Reflection Of The New Testament

The New Testament (NT) as we know it is a grouping of 27 books that make up a bigger picture. The word “testament” comes from the Greek translation of the word diatheke which means “a disposition or a contract. Covenant or testament” These are called the NT to fulfill the Old Testament (OT) prophecy in Jeremiah 31 where God promised the new covenant to wipe out all of the sins of the Jewish nation. When we read the Gospels, this is the main reason why Jesus continually went back to the OT. It was His method to defend Himself, but also to prove to the Jews that He is who He says He is.

When we look at the structure of the NT, these books are primarily divided up into 3 distinct categories. These books are not necessarily in chronological order,

The biggest problem of the day for the Christians was that the persecution was rampant coming out of Rome. The first believers did not have to worry about the stories of who Christ was and what He did on the cross, because there were a large number of first hand witnesses that had seen it for themselves so this lent to the facts being true and real. The writings came out of necessity to preserve the story of the Gospel for the future of man. With this being said, almost all of the NT documents were created in the first

100 pointing out a “well-defined corpus of sacred books”. It was shortly after this when the bigger picture starts to come together. When we look at bigger gatherings of the scriptures, these started around A.D. 140 with Valentinus and Tertullian pulling together most of what we know today as the NT. While having never solidified anything permanent, it wasn’t until Marcion came around the same time when things took an abrupt turn to solidification. He brought the thought process that the God from the Old Testament (OT) wasn’t the same God that Jesus talked about and therefore the OT was null and void. He also took point to get all of Paul’s writings together. With these thoughts flourishing, the early leaders such as Tertullian and Valentinus rapidly accepted the four accounts as one Gospel, all of Paul’s letters and the few other letters written by other apostles as one indisputable collection which came to be known as the NT which we see