What's up Every Nation Seminary? My name is Adam Mabry and I'm going to be Professor New Testament. In this class, New Testament 1, we're going to be looking at the documents of the New Testament from a couple of angles. We'll look at the whole of the New Testament and kind of its structure and its approach, but in this class we're going to particularly focus on the New Testament histories. If you were to do a survey of a bunch of different seminary courses and tracks through the New Testament, you'll not find many of them dividing amongst the histories and the letters.
But I've decided to take this approach because of our limited time together, and also because I want to show you not just the breadth of the New Testament, but I'd really like to be able to, after we're done with this class and New Testament 2, dive into the deeper work of studying the New Testament. So, our New Testament series breaks down like this. New Testament 1 will focus on... the histories of the New Testament. So that's Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.
New Testament 2 will focus on the letters, which is pretty much the rest of the New Testament. And then in New Testament 3, we're going to do a deep dive into the book of Romans. And the point there is twofold, to both study the depth of a book so that you can know how to study the depth of a book in the New Testament, and also to study one of the deeper and more profound books in the New Testament, from which we derive so much of our theology.
So in this particular lecture, we're asking the question, what is the New Testament, and how's this class going to work? And so the whole idea, again, behind this course and behind all of our seminary courses is that we could help you become better biblical preachers, help you become better apostolic leaders, help you be better and more effective world missionaries, and cause you to be and become better makers of disciples. And so this lecture is going to focus on three things.
The basics of the New Testament, the books... of the New Testament, the literature of it, and then the theology and approach that we are going to take. So let's dive right in. The basics of the New Testament is that it is a book of books. The Bible, as you know, is a book of books put together over almost two millennia by over 40 human authors across three different continents from all different walks of life, contains all kinds of genres of literature.
And the New Testament is basically the right quarter or third of that. book of books. It's 27 of the 66 books, and it comes to us from originals that were on, obviously, handwritten scrolls, papyri.
In addition to this particular lecture, I'm going to ask you to watch a few other lectures and even some documentaries describing how we got the documents of the New Testament and describing why you can be confident in the New Testament that your Bible contains. But just briefly, we can talk basically about where... the documents of the New Testament come from. The documents of the New Testament come from extant manuscripts from antiquity.
Now, from antiquity, that's within the first five or so centuries of the resurrection of Christ, we've got about 5,000 or so manuscripts or parts of manuscripts. Most of them are fragments of all or part of the Greek New Testament. And so that sort of leads us to the question, well, okay, are they trustworthy? You may have at some point played the game telephone.
where you line up with your friends and you whisper into the first friend's ear you know some some message some sentence and then he whispers it into the next person's ear and then the next person and then the next person and by the tenth or twelfth person what they heard and what you said are radically different and so sometimes critics of the New Testament will say look if we know that from just a child's game like that messages get lost how in the world could we possibly be confident that the New Testament that we have accurately or even closely reflects the documents as they were originally written? And that is a good question, one that actually has been dealt with by lots of textual scholars. And so if you were to take those 5,000 or so manuscripts and you put them onto a very powerful computer and you ask the computer to analyze the consistency and inconsistency between those 5,000 or so manuscripts, you find that they come out with a 99.5% accuracy or consistency between them. Now that's...
remarkable that across thousands of ancient manuscripts, there's that much accuracy. Now, you might be saying, wait, hold on. What about that other 0.5%?
I mean, we believe that the Bible is inspired and infallible and inerrant. And how are we going to trust God's word if there's these inconsistencies? Well, the inconsistencies that we have are inconsistencies mostly in like Greek.
spelling or uppercase Greek letters versus lowercase Greek letters, some simplified Greek, some more formal Greek containing like breath marks and ellipses and other things that you find there. And in the few places where we really aren't quite sure about the textual history of certain parts of the New Testament, any modern copy of the Bible simply notes that. An example would be the ending of the Gospel of Mark or The part in the Gospel of John when Jesus is drawing in the sand and, you know, he who is without sin cast the first stone. The parts like that we simply note about.
But the overwhelming majority of the Greek New Testament is just firmly established. And as I said, where uncertainties remain, we just tend to let you know about it. Now, the New Testament was written in the language of Koine Greek. Now, Koine Greek is not highfalutin academic Greek.
It's pretty much just the common... language of the time. Now, perhaps you've asked, well, wait, I thought that the New Testament was written during Roman times. Why were they speaking Greek?
That would be a very good question. You may remember that if you study Western history before the Roman Empire had kind of taken over everything, you go back an empire or two, and you get the Greek Empire. You get Alexander the Great kind of conquering all of the known world, and when he did that, he like Hellenized the world.
That's the word that describes how he... that expanded the influence of the Greek language, Greek stories, and Greek culture. And so even though we're in Roman times, you get the common language isn't Latin. The common language is actually Greek. And that's why the New Testament happens to be written in Greek, because much like English is today, Greek was the language that most people could most commonly speak.
And so, in fact, it was so common that around this time, a little bit earlier, a Greek copy of the... Old Testament called the Septuagint was brought into being and actually really helps us understand the language and the vocabulary and the categories of thought that these deeply Jewish men who wrote the New Testament were thinking when they used certain words. And so we'll get into more of that later. But Greek, Koine Greek, was the lingua franca of Rome and the Roman world, mostly because of Alexander the Great. Now, we should probably ask the question, well, why is it called the New Testament?
No. The word testament actually refers to a covenantal word or a covenant partnership between God and his people. If you are in an English-speaking country, testament has to do with like a will or an estate. If I die and I leave my children, you know, my money and my property, I am giving them a testament of what I want to happen with my stuff. And the testator is the one who testifies about...
what the new arrangement will be. So we have some precedent for modern use of the language of Testament, if you like. But in the New Testament particularly, it's not talking about so much a legal framework as a covenant framework. Now, when you take systematic theology and you take biblical theology, the word covenant is going to show up a lot more. And the reason for that is because the Bible is given to us and arranged largely by covenants.
That's one of the ways that's... That's very common to understand the story of the Bible. So the word testament refers to a covenant partnership between God and his people. And the New Testament part of that is the continuation of the story of God's desire to relate to people, of God's desire to save people, to covenantally bind himself to a people, his people Israel, and then later, as we'll see in the New Testament, new Israel, the church, by means of the life and the death and the resurrection and the ascension. of Jesus Christ.
And that's what the biographies of the New Testament are all about. And we'll get into that shortly. Now, the reason that we break it up into Old and New Testament is because the New Testament is, in fact, the testimony and the story of Jesus Christ and how he has come to relate to us and bring us into covenant relationship with God. The term itself, New Testament, is actually sort of a transliteration or a carryover from Latin, novum testamentum.
It's just a Latin rendering of the... phrase, kaine diatheke, which literally just translates new covenant. And so the word covenant and the word testament are closely related. Scripture indicates that followers of Christ considered themselves to be people of the new covenant.
You can see that in like 1 Corinthians chapter 11 or 2 Corinthians chapter 3 or Hebrews chapter 9, that that was the way Christ followers thought about themselves, people of a new covenant. And therefore that became the name attributed to the documents about that new covenant. The phrase New Testament should be understood to mean the books pertaining, therefore, to this new covenant. And the writing themselves, it's important to understand, are not the covenant. It's not the writing that is the covenant.
The writing is telling us, as a witness to the covenant. For instance, the Church Fathers both of the East and the West cautioned against sort of the unqualified use of the term New Testament, mostly because they didn't want someone to begin to worship the books themselves over the work of Jesus. So what we have in the 27 books of our New Testament are the documents, the stories, the biographies, the letters, in the case of the Book of Revelation, the apocalypse, the... the documents that tell us about the new covenant, not the covenant itself, if that makes sense.
The writings, therefore, are the writings pertaining to the new covenant. And we think probably when we look in history, it was probably Eusebius around the fourth century who was the first person to use this language. Now that we've talked about some of the basics of the New Testament, let's talk about the books themselves. Now, the books are 27 books, and I will require that you memorize them in the order of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1st and 2nd Peter, 1 through 3, John, Jude, and Revelation. I want you to have that memorized.
And so those are the books. There are no other books. You don't get to add books. Those are the books. And so for the purpose of Every Nation Seminary, as I mentioned earlier, we are going to be dividing the documents of the New Testament into these three.
categories. The histories, which are the Gospels themselves, the testimonies of the life and ministry and work of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, which is the history of the resurrection of Jesus, the sending of the Spirit, and the Empowering Church. The second lecture, or the second class, as I mentioned, will be the study of the letters, and then the final class will be the study of the book Romans.
So let's talk a little bit about the dates of these books. Unlike the Old Testament, which was, you know... written over like a thousand plus years in the making and has an enormous amount of history between it. The New Testament was written in a relatively short space of time, immediately after the life of Jesus, all within one generation of another.
And now there's ongoing debate about like when exactly. I've heard dates as early as perhaps, you know, the early 40s for parts of like 1 Corinthians, where Paul is clearly quoting a... a hymn or a poem that had been around even before he wrote that letter um and then you know dates all the way up to like the 80s uh for perhaps the gospel of john and other other letters so uh roughly between let's call it between 50 and 90 a.d but we'll get into that as we study each book now let's think about the the actual uh genre of the literature that we're studying now genre is really really important because when someone asks you you know do you read the bible literally Um, your answer should be that that's the wrong question. We must read the Bible in the literary context in which it presents itself to us.
For instance, if you were to read a story that began with once upon a time, you would immediately know that the genre that you were about to read is the genre of fairy tale. Well, the new Testament has lots of clues in it that tell us what kind of genre it is. One of the first, uh, genres that we're going to bump into, and especially in this particular class is the genre of gospel. Now, There's some debate as to, you know, how fixed this genre is, but a lot of newer New Testament scholars believe that the Gospels particularly are works of ancient historical biographical accounts and that there's some precedent for that. Now, in the case of our Gospels, the Gospel according to Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, these are ancient historical biographical accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus.
Now, one little sticky point. It's not the gospel of Matthew or the gospel of John or the gospel of so-and-so. It is the gospel, there's just one, according to Matthew, the gospel according to Mark and Luke, etc. And the reason that is a distinction is because we want to make sure that as we study the documents of the New Testament, we understand that we're not getting four different gospels.
There's one gospel with four different biographical accounts to it, four different angles, four different eyewitnesses. to the life and ministry and teachings of Jesus Christ. Now, let's talk about some of the similarities between Gospels and ancient biography.
All four of the Gospels mention the name of their subject, that is, Jesus, directly after the prologue, though some of them lack a formal title. Jesus is the subject of the verb in the Gospels, far more than any other individual, so it's obvious that these are books about him. Each of the Gospels devote a considerable amount of attention to Jesus. death, which aligns with ancient biographers'tendency to devote more attention to the events or attributes that they believed was best.
It was most important to best portray their subject. And so that's already telling us that everybody who witnessed the life of Jesus zoomed in and spilled a lot of ink on his death and burial and resurrection because they wanted us to focus on... Now, the Gospels are written in narrative form and fall within like the 5,000 to 25,000 word count, common to most ancient biographies. Two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke, open with the narration of Jesus'birth. while the other two begin with his adult ministry.
The Gospels show both a chronological and a topical arrangement of material. For instance, the Temple Cleansing finds its place at the front of the Gospel of John, but at a different place in the Synoptics. And the bulk of the narrative is composed of miracle stories, discourses on various topics, sayings and parables that contribute to the author's portrayal of Jesus.
Now, the Gospel writers seem to have used a variety of sources in composing their Gospels, which is something that we'll get into more and more as we study that particular problem. Where does the source material for these ancient biographies actually come from? And the topics the Gospels address were what one would expect to find in an ancient biography, the most important teachings and sayings and actions of the subject of the Gospel, in this case, Jesus. And the writers of the four Gospels cast Jesus in a positive light and exhibit the same sort of intentions or purposes for writing as other authors of ancient Gospels. They have an agenda.
They want you to know Jesus. Some of them, John particularly, is right up front about his goal. He wants you to know Jesus in a deep and life-changing way, the way he does.
But we'll get into that more as we go on. Now, the second genre of literature that we find in the New Testament is the genre of epistles. I'm not going to go into that huge now because, as I said, we're going to have a whole class on the letters of the New Testament.
But you can, for now, understand a letter to simply be a broad category of literature that includes public letters, private letters, official letters, chain letters, or formal kind of literary letters and works. And the letters of the New Testament belong to that category, although they can display some differences from conventional letters that we find in antiquity. Now...
The book of Revelation is a letter. It opens as a letter to a particular set of churches, but it also has the attributes of being an apocalypse. It is a revealing, an opening up of the end times and what Jesus wants to do near the end of days.
Now, here's what the New Testament is not, and we should really, really underscore this. The New Testament is not the product of a bunch of people who sat in a smoke-filled room and wanted to manipulate the religious outcome of generations to come. There's no evidence that the New Testament bears that kind of marking. Neither is the New Testament merely the den of scholars. While I love scholarship, and I love going to school, and I love nerding out on things, we've got to remember that the Gospels'audience was pretty common people.
The Gospels were written to normal folk, which should give you and I great hope that God likes to relate to people who are pretty normal. It's certainly not a Gnostic manual with secret meetings, rather. Like, we're not to take our Bible and kind of twist it this way and that, and discover through word count. It's not that.
It's also not a spiritual guidebook. The New Testament isn't about you. And so if you're coming to the New Testament to find what God says to you, and that's your primary agenda, you are approaching it wrong. The New Testament is not about you. The New Testament is about Jesus.
and the early people of Jesus, and how they followed Jesus as those who'd been transformed by his teachings, and his life, and his death, and his resurrection, and his ascension, and his promise to return. We find ourselves in that story, but what we must not do is make that story somehow about us, and that has to change the way we read it. Therefore, it's not simply a systematic theological textbook. I love theology. I have degrees in theology.
I... really like studying theology, but the New Testament is not a theology book. The Bible is not a systematic theology on the Trinity or on the resurrection or on salvation.
The Bible is instead a book of books, as we've said. And most of all, of course, the New Testament is true. It's not a fairy tale.
It's not pretend. These books, especially these biographies, bear all of the markings of real reportage, the things that they saw, they testified to. And that's what we have written in the New Testaments. So what have we said so far? In this lecture, we've talked about the basics of what the New Testament is.
We've talked about the books and some of the genre that we'll be handling. So now let's think about our third thing for this particular lecture, the theology and our approach to the New Testament. Now, the New Testament is, as I mentioned, uh contain containing biography which is historical reportage and letters filled with theology and so we we're going to look at the new testament therefore from two important angles the angle of history and the angle of theology now history if we think about that we've got to remember that the new testament especially the biographies uh the histories the book of acts were written as historical accounts to actual events that happened therefore we have to study them, especially in this class, as events that actually happened. They bear all of the marks of someone reporting what they actually saw.
They don't bear the marks of mythology. They don't bear the marks of someone kind of just manipulating works or literary works to get an outcome theologically that they wanted. They are histories, and so we approach them that way. The New Testament gives us the history of Jesus Christ and the early Christian movement. Now, We've talked a little bit about the degree to which it is a reliable version of the history, but we must understand that for now it is, and we'll go into how we know that more.
And of course, if you have any particular question about, you know, maybe something that you've heard or a book that you read or a question as to the reliability of the New Testament documents, please just email me and we'll be glad to help you. There's lots of great answers to your great questions. So it's history, but it's also theology.
So if the history is telling us the life and practices of the early Christians and of Jesus Christ, then the theology is telling us, well, what did early Christians believe about the life and practices of Jesus Christ? And so these history and theology angles, remember, they're angles. They're mutually dependent.
You can't really do one without the other. On the one hand, studying the theology of the New Testament depends on some belief, right? We can't just approach it. theologically sort of as a blank slate.
We've got to believe somehow that this has something important to tell us about God. And so it depends on some theology, however vague, that certain things happened in the first century and that somehow these are authoritative or normal or substantive for the Christianity that followed. But on the other hand, studying the history of early Christianity is impossible without a clear grasp of Christian beliefs.
So we're going to be kind of... vacillating back and forth between the study of the history of the New Testament and the study of the theology of the New Testament. We'll hold those things in conversation.
Now, I suggest that the New Testament must be read so as to be understood. In fact, I'll quote N.T. Wright here, a famous New Testament scholar. He says this exactly.
The New Testament, I suggest, must be read so as to be understood, read within appropriate context, within an acoustic, which will allow its full overtones to be heard. It must be read with as little distortion as possible, and with as much sensitivity as possible to its different levels of meaning. It must be read so that the stories and the story which it tells can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ideas. It must be read without the assumption that we already know what it is going to say, and without the arrogance that assumes that we already have ancestral rights over this or that passage, book, or writer..
for full appropriateness, it must be read in such a way as to set in motion the drama which it suggests. Here's the real thing he's getting to. The New Testament is not something that we study merely externally, but it's a book that involves our story too. Earlier I said the New Testament is not about you, and it's true, it's not. But because it's about Jesus, it has everything eventually to do with you.
And the way you know that will really help the way you lead others. It will change the way you preach this text and how you disciple people when you open the documents of the New Testament. So we will be taking a narrative historical approach. We're going to work hard to understand the writings in their historical context and also the nitty-gritty of the language. I don't expect you to know Greek, but if you do, that's great.
Let me know and maybe we can converse on that level. If you have Greek language questions, of course, you're welcome to... Ask me those things and I'll do my best.
I'm not a Greek scholar, but I do read New Testament Greek because it's just part of the studies that I've done. So we're going to take this narrative historical approach and we'll then take a biblical theological approach after that. And that's to ask this question.
How does what we are reading relate to or advance the story of the whole Bible? Because remember... We've got to study books as they are, but we've also got to study books in the context in which we find them within the entire canon.
And so we'll be going back and forth in conversation between the narrative historical approach and the biblical theological. approach. Now, I should say something about redemptive history.
So I just said that the biblical theological approach that we take is going to be asking the question, how does this part of the New Testament advance the story of the Bible? And so when I say something like redemptive history, I'm referring to the fact that the Bible is one unified story. And because it's one unified story that finds all of its finality in the life and death and resurrection and ascension and eventual return of Jesus, all of the history that it narrates is pointed toward that and his final revelation and return.
And that is sometimes called redemptive history or the story of the Bible. So sometimes we're going to abstract what we're reading out to understand the biblical or systematic theological truth. And other times we're going to zoom right in and say, okay, what did this mean right here in this context?
And so in that way, I hope that you learn the ability both to become rather granular and paying attention to things like prepositions and how certain linguistic flags or characteristics help you read the Bible in a very narrow sense, but also gain a greater appreciation for how what you're reading in a narrow sense fits into the larger canon of Scripture so that you can better understand and wield your New Testament. Remember, our goal here is to make you great preachers. great disciple-makers, apostolic leaders, and world missionaries. And so that's going to be our approach to the New Testament as we seek to understand what it's all about.