5 - The Making of the New Testament

Summary

The New Testament differs from the Old Testament and Apocrypha in several respects. First, the works of which it is made up were written in a comparatively short space of time – about seventy years if 1 Thessalonians is dated to around 50 CE and 2 Peter to c. 120 CE. Second, these works were written because of a fundamental difference of opinion in the Early Church between Paul and his followers on the one hand, and people who wanted to keep Christianity within, or at least close to, first-century Judaism on the other. In turn, this dispute about Christian identity affected relationships between the Church and the synagogue, and fed back in to the writing of the Gospels, where a key issue became the attitude of the Founder of Christianity to Judaism, the law, the Temple and non-Jews.

That such a dispute should have arisen is not surprising. On the principle that there is no smoke without fire, the catalyst for dissention was the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Even if the Gospels must be used with caution as historical documents, it is more likely that their picture of Jesus as befriending the outcast, challenging the strict interpretation and observance of the Jewish law and challenging the notion of the indispensability of the Jerusalem Temple, reflects the facts, than that the Gospels simply read back into the ministry of Jesus the later conflict between Church and synagogue. This being so, the question was bound to arise whether the movement initiated by Jesus would become part of the rich spectrum of Judaism before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, or whether it would move outside the limits of Judaism.