Who wrote the New Testament?

Answer 1

Answer

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and Peter did the handiwork, but the Holy Spirit moved them.

Answer

We can only be sure of the authorship of certain epistles attributed to the Apostle Paul. Most of the other New Testament books were written anonymously and only much later attributed to the apostles whose names they now bear.

• We do not know who wrote the New Testament gospels. Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament, a reference work of the Anchor Bible Series) says that it is doubted by most scholars that the gospels were written by an eyewitness of the public ministry of Jesus, but were only attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John late in the second century.
• Acts of the Apostles was written by the anonymous author of Luke's Gospel.
• Thirteen epistles have been attributed to Paul. Seven Pauline epistles are widely considered to be genuine, and of these five have been shown by computer analysis to contain exactly the same writing or dictation style: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philemon and Galatians. These were definitely written by the apostle Paul.

  The two that may, with some confidence, have been written by Paul, but do not match the style of Galatians are Philippians and 1 Thessalonians. The remaining Pauline epistles, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus were written by unknown Christian authors in Paul's name.

• We do not know who wrote Hebrews. It was at one stage attributed to Paul, but that is clearly not the case. It was never attributed to him until late in the second century.
• We do not know who wrote the other epistles: James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John or Jude, although they were attributed to the apostles with those names. We can say that John's Epistles were not written by the same author as John's Gospel.
• We do not know who wrote the Book of Revelation, although it is attributed to a person called John. However, scholars say that it could not have been written by the authors of John's Gospel or John's Epistles.