When the last book of the New Testament was written, there was no New Testament yet. Then he will indulge in exactly what his name suggests, the story of the New Testament.
The Story of the New Testament by Edgar J
Goodspeed
The Letter to the Galatians
Where Paul first learned of this change in the faith of the Galatians is not certain, but it was very likely in Antioch in Syria, where he had returned from Corinth. It is dangerous because, if admitted, it will certainly bring with it the necessity of observing all the rest of the Jewish law, and will reduce the religious life of the Galatians to a dull observance of innumerable religious forms.
The First Letter to the Corinthians
Some of the Corinthians had a problem with Paul's teaching about the resurrection and probably raised a question about it in their letter to him. More than any other New Testament book, 1 Corinthians does this.
The Second Letter to the Corinthians
Paul's mind went back again and again to the situation and the letter he had written in such distress. He refers touchingly to the anguish and sorrow in which he wrote his last letter to them, and to his purpose in writing it.
The Letter to the Romans
More than one early Christian thinker found sympathy in the inability of the Jews to accept the gospel. But their rejection of the gospel and the consequent rejection of them by God, in his opinion, are not final.
The Letter to the Philippians
Paul had, of course, long ago reported to the Philippians the arrival of Epaphroditus and. Paul is able to tell the Philippians that his imprisonment has not hindered the progress of the preaching of the gospel in the West. The Philippians are naturally eager to know what Paul's prospects are for a speedy trial and acquittal.
Paul must have had occasion to write to the Philippians at least four times before Epaphroditus took this letter back to them.
The Letters to Philemon, to the Colossians, and to the Ephesians
It was probably through him that Paul heard that some of the Colossians had begun to think that a higher stage of Christian experience could be reached by worshiping certain angels and fellowshipping with them than by mere faith in Christ. Paul begins by mentioning the good report of the church in Colossae that has reached him, and expresses his deep interest in its members. He goes on to tell them about the ideal of spiritual development that he has for them, and in connection with it takes occasion to show them the pre-eminent place of Christ in relation to the church.
Wives, husbands, children, fathers, slaves, and masters all have their special way of serving, but everything must be done in the name of the Lord Jesus.
The Gospel According to Mark
But the message and the Greek garb of the Gospel are the work of Mark, however much he owes to the memory of Peter's sermons the facts he reports. After two or three withdrawals from Galilee in search of safety or leisure to plan his route, Jesus announced to his disciples his intention to go to Jerusalem at the spring festival of the Passover. Until the hour of his arrest, Jesus does not give up all hope of succeeding in Jerusalem and of winning the nation in his teaching about the presence of the Kingdom of God on earth.
Informal and unambitious as the account of Mark's Gospel, and slight as it was esteemed in the ancient church, compared with the richer works of Matthew and Luke, no more convincing or dramatic account of the sublime and heroic effort of Jesus to put to death the.
The Gospel According to Matthew
In the fall of Jerusalem the evangelist saw the punishment of the Jewish nation for its rejection of the Messiah, and in this fact the proof that the gospel was intended for all nations. This book was to be a life of the Messiah, which was to articulate the gospel with the Jewish scriptures and legitimize the Christian movement. In this as in other respects, the book's success was early and lasting.
As a life of the Messiah, it swept aside all the partial documents that its author used as his sources.
The Gospel According to Luke
At the same time he declares that Jesus is in a special and immediate sense the child of the Holy Spirit. On reaching the city, he enters it in a messianic state amidst the acclaim of the people. He enters the temple and purges it of the merchants who use the courts for their trade.
He is less interested in the fate of the Jewish nation than the universal elements in the work of Jesus.
The Acts of the Apostles
Luke himself had witnessed the extension of the movement from Asia Minor to Macedonia and Achaea, and had finally followed its progress to Rome itself. These take place in the most varied scenes: Temples, marketplaces, deserts, islands, synagogues, courts of kings and governors, the streets of those splendid flourishing cities of the Greco-Roman world, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Athens, Rome. But we must admit that Luke has told his story to its climax, because with the churches once established in Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth and Rome, the expansion of the gospel to the rest of the Roman world about the Mediterranean was inevitable .
With such a sense of historical values, Luke wrote his sketch of the mission to the Gentiles.
The Revelation of John
For it inexorably demanded of them a worship of the emperor which Christians must refuse to grant. It was customary to attest legal documents -- contracts, wills, leases, and the like -- with an oath at the fortune of the emperor. John in Patmos writes to the neighboring churches as their brother, who shares with them the pain of the coming persecution.
Finally, the seventh trumpet sounds, proclaiming the triumph of the Kingdom of God, to which the prophet believes all misery and misery.
The Epistle to the Hebrews
It may have been the collection of temple taxes from the Jews for the benefit of Jupiter Capitoline and accidentally mistaking the Christians for the latter. The Christian scholar who undertook to deal with this situation took as his subject the complete and final character of the revelation in Christ. The language of Hebrews shows more elegance and sophistication than the language of any other book of the New Testament.
It is worth noting that the Judaism the writer has in mind is always that of the tabernacle in the wilderness, never that of the Temple in Jerusalem.
The First Epistle of Peter
Thereby they can share in Christ's suffering, and so also in his coming glory. To be punished for committing a crime carries with it shame, but to endure punishment for being a Christian brings glory to God. Their elders must do their work in a noble and high-minded way, as true shepherds of the flock of God under the chief shepherd Christ.
Who he was cannot be said; but in later times the Church in Rome came to regard itself as the heir and spokesman of Peter, and if one of the purposes of this epistle is to correct the seditious attitude toward the Empire which marked the Revelation, and if the publication of Paul's letters in collected form had recently drawn universal attention to him as an apostolic writer, we can understand how the Roman Church might have felt justified in claiming the great name of Peter, her martyr apostle, as the one whose authority was truly speaks in this letter to the Christian groups likely to be affected by the Revelation.
The Epistle of James
The greeting itself in the first verse alludes to the letter: "Jacob, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve generations which are of the dispersion, greeting." How would they go about handing it over to the "twelve tribes of the dispersion," that is, the Jews scattered throughout the Greco-Roman world from Babylon to Spain. 34; an epistle" in the literary sense of the word, is highly unlikely given its content, which refers to no single topic or situation.
It can surely be no cause for surprise or disbelief that we have among the twenty-seven books of the New Testament a representative of the commonest type of Christian literature, the sermon.
The Letters of John
Gaius is probably the most influential of the elder's friends and supporters in his own community, while Diotrephes is the leader of the party hostile to the elder. At the same time, the Elder writes another short letter, our Second John, to the church to which Gaius belongs, in which he exhorts its members to love one another and live harmoniously together, and warns them against the deceivers who teach that Christ has not come in not. the flesh. The Elder declares that he is of God and that all who truly know God will obey his solemn warning against these spirits of the antichrist.
But to John the letters have always been ascribed, and we may think of the elder John as sending them out from Ephesus, one to Gaius, one to the church to which he belonged, and one to that and other churches, in full assurance that, that the Christian experience and faith in Jesus as the Christ would save them from the errors of Docetism.
The Gospel According to John
The cleansing of the temple is placed at the beginning instead of at the end of his work. This idea of the life to be derived from Jesus is prominent throughout the Gospel. This made it all the easier for the author of the new Gospel to apply it to Jesus, but in this interpretation of Jesus as the divine.
These details were important in correcting the docetic idea that the divine spirit left Jesus on the cross.
The Letters to Timothy and to Titus
Only widows who have reached middle age and have no relatives to care for them become the Church's permanent retirees. It was the advent of these new schools of thought that most perplexed Christian leaders around the end of the first century. Christian leaders felt more secure in following them in their approval of the Jewish scriptures than in their partial rejection of them, and most certainly added the Old Testament to their new authorities.
Authorities were needed, and with Jesus, Paul, and the Old Testament literature, that need was met.
The Epistle of Jude and the Second Epistle of Peter
In the early part of the second century, various books began to be written in Christian circles about the apostle Peter, or even in his name, until an entire New Testament bearing his name could have been compiled. It comes out of a time when Christians seriously doubted the second coming of Jesus. He prefers to meet the skepticism of his time about the second coming with a firm insistence on the old doctrine.
He repeats the condemnation that Judas hurled at the Gnostic libertines of his day, but it is now directed against those who give up the expectation of the second coming.
The Making of the New Testament
The New Testament, as it soon came to be called, did not supplant the Jewish scriptures in the church's esteem, as Marcion had intended with his collection. Testaments, but little above it, for the Old Testament now had to be interpreted in the light of the New. This was somewhat less felt than it would be now because the books of the New Testament were often not all included in a single manuscript.
The value of the New Testament to the Christian church has, of course, been immeasurable.
