christianity there was no single volume called the ‘New Testament’. Instead, each church had a collection of codices (books handwritten on parchment), and the collections differed from one church to another. By ‘church’ here I mean a group of Christians meeting together in a town or city.

Serious contenders

Certain books had a special status in certain churches. They include a letter from Clement of Rome, letters from Ignatius of Antioch and putatively from Barnabas; The Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache.

1 Clement was written by Clement of Rome to the troubled church in Corinth during a time of persecution, probably 95–97 AD, and mentions that Peter and Paul both died during Nero’s persecution from 64 to 68 AD. It was included in some very early New Testaments.

Letters by Ignatius were written as he was being taken to Rome to be executed. The Letter of Barnabas contains no mention of its alleged author. It refers to the destruction of the Temple, so was written after 70 AD.

The Shepherd of Hermas contains a series of visions seen by Hermas, a former slave living in Rome, and apparently a church leader. The theme is the need for repentance, self-control and piety.

The Didache was a manual of do’s and don’t’s of the Christian life.

There are also a number of ‘extra’ gospels, but only the Gospel of the Hebrews was mentioned by the earliest Christian writers. Clement of Alexandria quotes from it around 180 AD. We only have fragments. Other ‘extra’ gospels, and there were many, tended to be written later and to be gnostic or otherwise heretical. Their writers’ ignorance of Palestine at the time of Jesus is often a give-away.

Gaining acceptance

From quite early there is evidence as to which Christian works enjoyed broad acceptance. ‘2 Clement’, a sermon probably from the early second century (and not by Clement of Rome), contains references to Matthew, Luke, Acts, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Philemon, 1 Timothy, 1 and 2 Peter, James and Hebrews, the ‘Gospel of the Egyptians’, some sayings of Jesus that are not in the gospels, and some unknown works. But Page comments that the two gospels are quoted more than twice as often as all other sources together. The first known list of the books of the New Testament as we have them today was by Origen, the first great Christian textual scholar, around 240 AD. But at the time this decided nothing. Eusebius’ monumental history of the Christian church, finished in 325 AD, gives no list of canonical accepted New Testament books, but he tells us which scholars accepted which books. Undisputed inclusions were the four gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, 1 John and 1 Peter, and tentatively Revelation. Disputed, but approved by some churches, were the letters 2 and 3 John, 2 Peter, James and Jude. Illegitimate or heretical were a number of books that have not made it into the New Testament. He doesn’t mention Hebrews, perhaps because he includes it with Paul’s letters. Cyril of Jerusalem (315–386) wrote a series of lectures, and one from around 350 AD lists all the New Testament books except Revelation. The next list that matches modern Bibles is found in a letter from Athanasius of Alexandria of 367 AD. But this didn’t clinch things. Didymus the Blind, Athanasius’ own appointee as head of the Catechetical School, put out a competing list that added Hermas, Barnabas’ letter, the Didache and 1 Clement but excluded 2 and 3 John and Philemon. Around 385 Gregory of Nanzianus wrote a list in verse as a mnemonic: it almost agreed with Athanasius but omitted Revelation

At last, the New Testament canon

The oldest single-volume Christian Bibles that we have date from around 350 AD. The most complete are the Codex Sinaiticus (discovered in St Catherine’s Coptic monastery on Mount Sinai in 1844; it had been written ca 325–ca 360; (it is on the web here), the Codex Vaticanus (kept in the Vatican Library, and perhaps as old as Sinaiticus) and the Codex Alexandrinus (from Alexandria, sometime a few decades either side of 400 AD). Sinaiticus includes Hermas and Barnabas; Alexandrinus includes 1 and 2 Clement. Nonetheless, the idea of a canon (an accepted list) was reinforced by one-volume Bibles, and an agreed canon did gradually emerge. Acceptance depended on certain criteria: Did the book follow the teachings of the church? Could it be traced back to the apostles? Was it accepted by the church at large? Clement of Rome, though, thought of the scriptures as ‘given through the Holy Spirit’ in a continual process in the life of the church. Finally, a synod in Rome in 382 agreed with Athanasius’ list from 367, and this was endorsed by synods under Augustine’s leadership in 393 (Hippo Regius), 397 and 419 (Carthage).

Just a thought

This rather messy history seems at odds with today’s evangelical view of the New Testament as an inspired work, complete in itself, through which God speaks to the reader. But if we accept that the various church leaders around the Mediterranean were inspired by the Holy Spirit over three centuries as they discerned which works were God-inspired, there is no problem. Many evangelicals also regard the New Testament as the foundation and handbook of their faith, and here we have something we can learn from the leaders of the early church. Their quest for the appropriate books to read in their services was guided by a strong desire to know what the disciples had heard from Jesus’ own mouth, what they had witnessed of his ministry, and what the apostles said about him in their letters. They wanted to get as close to the life of Jesus as they could. Their relationship with God and the teachings carefully passed down to them were the foundation of their faith. They worked out what they believed and enshrined it in the Nicene Creed, agreed on by the First Council of Nicaea in 325. So faith came before the gradual compilation of the New Testament. The New Testament attested to what the early Christians already believed.