The Origin of the Bible - Flipbook - Page 19
THE BIBLE
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flesh, and who came to know and proclaim the significance of
his coming more fully, by the power of his Spirit, after his resurrection from the dead.
The New Testament has been accepted by the great majority of
Christians, for the past sixteen hundred years, as comprising twentyseven books. These twenty-seven fall naturally into four divisions:
(1) the four Gospels, (2) the Acts of the Apostles, (3) twenty-one
letters written by apostles and “apostolic men,” and (4) Revelation.
This order is not only logical, but roughly chronological so far as
the subject matter of the documents is concerned; it does not correspond, however, to the order in which they were written.
The first New Testament documents to be written were the earlier epistles of Paul. These (together, possibly, with the Epistle of
James) were written between a.d. 48 and 60, before even the earliest of the Gospels was written. The four Gospels belong to the
decades between 60 and 100, and it is to these decades too that all
(or nearly all) the other New Testament writings are to be assigned.
Whereas the writing of the Old Testament books was spread over
a period of a thousand years or more, the New Testament books
were written within a century.
The New Testament writings were not gathered together in the
form that we know immediately after they were penned. At first
the individual Gospels had a local and independent existence in
the constituencies for which they were originally composed. By
the beginning of the second century, however, they were brought
together and began to circulate as a fourfold record. When this
happened, Acts was detached from Luke, with which it had formed
one work in two volumes, and embarked on a separate but not
unimportant career of its own.
Paul’s letters were preserved at first by the communities or
individuals to whom they were sent. But by the end of the first
century there is evidence to suggest that his surviving corre
spondence began to be collected into a Pauline corpus, which