W. R. Telford - The New Testament: A Beginners Guide

The New Testament

A Beginners Guide

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The New Testament

A Beginners Guide

W. R. Telford

To Andrena

Contents

Tables

Figures

This book was written over a period of six weeks spent at St Deiniols Library, Hawarden in North Wales. My thanks must go, first of all, to the Trustees, Warden and Staff of the Library for all the support, help and encouragement they have offered me, not only during this period, but at all the other times when I have had the privilege and joy of working here. Particular thanks go to the Trustees for awarding me a Revd Dr Murray McGregor Memorial Scholarship, and to the Warden and Chief Librarian, the Revd Peter Francis, for his enduring friendship and assistance. For making it possible for me to have a period of study leave, my appreciation goes to my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies at Newcastle University, and to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Dr Eric Cross. This book is based on a series of lectures given over the years to my first year undergraduates at Newcastle. My thanks, therefore, go to them, for the interest they have shown in the New Testament, and for the stimulation they have provided to put these lectures into published form. My gratitude also extends to Oneworld, for making it possible for me to publish The New Testament: A Beginners Guide, and to its enterprising publisher, Novin Doostdar, for his patience, encouragement and good humour. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank, as always, my dear wife, Andrena, for being my number one supporter, for giving me the benefit of her advice and judgement, and, above all, for being, at all times, her loving, charming and cheerful self.

No other collection of writings is perhaps better served with Guides and Introductions, both scholarly and popular, than the New Testament. To supply yet another might seem at best unnecessary, at worst impertinent. Further, to offer a beginners guide not only to the New Testament, but to early Christianity and the Synoptic Gospels as well, when others have written, at length and in depth, on these weighty subjects, and on these significant texts, might appear no less than foolhardy. Clearly, therefore, a strategy is required. This Beginners Guide proceeds from the presupposition that the historical value of the New Testament writings lies in the fact that they represent (though not exclusively, as we shall see), the foundation documents of early Christianity. To understand them, one must therefore have a broad, historical awareness of the wider social, economic, political, cultural and religious context in which they were produced. To appreciate them, one must also have a more specific knowledge and understanding of the needs, circumstances and ideology of the first- and second-century Christian communities out of which they arose. To interpret them in their original context, furthermore, one must have some grasp of the methods of historical criticism which contemporary scholars apply to them (especially to the Gospels), and there is no better way to do this than to become familiar with at least some of the texts in some depth.

These presuppositions help define the strategy I have adopted in this book. Given its nature and scope, and the fact that it would be impossible to do justice to all twenty-seven of the writings which make up the New Testament, we shall proceed, therefore, in a series of ever-narrowing circles, moving from the general to the particular. In the first chapter, entitled The World of the New Testament, I shall be providing a survey of the creative milieu in which Christianity was born, giving due weight to the fact that this new religious movement was a product of two chromosomes, if you like, one provided by Hellenism, the other by the mother-religion, Judaism. The womb in which this new age child was conceived was the Roman Empire. In the second chapter, we shall examine the early church, outlining its origins and history, and commenting on the nature and development of belief and practice in the New Testament period (30150 CE). Then, in our third and central chapter, we shall move on to the literature produced by the early church, the New Testament writings themselves. Here, I shall be pointing out the factors that led to the emergence of these writings, and offering a brief introduction to them. For more detailed information, the reader will be referred to the more specialized help that is available. In the fourth and fifth chapters, our focus will become narrower still. Here, I shall be concentrating on the special Gospel literature in which many of the traditions about Christianitys founder, Jesus, are found (in particular the Synoptic Gospels), and we shall conduct this study armed with the tools that scholars use to interpret them.