The Origin of the Bible - Flipbook - Page 15
THE BIBLE
5
THE T WO TESTA MENTS ________________________________
The word “testament” in the designations “Old Testament” and
“New Testament,” given to the two divisions of the Bible, goes
back through Latin testamentum to Greek diatheke, which in most
of its occurrences in the Greek Bible means “covenant” rather than
“testament.” In Jeremiah 31:31, a new covenant is foretold that
will supersede that which God made with Israel in the wilderness
(cf. Exod. 24:7ff.). “By calling this covenant ‘new,’ he has made the
first one obsolete” (Heb. 8:13, NIV). The New Testament writers
see the fulfillment of the prophecy of the new covenant in the new
order inaugurated by the work of Christ; his own words of institution (1 Cor. 11:25) give the authority for this interpretation.
The Old Testament books, then, are so called because of their
close association with the history of the “old covenant”; the New
Testament books are so called because they are the foundation
documents of the “new covenant.” An approach to our common
use of the term “Old Testament” appears in 2 Corinthians 3:14,
“when the old covenant is read,” although Paul probably means
the law, the basis of the old covenant, rather than the whole volume of Hebrew Scripture. The terms “Old Testament” and “New
Testament” for the two collections of books came into general
Christian use in the later part of the second century; Tertullian
rendered diatheke into Latin by instrumentum (a legal document)
and also by testamentum; it was the latter word that survived,
unfortunately, since the two parts of the Bible are not “testaments” in the ordinary sense of the term.
The Old Testament
In the Hebrew Bible the books are arranged in three divisions:
the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Law comprises the
Pentateuch, the five “books of Moses.” The Prophets fall into two
subdivisions: the “Former Prophets,” comprising Joshua, Judges,