A "New" Testament

It took about 700 years to get the Old Testament written down. The New Testament, by contrast, was completed in about 100 years. Its books were not written in Hebrew but in Greek. They were not written in the stately classical Greek of Plato, but in an ordinary, market-place dialect, known as koine. At that, the Gospels represent a kind of "translation," for Jesus and his disciples spoke, not Greek, but Aramaic, and their spoken Aramaic had to be translated into written Greek. You can find a few Aramaic expressions in the Gospels, such as Jesus'cry from the cross, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani" ( Mark 15: 34), and his words to a girl, "Talitha cumi" ( ch. 5: 41).

Many people fail to realize that the earliest New Testament writings are not the Gospels, but Paul's letters. The first of these, I Thessalonians, may be as early as A.D. 50. Paul had no idea that he was writing "sacred Scripture"; his letters were "occasional pieces," jotted down to help churches to deal with specific problems. They were almost always circulated among the early Christian churches, and a collection of them gradually developed. They form a substantial part of our New Testament.

The rest of the New Testament writings (except for the Gospels, which will be discussed in Chapter 9) fall into two main classifications. Some of them were written during times of persecution, such as the letter to the Hebrews, the letter called First Peter, and (while you might not guess it from a quick glance) Revelation. In these writings we get a clear witness to the bravery of the early Christians as they stood firm against a hostile pagan world.

Other letters combat a heresy which was common around the end of the first century. (A "heresy" is not a belief that is totally false; it is a belief that overemphasizes part of the truth, and can thus pretend to be the truth itself.) The stock heresy in this period was the notion that while Jesus was God incarnate, he was not fully man, but only seemed to have a human body. Hence the belief was called "Docetism," from the Greek word meaning "to seem." It goes without saying that if this belief had won the day it would have destroyed Christian faith, since the whole point of Christian faith was precisely the claim that Docetism denied, namely, that in Jesus God fully indwelt a human life, and that this was a true human life, not a fake. This situation helps us to appreciate more fully the emphasis of the Fourth Gospel, on "the Word made flesh," and similar statements in the three letters of John. Second Peter and portions of the "Pastoral Epistles" (I and II Timothy and Titus) combat this and other false positions.

This does not mean that the New Testament books are merely negative, but only that we can understand their positive message more adequately if we also know what they were seeking to deny.