The New Testament was written much faster than the Old. Its twenty-seven books were all composed within about seventy years of the death of Jesus, most of them probably within forty or fifty. They were written in Greek, the common language of the Roman East, by a small number of authors, mostly Jewish followers of Jesus. This article looks at how they were written and how they first circulated.

Before the writing

Jesus himself wrote no books. His teaching was spoken, in Aramaic and perhaps sometimes in Hebrew or Greek, and remembered by his followers. For the first two decades or so after his death and resurrection, around 30 or 33 CE, the message about him spread mainly by word of mouth: in preaching, in teaching new believers, and in worship.

The New Testament itself shows this oral stage. Paul speaks of passing on what he had received, using the technical language of tradition: “For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received” (1 Corinthians 15:3). He then summarises a short creed about Christ’s death, burial, resurrection and appearances, which most scholars think he received within a few years of the events. Similar formulas appear in 1 Corinthians 11:23–25 (the Lord’s Supper) and Philippians 2:6–11 (perhaps an early hymn).

Richard Bauckham, in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, argues that the Gospel traditions remained closely connected to named eyewitnesses who were still alive and known in the churches. Other scholars give more weight to the role of the community in shaping the traditions. Either way, the oral stage was short by ancient standards, and it overlapped with the lifetimes of people who had known Jesus.

Paul’s letters: the earliest writings

The oldest books of the New Testament are almost certainly the letters of Paul. His first letter to the Thessalonians is usually dated to around 50 CE; Galatians may be earlier or slightly later; 1 and 2 Corinthians and Romans date to the mid-50s. They were written to particular churches, about particular problems, and many of them say so.

Ancient letters were usually not written by the sender’s own hand. They were dictated to a secretary, or amanuensis. Paul’s letters show this clearly.

  • At the end of Romans, the secretary adds his own greeting: “I, Tertius, who write the letter, greet you in the Lord” (Romans 16:22).
  • Several letters end with Paul taking the pen himself: “This greeting is by me, Paul, with my own hand” (1 Corinthians 16:21; see also Colossians 4:18; 2 Thessalonians 3:17). This was a mark of authenticity.
  • In Galatians, Paul writes, “See with what large letters I write to you with my own hand” (Galatians 6:11).
  • 1 Peter says that it was written “through Silvanus” (1 Peter 5:12), who may have been the secretary, the carrier, or both.

E. Randolph Richards, in his study of letter-writing in the first century, shows that secretaries could work in different ways: taking down dictation word for word, sometimes in shorthand; editing a draft; or composing from the author’s instructions. This helps explain small differences in style between letters bearing the same author’s name, and reminds us that letter-writing was often a team effort.

Paul’s letters also name co-senders: Sosthenes, Timothy, Silvanus. And they were carried by trusted messengers who could explain them. Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, was probably the carrier of Romans (Romans 16:1–2); Tychicus carried Colossians and Ephesians (Colossians 4:7–8; Ephesians 6:21–22).

Read aloud and shared

Letters were written to be read aloud to the gathered church. “I solemnly command you by the Lord that this letter be read to all the holy brothers,” Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:27. And they were meant to be shared: “When this letter has been read among you, cause it to be read also in the assembly of the Laodiceans; and that you also read the letter from Laodicea” (Colossians 4:16).

This sharing required copying. A church that wanted to keep a letter it had passed on, or to read one sent to another church, needed a copy. Before the end of the first century, Paul’s letters were already being collected and read as more than occasional correspondence: 2 Peter 3:15–16 speaks of “all of his letters” and puts them alongside “the other Scriptures.” Harry Gamble, in Books and Readers in the Early Church, argues that a collection of Paul’s letters was circulating by the end of the first century, and that it was one of the main reasons Christians took up the book form called the codex (see Papyrus, parchment and the codex).

The Gospels

The four Gospels are a different kind of writing: accounts of the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus. Most scholars date them between about 65 and 95 CE, with Mark the earliest and John the latest, though some argue for earlier dates.

Sources. Matthew, Mark and Luke share a great deal of material, often word for word in Greek. The most widely held explanation is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark, together with another shared source of sayings, which scholars call “Q”, now lost. Other explanations exist, and the question is still debated. Luke says openly that he used earlier sources: “many have undertaken to set in order a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word delivered them to us” (Luke 1:1–2). He writes “having traced the course of all things accurately from the first,” so that his reader “might know the certainty” of what he had been taught (Luke 1:3–4).

Names. The Gospels themselves do not name their authors in the text. The traditional titles, “according to Matthew,” and so on, are attested in the earliest manuscripts that preserve the beginnings or ends of the books, and in second-century writers. Papias, a bishop in Asia Minor in the early second century, said that Mark wrote down Peter’s teaching accurately, though not in order, and that Matthew compiled the sayings “in the Hebrew language” (quoted by Eusebius, Church History 3.39.15–16). Martin Hengel argued that the consistency of the Gospel titles across the church means they must have been attached very early, as soon as churches had more than one Gospel to tell apart.

John. The fourth Gospel claims to rest on the testimony of “the disciple whom Jesus loved”: “This is the disciple who testifies about these things, and wrote these things. We know that his witness is true” (John 21:24). The “we” seems to be a group associated with him.

The other books

The Acts of the Apostles is the second volume of Luke’s work (Acts 1:1), continuing the story from Jesus to the spread of the church as far as Rome, in the early 60s CE. The other letters, such as Hebrews, James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John and Jude, were written to wider audiences, and their dates and authorship are debated in different ways for each. The Revelation to John, a prophetic and apocalyptic book, is addressed to seven churches in Asia Minor (Revelation 1:4, 11) and is usually dated to the 90s CE.

Written in Greek

The New Testament was written in Koine (“common”) Greek, the everyday Greek of the eastern Roman Empire, not the polished literary Greek of classical Athens. Its writers ranged from the simple, direct style of Mark to the more literary Greek of Luke and Hebrews. Their language was also shaped by the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint. The discovery of thousands of everyday papyrus documents from Egypt in the late nineteenth century showed that many words once thought to be special “biblical Greek” were in fact ordinary words of the time. As Adolf Deissmann showed, the New Testament was written in the language of the people.

From autographs to copies

The original documents, the autographs, written by Paul’s secretaries or by the Gospel writers, have not survived. That is true of virtually every book from the ancient world. Papyrus is fragile, and documents that were read often wore out. What we have instead are copies, and copies of copies.

But the gap between the writing and the first surviving copies is short by ancient standards, and the number of copies is very large. The rest of this series looks at those copies: who made them, what has survived, and how scholars work back from them to the text the authors wrote.

Sources

  • Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017.
  • Deissmann, Adolf. Light from the Ancient East. Translated by Lionel R. M. Strachan. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910.
  • Eusebius. Church History 3.39.
  • Gamble, Harry Y. Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
  • Hengel, Martin. The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000.
  • Richards, E. Randolph. Paul and First-Century Letter Writing: Secretaries, Composition and Collection. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004.
  • Dunn, James D. G. Jesus Remembered. Christianity in the Making 1. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.