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Introduction to the New Testament
PART I: What is the New Testament?
1. New Testament Writings
There are 27 writings in the NT. What holds the whole collection together? They are not 27 chapters in a single book. The most general answer you could give would be to speak of a common belief shared by all the writers: Jesus of Nazareth represents a decisive turning point in God’s relationship to humanity. Or as Acts 4:12 says: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven, given to human beings by which we must be saved.”
This common belief in Jesus Christ is expressed in many different ways in the NT. In this brief introduction we’ll try to look at how each way of expressing the message speaks to the situation of Christians the author is writing for. The NT gives us a window into the emergence of Christianity.
The 27 books of the NT include:
· 4 Gospels: Mark, Matthew, Luke, John
· The Acts of the Apostles
· 13 Letters of St. Paul
· 7 “Catholic” letters of John, Peter, James, Jude
· The Letter to the Hebrews
· The Book of Revelation or “Apocalypse”
As in the OT, we have here a “library” of diverse styles & purposes:
· The clear simplicity of the Synoptics (Mt, Mk & Lk);
· The mystical depth of John;
· The ardent personal witness of Paul;
· The excitement of a growing church in Acts;
· The practicality of apostles’ advice given in letters;
· The quiet contemplation of Christ our Priest in Hebrews;
· The serenity of a people faithful in persecution in Revelation.
2. The Gospels
Like the books of the OT, the NT writings are equally concerned with facts & faith. The Gospels are not cold, impartial history (if such exists), but the announcement of salvation through Jesus. The writers make no bones about stressing the importance of Jesus & they are more concerned about the meaning of his life than a tape-recorded account. They want to inform us, but they are more concerned to inspire us. They want to shout out their own faith & arouse it in us. It doesn’t really matter to them whether “scientific” history, archaeology or whatever gives us evidence that Jesus actually had a home in Nazareth or was crucified on a hill outside the walls of Jerusalem or left the imprint of his body on a shroud. Faith, in the end, does not rest on any “proofs.” The NT writers let faith colour all their narratives. Their concern is to show the working of God in history.
2.1 Background of the word “Gospel”
It occurs in the OT & is found in Deutero-Isaiah. Israel is in exile, far from home, temple & land. The gospel is the good news that God is going to take pity on them & lead them home:
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings Good News, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, your God reigns (Is 52:7)
First found in the NT in the writings of Paul. It defines the oral content of his message:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first & also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, the one who is righteous by faith, shall live (Rom 1:16-17).
2.2 The Four Written Gospels
These are the best sources for knowing about Jesus’ life. Paul tells us how Jesus instituted the Eucharist & about his Resurrection (1 Cor 11:23; 15:3-5), but little else. Other literature of the time (Josephus, the Jewish historian & Tacitus the Roman historian) say very little about Jesus. The Gospels have been treasured from the start of Christianity. But they are its product, not its origin. They come from its second or third generation. A whole generation or more of Christians lived without them. The earliest NT writings are the letters of Paul, especially 1 Thess, Galatians, 1 & 2 Cor, Philippians, Philemon & Romans. Other gospels (termed apocryphal gospels), some of which survive, were also written. But these were never accepted by Christians as a whole. They may edify & even entertain us, but they don’t give a true picture of the Christian faith.
2.3 The Communities Behind the Gospels
Behind our gospels are communities of believers who lived in various cities of the ancient Greek world & the Roman Empire. In their eagerness to build up & understand their faith, they appealed to the life & teaching of Jesus. The information about Jesus which they used over the years in their worship, in their teaching of converts, in controversies with opponents, provided the basic material for the written gospels. This is why we say the gospels reflect the concerns of the communities which produced them.
3. Stages of NT Formation & Transmission
The original Gospel heralded by Jesus was a spoken word. Jesus was a voice, not a writer; he was a preacher, not a scribe. He used direct speech & deeds of power (what we call miracles) to communicate his message. In the apostolic proclamation there is a dramatic shift from Jesus the preacher to Jesus the preached, concentrating on what pertained to Jesus’ proclamation about God.
The oldest Christian preaching about Jesus concerned his death & resurrection, & the earliest writings in the NT (the letters of Paul) focused on the same central theme. Given that the events surrounding Jesus’ death were the central focus of the whole of the whole public ministry, the early preachers were bound to have first formed a standardised sequence of the last days of Jesus for their hearers.
Their claims about the identity & mission of Jesus rested, above all, on an interpretation of what happened during his last days. Since their first listeners were all Jews, this interpretation also needed to show how these events corresponded with scriptural prophecy. This sequence can be seen in the formula Paul uses in 1 Cor 15:3-4:
· Jesus’ identity asserted: “Christ”
· His mission interpreted: “died for our sins…was raised on the third day”
· Consistent with prophecy: “in accordance with the scriptures.”
The evangelists developed the proclamation of Jesus’ death & resurrection by prefixing the ministry material to the passion accounts.
To help us to understand the development of the Gospels, the Church has given us a number of helpful guides:
Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum [1965]) nn.18-19
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992; revised 1997) n.126
These set out an account of the stages of formation of the gospels. A fuller account of the process is to be found in the documents of the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC) on The Historical Truth of the Gospels, entitled Sancta Mater Ecclesia (1964) & in The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (L’interprétation de la Bible dans l’Église (1993). A brief description of the process is given in The Gift of Scripture (2005) n.43 by the Bishops Conferences of England & Wales & Scotland.
The substance of The Historical Truth of the Gospels (1964) was incorporated into Vatican II’s Dei Verbum (1965). The document tells us “To judge properly concerning the reliability of what is transmitted in the Gospels, the interpreter should pay diligent attention to the three stages of tradition by which the doctrine & the life of Jesus have come down to us” (VI,2).
The 3 stages of tradition are:
Stage 1: The public ministry of Jesus of Nazareth: What Jesus did & said during the public ministry that was witnessed by his chosen followers.
Stage 2: The apostolic preaching about Jesus: What the apostles preached about Jesus in the light of his resurrection from the dead.
Stage 3: The evangelists’ written Gospels: What the “sacred authors” committed to writing, “taken from the many things handed down.”
Stage 1: The public ministry of Jesus of Nazareth (c. 30-33 AD)
The PBC in The Historical Truth of the Gospels (1964) limits the first stage of the tradition to the public ministry, excluding from consideration Jesus’ infancy & early years. When the PBC refers to “the beg inning” it specifies the moment Jesus “joined to himself chosen disciples” (VII). Even considering the public ministry, the PBC makes no claim that what we have in the Gospels is an exact record of that time.
We have no resources available to us that were written at the time of Jesus’ ministry: the only words written about Jesus during his lifetime were those ordered to be written by Pontius Pilate. The public ministry of Jesus lasted 2-3 years, & traditionally we have referred to the major part of his lifetime as the hidden years. That acknowledgement warns us how much we do not know about Jesus.
Jesus lived as a Galilean Jew in the first third of the 1st cent., a relatively peaceful period under the Roman occupation. He spent most of his life as a minor artisan, someone who worked with his hands, living in the small hill village of Nazareth. These years are not only unknown to us but also unknowable.
For the last three years of his life, however, much of what Jesus did & said was available to the public, especially to his disciples who travelled with him around Galilee, Judea & elsewhere. What Jesus did & said, including the ways he chose to express himself, would help his followers to be witnesses of his public life & teaching. Many of the details of ordinary existence – about what Jesus looked like, how he remembered his own upbringing etc. – are not included as they would normally be in a biography.
Stage 2: The apostolic preaching about Jesus (c.33-70 AD)
The second stage of the tradition refers to what the apostles & disciples preached about Jesus after the first Easter. As the PBC says, the content of their proclamation was “above all the death & resurrection of the Lord, as they bore witness to Jesus” (VII). Examples of this can be seen in 1 Cor 15:3-4; Acts 2:23-32; 3:14-15; 10:39-40. The earliest preached Gospel began where our written Gospels finish – which is why we can say that the written Gospels developed backwards. As a result of their Easter experience & their enlightenment in the Spirit, the early preachers came to a fuller understanding of who Jesus was (cf. Jn 2:22). Their new experiences enabled them to re-interpret the past & bring it up to date.
The early preachers then turned their attention to the deeds & words of Jesus, & thus collections of sayings, parables, & miracles grew. This attention to the ministry of Jesus would have been particularly useful for new converts who wanted to know about the earthly life & teaching of the one they professed as Lord. More importantly, attention to the ministry of Jesus would save the event of death & resurrection from evaporating into mythology.
The death & resurrection are inseparably attached to Jesus, the one who came from Nazareth, called named disciples, preached the kingdom of God in Galilee & Judea, healed the sick & disabled, told parables, challenged people to think & act differently. Rooting the significance of Jesus in the particular world of time & place was essential to a historical proclamation.
Although the testimony of the preachers was suffused with faith in Jesus as Lord, as the PBC says: “their faith rested on the things Jesus did & taught” (VIII). The apostolic preachers who followed Jesus during his public ministry were in a unique position to witness to the fundamental continuity between Jesus of Nazareth & Jesus the risen Lord.
The preachers did not just chronicle what Jesus did & said, but “interpreted his words & deeds according to the needs of their listeners,” using “catecheses, stories, testimonia, hymns, doxologies, prayers, & other literary forms of this sort” (VIII). Already, in this pre-literary stage, oral tradition was recasting stories about Jesus according to various needs, for by this time the Gospel was being preached in different languages & in different contexts (e.g. Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, Rome).
Stage 3: The evangelists’ written Gospels (c.70-100 AD)
The stories & sayings about Jesus’ passion & ministry that circulated in Stage 2, which were already modified in the light of an Easter faith, provided the evangelists’ source material. Sections of that tradition, such as an outline passion narrative & brief collections of material relating to different subjects, were probably already in writing before the evangelists composed their own accounts. The PBC stated that the evangelists wrote, “for the benefit of the Churches, with a method suited to the peculiar purpose which each one set for himself. From the many things handed down, they selected some things, reduced others to a synthesis, (still) others they explicated as they kept in mind the situation of the Churches” (IX).
The PBC is silent about the identity of the evangelists & makes no claims that any of them was an apostle-eyewitness. Given the PBC’s statement that the evangelists’ source material was handed down from Stage 2, Joseph Fitmyer comments on the text: “This means, then, that none of the evangelists was an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry. They heard about Jesus & his ministry from others who were “eyewitnesses” & who had become ‘ministers of the word’ (Lk 1:2)” (Christological Catechism, p.25).
Raymond Brown makes a similar point: “The wide recognition that the evangelists were not eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry is important for understanding the differences in the Gospels. In the older approach wherein eyewitness testimony was directly involved, it was very difficult to explain differences in the Gospels… The evangelists, who were not eyewitnesses, had a task that the preachers of Stage Two never had, namely, to shape a sequential narrative from Jesus’ baptism to his resurrection” (Reading the Gospels with the Church, pp.16,17). Mt & Lk add the infancy narratives. They are a later development prefixed to the main body of the Gospel material, with the same message: Jesus is the Son of God. The birth of Jesus is now seen in the same salvific light as his death & resurrection.