The New Testament is made up of 27 different writings.\u00a0 Most people refer to them as books.\u00a0 In reality most of them were written as letters to various people or groups of people, churches.\u00a0 Only three of the \u201cbooks\u201d are not specifically written to a person or group.\u00a0 Some of the \u201cbooks\u201d are named after who wrote them and some of them are named after who they were written to.\u00a0 The \u201cbooks\u201d were not written in the order they are in our New Testament.\u00a0 The first \u201cbook\u201d was probably James, written around 45 AD.\u00a0 Over the next 25 years 21 more \u201cbooks\u201d were written with Hebrew, Mark, and Jude being written in the mid to late 60\u2019s.\u00a0 About 68 AD Paul (author of at least 13 of the New Testament \u201cbooks\u201d) and Peter (One of the original apostles, or \u201csent ones\u201d, and author of 1 & 2 Peter and main source for Mark) were executed in Rome.\u00a0 The other are all believed to have died in various parts of the world telling people about Jesus by about 90 AD.\u00a0 John was the last of the \u201ctwelve apostles\u201d to die.\u00a0 He was involved in the church in the city of Ephesus where he wrote 1, 2, & 3 John and the Gospel of John all in the early 90\u2019s AD.\u00a0 About 95 AD he was banished to an island off the coast of Greece called Patmos by then emperor of the Roman Empire, Domitian.\u00a0 It was while on the island that he wrote the \u201cbook\u201d of Revelation about 95 AD.\u00a0 Apparently he returned to Ephesus after that time and died of natural causes a very old man.<\/p>\n
So the twenty-seven \u201cbooks\u201d in the New Testament were written during the first century by eye-witnesses to the events of Jesus\u2019 life, death, resurrection and the beginning of the \u201cChurch\u201d (In the Greek language the word is \u201cekklesia\u201d and it means \u201ccalled out of\u201d).\u00a0 Remember I said the books were actually mostly letters.\u00a0 They were sent to individuals (Philemon, 1&2 Timothy, Titus, Luke, Acts, 3 John), churches in a particular city (Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1&2 Thessalonians), groups of churches (1&2 Peter, Galatians, 1&2 John, Revelation, James (?), Hebrews (?), Jude(?)).\u00a0 That leaves Matthew, Mark and John\u00a0 which do not seem to be specifically \u201cletters\u201d.\u00a0 Mark was probably written to believers in the church in Rome though he was probably in Rome when he wrote it.\u00a0 These letters and other writings were copied and shared with other churches and believers in the years after they were written.\u00a0 There were other writing during the early years of church history by others, but these 27 were almost universally accepted by the early churches as being communication from God.<\/p>\n
During the first few centuries after Christ the church faced a lot of opposition from those around it (2 Peter is an example of a letter written to deal with external pressure) and from within (2 Corinthians, Jude, maybe Galatians).\u00a0 In 397 AD a council was called of church leaders from across the world in Carthage in North Africa.\u00a0 At that council the twenty-seven \u201cbooks\u201d of our New Testament were formally recognized as being the New Testament.\u00a0 This was a formal declaration of what the church had seen in these writings mostly from the beginning (some of the writings were questioned by some and all of them still are questioned by some \u201cso called\u201d Christians).<\/p>\n
The \u201cbooks\u201d are not published in the order they were written and are not even grouped by author. \u00a0The order of the books in our New Testament seems to be based mostly on content.\u00a0 The first four books are usually grouped together and they are called \u201cgospels\u201d.\u00a0 In Old English, gospel means \u201cgood news\u201d.\u00a0 In Luke 2:10-11 we are told that Jesus\u2019 coming into the world was good news (the word in Greek is evangellizo, we get the word evangelize from it).\u00a0 The first four books of the New Testament are called gospels because they tell us the history of Jesus\u2019 life, death, and resurrection, the \u201cGood News\u201d (1 Corinthians 15:1-4) according to Paul.\u00a0 Some times Matthew, Mark, and Luke are grouped together and called the \u201cSynoptic\u201d Gospels.\u00a0 Synoptic means \u201cto see together\u201d and theses three Gospels are very similar in the way they tell Jesus\u2019 story.\u00a0 John\u2019s Gospel is more about who Jesus is, the \u201cpromised one, son of God\u201d (John 20:30-31).\u00a0 Acts is usually called \u201cHistory\u201d though it is clearly a letter from Luke to his friend Theophilus (as is the gospel of Luke).\u00a0 Also the the other \u201cGospels\u201d are also historical and there is history in the other New Testament \u201cbooks\u201d too.<\/p>\n
The next twenty-one books are recognized as letters, scholars call them \u201cepistles\u201d (the Greek word for letter).\u00a0 The first thirteen (Romans through Philemon) are grouped together because of their author and are called the \u201cPauline Epistles\u201d\u00a0 (Letters from Paul).\u00a0 Also as I mentioned above most of Paul\u2019s letters were written to specific churches, with Galatians written to the churches in a region and 1&2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon written to individuals.\u00a0 The rest of the \u201cletters\u201d are usually called \u201cGeneral Epistles\u201d since they are not as specifically addressed and seem to be to all churches in general (though interestingly enough 3 John is to a particular individual).\u00a0 Also notice that the General Epistles are named for their author except for Hebrews. Hebrews is first in the order because some early Christians tohough it might have been written by Paul, otherwise we do not know who the human author was.\u00a0\u00a0 Finally the \u201cbook\u201d of Revelation is usually classified as prophecy though it was clearly written as a letter to seven particular churches in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey).<\/p>\n
One other note, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon were written by Paul from Rome between 60-63 AD while he was a Roman prisoner there.\u00a0 They are sometimes called the \u201cPrison Epistles\u201d (See Also \u201cPaul:\u00a0 Sent one to the Gentiles\u201d<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The New Testament is made up of 27 different writings.\u00a0 Most people refer to them as books.\u00a0 In reality most of them were written as letters to various people or groups of people, churches.\u00a0 Only three of the \u201cbooks\u201d are not specifically written to a person or group.\u00a0 Some of the \u201cbooks\u201d are named after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":50,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1072","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/deltaforcedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/deltaforcedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/deltaforcedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deltaforcedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deltaforcedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1072"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/deltaforcedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1074,"href":"http:\/\/deltaforcedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1072\/revisions\/1074"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deltaforcedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/50"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/deltaforcedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}