Back to Essays on History Before Faith
In giving us the New Testament, ancient Christians were making two major claims: one theological and the other historical. It is important that we distinguish the two.
To distinguish these claims, open any nearby Christian Bible to its table of contents. That some of its contents are labeled “New Testament” is an implicit theological claim. (Such contents will not, of course, be present in a Jewish Bible.) The inclusion of 27 texts having the heading “New Testament” is a claim that these texts belong with the Jewish texts (labeled “Old Testament”) that came before them, and that God was involved in the production of both. So much for the major theological claim.
As for the major historical claim, the titles, depending on their length, of the individuals books name an author for each. For example, it’s likely we will see the short title “1 Corinthians” in the table of contents, but when we turn to that text we will see something like “The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians.” There are a few exceptions to this – such as Luke not being explicitly named as the author of the Acts of the Apostles – but even in the case of these exceptions, it was understood by various means who the author was. Thus the major historical claim inherent in the production of the New Testament was that the author of each of the 27 books was known, and that it amounted to eight men: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter, and Jude. These eight men were all contemporaries of Jesus and named as apostles or else co-workers with them. Each book’s full title includes one of their names, except for the aforementioned exceptions.
(As for the exceptions, there is really only one when it comes to the formation of the New Testament. That is the Acts of the Apostles. Nevertheless, its opening lines clearly indicate that it is the second volume of a two-volume work that began with the Gospel According to Luke. Therefore, the known existence of Luke-Acts meant that everyone knew the author of Acts even though his name wasn’t in the title. It also meant that when the New Testament was declared to be in final form all over the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries, no anonymous books were included. The only other exception worth mentioning involves modern Bibles which increasingly omit Paul from the title of Hebrews. This phenomenon merely serves to call attention to modernity’s departure from the ancient verdict on New Testament authorship – which is the central theme of this section of the library.)
All entries in this section (Wing 2, Section 2a) of The Online Library of 21st Christianity for Men and Their Families are focused on the historical nature of the New Testament – not its theological nature. Of course, I believe that the New Testament has a theological dimension, but I also believe that it is based on, and derived from, its historical dimension. Therefore, this section of the library (titled “History Before Faith”) avoids theology in order to grasp the history.
Those involved – and there were many, many people involved – in forming the New Testament. They changed nothing about the 27 texts that qualified for inclusion; they only gave each text a title and the total collection a title. And the primary purpose of each title was to indicate its source – that is, its author. As I said above, the name given to the collection was a theological claim – that God was involved in the production of these texts in a unique way and that these text were of a similar nature to the Hebrew Scriptures that had preceded them. But for our purposes in this section of the library, all “New Testament” is to us is a name that distinguishes these 27 texts from all others.
What really concerns us is the identity of the authors of the texts. These individual identities are not theological claims. These 27 texts were written by eight men about a man. Those who formed and gave us the New Testament are simply telling us where they got those 27 texts they’re handing us. The authors handed them over; ancient Christian congregations handed them down individually until they came together into this collection. Those are the kind of simple facts that make for history.
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