How did the New Testament get its name?

Answer 1

The word 'testament' means 'covenant' or 'solemn agreement' or 'contract'. For example, when you write your 'last will and testament' it contains the promise and agreement of who will receive your property when you die.

Therefore in The Bible, the Old Testament refers to the 'old agreement' or old contract' or 'old covenant' between God and us. This covenant was made with Noah, then Abraham and then with Moses and so on throughout Jewish history and involved sacrifice of animals for the atonement of sin and in order that a relationship between God and us coul;d be restored after we sinned. After Jesus's sacrifice on the Cross, for all of our sins, and his resurrection and ascension, this marked God's new promise with humankind in the redemption of humans through Jesus. Therefore, the part of the Bible that describes the life and teachings of Jesus and the early church history and so on is called the 'New Testament' as it describes this new covenant God gives us through Jesus.

Answer 2

A:We can be sure there was an early Christian called Paul, since there is no reasonable doubt that he wrote some of the epistles in his name. We can also be sure that there were people called Peter (Cephas), James and John, since Paul says that he met them. Paul also writes of Barnabas, Mark, Luke and many other less well known Christians. James is also mentioned by the first-century Jewish historian, Josephus.

Most Christians would say we are also sure that the names of the twelve disciples were the names of real people who followed Jesus and learnt from him. This should be all the more certain because four different gospel accounts mention the twelve disciples by name, and two of the accounts were written by actual members of that group. However, it is not that simple. The New Testament gospels were all written anonymously and were only attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John later in the second century. Modern scholars say that there is no good reason to accept those attributions, not least because the gospels could not have been written by eyewitnesses to the events portrayed in the gospels. Further, they say that Matthew and Luke were closely based on Mark, with some additional sayings material taken from the hypothetical 'Q' document. John's Gospel was inspired by Luke, with some material demonstrably taken direct from Mark. Thus, we do not have four independent accounts, but only one, with the other three accounts based on that original. Moreover two of the disciples supposedly had two different names because different names were used in different gospels - or the gospel authors were unclear as to what names the author of Mark had used. Thus we should be somewhat less certain that there were twelve disciples called by the names in the various gospel accounts, unless we know where Mark gets its information from.

The conservative Christian answer is that Mark probably got his information from the apostle Peter, but this is based on a second-century suggestion by Papias, and is not reliable. In any case, once we recognise that the author of Mark's Gospel is most unlikely to have been Paul's companion Mark, then we should abandon this hypothesis. We do know that there are some parallels between Mark's Gospel on the one hand, and Paul's earlier Epistle to the Galatians and his First Epistle to the Corinthians, and it has been suggested that some of the gospel story was inspired by the epistles. Thus, the names of Peter, James and John could have been based on the three pillars of the Christian Church that Paul found in Jerusalem.

The name Judas means Jew. Judas the traitor could well have been so named because, in the gospel story, he betrayed Jesus just as the Jews called for his crucifixion. Paul's epistles make no mention of a betrayal and actually suggest that the 'twelve' remained intact.

In Matthew's Gospel, the father of Joseph was called Jacob, just as in the Old Testament the father of Joseph was called Jacob - scholars agree that in his nativity account, this author was drawing parallels between the infant Jesus and Moses. The author of Luke's Gospel did not draw that parallel and simply named Joseph's father as Heli (Luke 3:23).

In Acts of the Apostles, St Stephen is portrayed as the first Christian martyr, but Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament) says that we can never verify the martyrdom or even existence of Stephen. However that name was arrived at, there are grounds for believing that Stephen did not really exist.

It is not possible in this format to canvass every name in the New Testament, but we should return to the Apostle Paul. It is very possible that he was also called Saul, but in his own epistles he never referred to himself by this name, which is found only in Acts of the Apostles. Some of the key passages regarding Saul in Acts of the Apostles have parallels to a Saulus whom Josephus mentions in Antiquities of the Jews, with which the author of Acts is known to have been familiar. Josephus even talked of a riot in Jerusalem, led by Saulus after the stoning of James. Although this Saulus could have inspired the author of Acts, he could not really have been the same person as Paul.

A:

The names of the books in the New Testament come from several sources; usually the name of the author of the book, the name of the person the book was written to, and the name of the community the book or letter was addressed to. Revelation was an apocolyptic work whose name means 'unveiling."