New Testament Background

My Masters degree is in Biblical studies with a major in the New Testament. I wanted to do my Doctorate in the New Testament but scrapped it for Philosophy of Religion & Theology because of the New Testament Greek. I managed to pass it for my Master’s degree, but sustaining it at a Doctoral level is challenging, so I opted for a suitable alternative that sits well with my first degree in Science (Biochemistry). The Philosophical & Metaphysical angles of the Philosophy of Religion are interesting, and I embraced them.

I am going down memory lane into my Master’s to discuss topics in the New Testament, starting with the Background.Then, Synoptic Gospels & the Problems.

To Understand the New Testament (NT), scholars must have an Old Testament (OT) understanding and background. The NT is a new Will of God through Jesus Christ. There is unity between the OT and NT because, in Church History, we have Heresy. Heresy is a pretentious doctrine to be accurate but false; it is an overstretch of the truth, a false doctrine that pretends to be true. An enemy outside is better to be dealt with than the enemy inside.

There is an inherent conflict between Faith and Reason, between Belief and Rationalism. Faith and Belief are spiritual acceptance of declared Revelation. Sense cannot prove God, but Faith. The majority of the Books on Biblical Studies come from the rationalistic mindset. Some of the Problems are derived from:

• Secularism
• Evolutionism
• Epicureanism is closely related to Hedonism
• Freudianism
• Marxism/Communism

 Marcionism believes that the God of the OT differs from the God of the NT. This Belief has a fragmented Canon. The Testament (Testimony) is a Will, a Revelation of God. A revised mission is now taking place in the Western World.

OT Structure

• Torah              –                       Law
• Nebim              –                       The Prophets
• Katubim          –                       The writings

NT Structure

• Gospels
• Acts
• Epistles
• Apocalypse

Canonization is the measuring standard put in place for accessing the books of the NT Criteria used were:

1. Written by an Apostle
2. Immediate Disciple of an Apostle
3. Conform with Apostolic Doctrine
4. Whole Acceptability

The ones not canonized were put as Apocrpha or Pseudepigrapha.

Literary Critical Apparatus

1. Source Criticism
2. Historical criticism
3. Form Criticism
4. Redaction Criticism

Tools used to explain any piece of literature weigh things on both sides and take a position. We have positive and Negative criticism. Christians are the greatest enemy of the Church. One must learn to be bold and courageous for one’s Faith. You are different from other people. Stand up wherever you are to defend your Faith. Criticism is an objective assessment of any issue. When you appraise, you come to your judgment and make original contributions to that issue.

Rules of Thesis:

1. Original Contributions
2. Never Plagiarize
3. No Over Generalization
4. Acknowledge your Source
5. Do not Preach

Textual Errors

Things that cause errors in NT:

1. Greek words were written without any separation. Sometimes, this creates ambiguity, which can cause some to need help understanding the writing.
2. Various educational standards of the Translators. Their intellectual ability comes into play.
3. Errors of the eye and ear. A whole line could have been omitted in the process of copying, which is Accidental Omission.
4. Confusion of letters that look alike. Mainly, changing a single letter will cause an error.
5. Confusion of words that sound alike.
6. Introduction of marginal notes
7. Deliberate tampering with the Text to support Heresy.
8. Confusion of sounds of words in the process of mass production.
9. Attempts to conflate two divergent terminologies of editions
10. Attempts to modernize biblical terminologies.

Source Criticism

Sources of information used in the Text. Authorship of a particular text will necessitate the date of Publication, the Text and place of origin, and who wrote and copied from whom.

Historical Criticism

To find out the historicism of the Text, whether there were actual accounts, internal and external evidence, chronology, sense of time, knowledge of the history of the Text, calligraphy, and manuscript dating—how long ago did this occur?

Form Criticism

Before the texts were written, they were used in oral tradition in units and were brought together. i.e., Tales, Legends, Myths, and Exhortations. Go back to the origin and classify them.

• Tales – Four types of Jesus’ miracles: Healing, Nature, Exhorism, Raising the Dead
• Legends – Stories of great people and their achievements
• Myths – Manifestation of supernatural
• Exhortation – Teaching of Jesus
• Paradigm – Events that lead to Jesus’ teachings.

Redaction

Critically examine how others have used somebody’s work and adapted it; adapt another scholar’s work. Since the rise of literary historical criticism, Western scholars have relished subjecting biblical texts to rational scrutiny based on a set critical apparatus to determine their historicity and authenticity. Many questions commonly arise from such a daring venture because the bible and scholarship attendant were taken as fait accompli.

The divine inspiration of the ScriptureScripture was taken for granted in Canonicity respected, its relevance to contemporary settings accepted, and its historicity, mainly when supported by early respected church traditions and fathers. Conservative Scholarship pursues the line of dogma and contextualization of biblical realities about contextualization challenges.

The early Church witnessed persecutions of varying degrees; it witnessed various stages of controversies, such as:

• Donatism
• Arianism
• Montanism
• Marcionism

Each of these controversies involves interpreting and explaining the Holy Scriptures. Can the Canon of the bible survive? Following the cessation of persecution under Clementine the Great and the emergence of Church-based relations, the Church under the Roman Catholic papacy slipped into a cold Catholicism only to be challenged by the protestant revolution led by Martin Luther and later John Calvin. The Protestant group has become dominant, giving birth to the Evangelical, the Orthodox, and the Pentecostal streams.

Again, the Scripture is the issue in all these emergent ecclesiastic developments. OT criticism has challenged the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, propounding the issues in the early part of the last century; severe arguments arose over what is regarded as synoptic controversy, synoptic question, or synoptic problem. Studies to unravel the synoptic problem pitched scholars into two camps: the conservative and the liberal or radical scholars. Whereas the former maintains the sacredness of Scripture by its divine Revelation, the latter sees the Scripture as an ordinary text like another piece of literature whose integrity can only be determined by the hot application of critical and scientific inquiry.

The Johannine question is one paradigm of the major issue over which scholars were severely contended in the last century. What is the Johannine question? It concerns the following questions about the person and literary works of the Gospel and Letters of John.

1. Who was the author of the Johannine literature? Did John, the son of Zebedee, write the Gospel?
2. Is the Gospel of John a unity, or did several people write it?
3. Do we have the Gospel in its original order?
4. Did the author of this Gospel know the authors of the Synoptic Gospels? In other words, did the fourth evangelist know the Synoptic?
5. How far did the discourses in John reflect the mind of Christ?
6. Where do History and Reflection begin and end in the Gospel?

Right from the beginning of the last century, scholars have been divided on this issue of Johannine literature. Williams Sengei, a British scholar close to the apostolic authorship, used it to claim that John, the son of Zebedee and the apostle of the Lord, was the author. He saw the 4th Gospel author as being at par with other apostolic authors such as Peter and Paul and as par with the synoptic. James Drummond (1903) weighs internal and external evidence and favors apostolic authorship. As the debate over authors continued, the Roman Catholic Church set up a biblical commission in 1907, which pronounced that “It is no longer a question of knowing, if the Johannine gospel had as its author the ‘beloved disciple’ John the son of Zebedee.

This point is fixed by ecclesiastical tradition”. The pastoral tradition is referenced here by the statement made by Irenaeus, one of the church fathers who commented on the authorship of the 4th Gospel, the letters of John, and the apocalypse shortly after 180 AD. Irenaeus provided information on the synoptic author, indicating that Matthew was the earliest. He also said the following about John:

“Lastly, John, the Lord’s disciple who also reclined on his breast, produced the gospel when he was staying in Ephesus in Asia.” Scholars have tried to regard such statements as legends, but this position is invalid. According to Maurice Jones (1914), the authorship of John’s Gospel is perhaps the most fascinating problem of the NT criticism, and it’s comparably the most important of them all. In 1889, Emil Schurer remarked that no other question of NT criticism is of such significance as that of the origin of the 4th Gospel, so no other question agitates people as that of Johannine’s question.

Von Hugel (1911) saw the Gospel of John as a great piece of allegorizing. For example, Mary at Canan represents the faithfulness of Israel, while the reference to Christ’s sinless role in John symbolizes Church unity. This shows us another dimension of scholars’ critical attempt not to accept the literary John as the Gospel but to reduce it to simple allegories. German scholars led to this Johannine question, as did other issues. P.W Schmiedel (1901) found Irenaeus to be in error.

According to him, the John of Asia, whom Irenaeus wrote about, was John the Elder, not John the Apostle. He claimed that the 4th evangelist was neither an apostle nor an elder. According to him, the author is an anonymous Christian of Asia who wrote after 132 AD because John 5:43 refers to Bar Cochba’s revolt, which took place about 132 AD. The Gospel lays little claims to historical value in its words. A book which begins by calling Jesus the Logos of God and ends by representing the Soldiers having fallen to the ground as to the majesty of his appearance ought not to have been taken as history”. According to him, the 4th Gospel is like seamless cloth, not to be divided but taken as a piece.

In his work Johannine Grundschrift (Basic document), Wellhausen regarded the Gospel as a Groundschrift, i.e., an original document on which a redactor has been busy. He says who was the author, John of Ephesus, John Mark, or John the Elder. He wasn’t indefinite, but the argument was that the original apostle prepared the Background of the original document and that we must find the real author out of the suggested ones. Hans Willich (Form Critic) opens another debate on the structural content and unity of the Gospel.

 According to him, “a study of John’s narrative style reveals different types of narratives, e.g., it includes the following:

1. Dramatic stories, e.g., a woman of Samaritan
2. Stories with controversies, etc., e.g., imported man Bethsaida

Rudolf Butmann, in his work (1937-41), also traces the hand of an ecclesiastical Redactor in the Johannine literature. He believed the evangelist

1. The collection of sayings in the earliest Church in Aramaic
2. The miracle stories are another source
3. Apart from these two familiar sources also used by the synoptic, he used another independent source parallel to the synoptic tradition.

W. Bacon (1933) designed 3-arms in the Gospel of John

1. John the beloved disciple who was the apostle.
2. John the Elder.
3. Another author who wrote the appendix to the original John’s Gospel

Ten years later, he wrote again, shifted his position, got rid of both the apostle and the elder, and found the author in Ephesians Christian of the 2nd century. He complained that textual dislocations were widespread and concluded that a Redactor finally wrote the present Gospel somewhere in Rome about 150AD. The debate continues, and we shall still examine other views, but we should note that other factors emerge, such as arguments of scholars and authorship and the date of texts. For example, the discovery of a fragment of the Gospel in Egypt, which experts are sure can not be later than 125 AD, makes a date for John later than 100 AD highly unlikely.

Scholarly critics have not quarreled more about the date of origin of the Johannine literature based on the conservative assumption that it was written by John the Apostle, who lived in Ephesus. Ephesus was popularly accepted as a source, although scholars like Burney, Bultmann, and T. W. Manson argued that Johannine corpus had a strong connection with Antioch, though most scholars accept Percy Gardner’s title for John’s Gospel (The Ephesians Gospel).

Let me wrap up the old issue of authorship. In the opinion of most scholars, they agree as follows that:

1. The writer was a Jew, probably of the Aramaic Jewish Palestine, who lived in a Hellenistic environment
2. If he was not the Seer “of Revelation,” he was most certainly the elder of the Epistles.

There are three possible answers still being pursued:

1. The conservative answer is that he is John, the son of Zebedee
2. A radical answer, an unknown Christian of Asia
3. The mediating answer, a disciple of apostle John

In conclusion, there is no unanimous position, and the search for an answer continues, but we must note that the radical answer ignores strong evidence from the church father, Irenaeus. It also ignored claims to eyewitness accounts in John 1:14, an explicit claim of apostolic authority. Most scholars settle for the disciple of John, specifically John the Elder, whose existence Papias testifies to. If this be so, we may argue for the terminology used by Adolf Harnack: “THE GOSPEL OF JOHN (THE ELDER) ACCORDING TO JOHN (SON OF ZEBEDEE).”

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