Jimmy Akin - 20 Answers: The New Testament (20 Answers Series from Catholic Answers Book 35)

The New Testament is the collection of inspired books that are regarded as sacred and canonical by Christians.

Testament is another word for covenanta type of solemn and binding agreement. Over the centuries, God has made a number of covenants, either with mankind as a whole, with a particular people, or with a particular individual.

Among the most famous is the one made through Israels founding lawgiver, Moses. This covenant, which is described in the first five books of the Bible (Genesis-Deuteronomy), became the basis of Israels national life and of the Jewish faith. The sacred books that were written as a result of this covenant are known as the books of the Old Testament.

However, the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah declared that one day God would institute a new covenant (Jer. 31:31), and Jesus announced the coming of this covenant on the night of his passion. When he instituted the Eucharist, he declared, This cup which is poured out for you is the New Covenant in my blood (Luke 22:20). The New Covenantwhich makes salvation possible for all mankindwas then put into effect when he shed his blood on the cross.

Consequently, the books of the New Testament are the ones that deal with Jesus and the covenant God made through him.

This doesnt mean that the books of the Old Testament are irrelevant for Christians. Christianity builds on Judaism, and the books of the New Testament build on those of the Old. They are still Gods inspired word and contain much valuable information. As St. Paul says, They were written down for our instruction (1 Cor. 10:11; cf. Rom. 15:4).

For the first Christians, before the New Testament was written, the books of the Old Testament simply were the scriptures, and the New Testament quotes from and alludes to them hundreds of times. They do so not only to show that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies given in the Old Testament but also to reveal the character of God and to draw moral and theological lessons for Christians.

The New Testament itself contains twenty-seven books. They were written in the first century, in the decades following the ministry of Jesus (c. A.D. 2933), and they fall into four general categories:

• Four of the books are known as Gospels and are biographies of Jesus Christ.
• Onethe book of Actsis a history that continues the story of the early Church from the time of Jesus to about the year A.D. 60.
• Twenty-one books take the form of letters (also called epistles ) that were written to groups and individuals.
• Finally, onethe book of Revelationis a work of prophecy.

Given the age of the New Testament books, people sometimes ask how we know we have accurate texts.

Before the invention of the printing press in the 1400s, books had to be hand copied by scribes, who invariably made at least small mistakes. After centuries of hand copying, could serious errors have been introduced into the text? Could some even have been introduced deliberately?

Several factors worked to prevent this. The first is the fact that the books of the New Testament are considered sacred. This means scribes took great pains not to make mistakes when copying them and to quickly fix mistakes if they did.

Another major factor protecting the integrity of the manuscripts was the enormous number of copies that were made. We have almost six thousand manuscripts of the Greek New Testament before the first mechanically printed version of it appeared in 1516. We have thousands more manuscripts that are translations of the New Testament into languages like Latin, Coptic, and Syriac.

Modern scholars have recovered these manuscripts from places like monastery libraries and archaeological sitesespecially in Egypt where the dry, desert conditions help preserve buried writing materials.

Many of these manuscripts date to very early timesthe A.D. 200s and 300sand some date even earlier. For example, we have part of the Gospel of Johnin a manuscript known as the Rylands Papyrus or P52 that dates to around A.D. 140, just a few decades after this Gospel was written.

At this time, the original copies of the New Testament booksknown as the autographs were still in circulation. Recent studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient library practices have revealed that individual copies of books remained in use for up to 500 years, though 150 years was more common.

This means that original copies of the New Testament books would have remained in use in the second and third centuries and able to influence copies made in this period, such as the Rylands Papyrus. In fact, the early Church Father St. Peter of Alexandria (died c. A.D. 311) mentions that in his day, the original copy of the Gospel of John written by the hand of the evangelist was still preserved in the most holy church of Ephesus, and is there adored by the faithful (Fragment 5:1:7).

In addition to the thousands of New Testament manuscripts that exist, we also have extensive quotations from it in the writings of Church Fathers and in lectionaries used in churches. Even if all of the manuscripts somehow vanished, we would be able to reconstruct the entire New Testament just from these sources.