New Testament

The New Testament (Ancient Greek: Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη, transl. Hē Kainḕ Diathḗkē; Latin: Novum Testamentum) is the second part of the Christian biblical canon, the first being the Old Testament. The New Testament discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events in first-century Christianity. Christians regard both the Old and New Testaments together as sacred scripture. The New Testament is a collection of Christian texts originally written in the Koine Greek language, at different times by various different authors. While the Old Testament canon varies somewhat between different Christian denominations, the 27-book canon of the New Testament has been almost universally recognized within Christianity since at least Late Antiquity. In almost all Christian traditions today, the New Testament consists of 27 books: the four canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the Acts of the Apostles, the fourteen epistles of Paul, the seven catholic epistles, and the Book of Revelation. The earliest known complete list of the 27 books of the New Testament is found in a letter written by Athanasius, a 4th-century bishop of Alexandria, dated to 367 AD. The 27-book New Testament was first formally canonized during the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) in North Africa. Pope Innocent I ratified the same canon in 405, but it is probable that a Council in Rome in 382 under pope Damasus gave the same list first. These councils also provided the canon of the Old Testament, which included the apocryphal books. There is no scholarly consensus on the date of composition of the latest New Testament texts. Conservative scholars John A. T. Robinson, Dan Wallace, and William F. Albright dated all the books of the New Testament before 70 AD. But most scholars date some New Testament texts much later than this. For example, Richard Pervo dates Luke-Acts to c. AD 115, and David Trobisch places Acts in the mid- to late second century, contemporaneous with the publication of the first New Testament canon. The use of the phrase New Testament (Koine Greek: Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη, Hē Kainḕ Diathḗkē) to describe a collection of first and second-century Christian Greek scriptures can be traced back to Tertullian in his work Against Praxeas. Irenaeus uses the phrase 'New Testament' several times, but does not use it in reference to any written text. In Against Marcion, written c. 208 AD, Tertullian writes of: And Tertullian continues later in the book, writing: By the 4th century, the existence—even if not the exact contents—of both an Old and New Testament had been established. Lactantius, a 3rd–4th century Christian author wrote in his early-4th-century Latin Institutiones Divinae (Divine Institutes): Each of the four gospels in the New Testament narrates the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The word 'gospel' derives from the Old English gōd-spell (rarely godspel), meaning 'good news' or 'glad tidings'. The gospel was considered the 'good news' of the coming Kingdom of Messiah, and the redemption through the life and death of Jesus, the central Christian message. Gospel is a calque (word-for-word translation) of the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, euangelion (eu- 'good', -angelion 'message').