How Did the New Testament Come to Be?

BibleProject

BibleProject Podcast

Christianity, Old Testament, Torah, Theology, New Testament, God, Demons, Tim Mackie, Bible Study, Angels, Bible, Jesus, Spiritual Beings, Jon Collins, Religion & Spirituality, Spirit, Satan

4.8 • 18.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How the Bible Was Formed E4 — In the last three episodes of this short series, we focused on the formation of the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament. We also talked about other works of literature from the Second Temple period, known collectively as the Deuterocanon or Apocrypha. Today, we’ll finally explore yet another collection of Second Temple literature that was formed around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—the New Testament. In this episode, Jon and Tim look at the people in the early Jesus movement who wrote, collected, and distributed these biographies about Jesus and letters to churches across the Roman Empire.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is our last episode and a quick tour of how the Bible was formed.
0:09.4	In the last three episodes, we focused on the formation of the Hebrew Bible, what Christians
0:13.6	call the Old Testament. And we also looked at all the other Second Temple literature that was written,
0:18.6	some of which was incredibly important to Jesus and his disciples. Today we talk about the literature that was written, some of which was incredibly important to Jesus and his
0:21.7	disciples. Today we talk about the literature that was written after the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
0:27.7	The literature we call the New Testament. So how did the New Testament come into existence?
0:33.9	And how did it come to be placed alongside a collection that got called the Old Testament?
0:40.4	Now, there was a lot of Second Temple Jewish literature being written,
0:43.5	but what made the New Testament literature stand out was who it was about.
0:47.9	Every single one of these 27 books that are in our contemporary New Testaments
0:52.7	are about, focused on, revolve around,
0:56.6	centered on Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah of Israel and as the risen Lord of the whole
1:02.7	world. They're about a person. Jesus believed that he was fulfilling the story of the Hebrew Bible.
1:08.9	Jesus claimed that he was bringing the story and the meaning of what the Hebrew scriptures
1:14.3	are about to their fulfillment.
1:16.2	Jesus says, I didn't come to set aside the Torah and the prophets, but to fill them full.
1:21.5	Jesus told his disciples to go and teach people all over the world to follow his teachings.
1:27.0	He's commissioning his followers to go represent him.
1:31.4	And what he represents is the Torah and prophets fulfilled Jesus style.
1:36.1	We're going to look at the people named in the New Testament, the ones who wrote, collected,
1:41.0	and distributed the New Testament literature.
1:43.5	The New Testament didn't come together by the independent circulation of each document on its own.
	...

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