The Bible - a thumbnail sketch: Part Seven - Introduction to the New Testament

Over the years I’ve had many Bibles; I still do. Some have fallen apart, others I‘ve given away, but I still have a few old favourites. There have been translations, and I even have three Hebrew Tanakhs and a couple of Greek New Testaments, so I’m quite familiar with Bibles. And one thing about modern Bibles is that, whatever they say on the cover, they tend to contain more than just the Holy Bible. If you have a Bible anything like mine you’ll know what I mean. Most Bibles nowadays have a couple of flyleaves, a page or two of copyright, a table of contents and mine at least has several pages of introduction and acknowledgement, 38 pages of notes and introduction, plus a glossary and several further pages of charts and explanatory material, and that’s before you even et to the Bible. After it, you encounter an extensive concordance, some more notes and a few maps. Such Bible aids and add-ons can be useful and even invaluable, but there is one page in my Bible and almost every other that is quite unnecessary. Ripping it out would lose nothing of value because it is redundant and neither inspired nor any part of Scripture, yet there it is; at least a page in most Bibles, the leaf between Malachi and Matthew’s Gospel that separates the Old and New Testaments.

The point is God didn’t put it there - man did - thereby creating an artificial separation in the Holy Scriptures that is not there in reality.

As already mentioned in Part One, the Hebrew Tanakh differs from the Christian Old Testament in its arrangement, not its content. The 39 books of our Old Testament are the 22 scrolls of the Tanakh, which are:

 

Torah:

 

Scroll 1 - Genesis;

Scroll 2 - Exodus;

Scroll 3 - Leviticus;

Scroll 4 - Numbers;

Scroll 5 - Deuteronomy

 

Navi’im:

 

Scroll 1 - Joshua and Judges;

Scroll 2 - Samuel, First and Second Kings;

Scroll 3 - Isaiah;

Scroll 4 - Jeremiah;

Scroll 5 - Ezekiel;

Scroll 6 - Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi

 

 

Ketuvim:

 

Scroll 1 - Psalms;

 Scroll 2 - Proverbs;

Scroll 3 - Job;

Scroll 4 - Song of Songs;

Scroll 5 - Ruth;

Scroll 6 - Lamentations;

Scroll 7 - Ecclesiastes;

Scroll 8 - Esther;

Scroll 9 - Daniel;

Scroll 10 - Ezra-Nehemiah;

Scroll 11 - First and Second Chronicles

Differently ordered from our Old Testament, but entirely familiar to most Christians, they comprise what are often considered the Jewish Scriptures of the Hebrew Bible, as opposed to the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament. This is entirely wrong, because the whole Bible is the work of Hebrew writers and, when Paul famously wrote 2 Timothy 3:16-17, there was no New Testament, only The Tanakh, or its Greek translation The Septuagint:

All Scripture is God-breathed, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfected, thoroughly furnished to every good work.

The New Testament and New Covenant are not the same. For Christians, the Bible is made up of 66 books, not just the 27 Greek Scriptures we call the New Testament. And even here misunderstanding arises over what we actually mean by New Testament. Messianic believers, who recognise Yeshua as Messiah and Son of God but don’t label themselves Christian, often use a Hebrew translation of the New Testament they call B’rit Hadashah, (literally, The New Covenant) which can also add to the misunderstanding. This is because the Greek word translated Testament is diathé ké , which is generally interchangeable with Covenant, especially in the old King James or Authorised Version. However, this usage when applied to the last 27 books of the Bible has led many to wrongly infer that New Testament and New Covenant are synonymous: that the New Testament is the New Covenant, whereas this is substantially incorrect. Rather, In modern usage the New Testament refers to the exclusively Christian portion of the Holy Bible, whereas the New Covenant as a specific entity is we find revealed in the New Testament but is not the whole book.

Remarkably, we find the first mention of the New Covenant in the Old Testament, where it is famously prophesied in Jeremiah 31:31-33:

"Behold, the days are coming,” declares Yahweh, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband,” declares Yahweh. “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares Yahweh: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

This New Covenant that Jeremiah prophesied, is the very one we see ratified in the Messiah’s blood at Cross, as Jesus himself confirmed at the Passover Seder which Christians call the Last Supper, when he took the Redemption Cup of wine, gave thanks and said:

For this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. (Matthew 26:28)

When Jesus fulfilled these words on the Cross, he ratified the Covenant which Jeremiah promised would supersede the Old Covenant of the Ten Commandments that Moses had ratified with animal blood in Exodus 24:3-8.

If all of this seems a little bit academic and irrelevant, think again. Because the failure to understand that the New Covenant does not begin in Matthew Chapter 1 has caused no end of confusion in the Church for centuries. This is an extremely important principle when it comes to understanding the first four books of the New Testament that we call the Gospels.

In the next five parts of this series our whistle-stop tour of the New Testament will continue with a closer look at the Gospels and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, the latter being written by Gospel writer Luke. For this reason some consider Luke and Acts as effectively, First and Second Luke. However, they are separated by the Gospel of John because to place them together after John’s Gospel would have split up the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, whereas placing them together before John’s Gospel would have disjointed the Gospel flow with the account of the early Church in Acts.

The New Testament begins with those Gospels which introduce us to Jesus and demonstrate both who he is and how he fulfilled the hundreds of Old Testament prophecies that foretold his coming. They speak of his ministry and above all his message, which is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. The New Covenant is not actually ratified until nearly the end of all the Gospel accounts. In other words, the New Testament does not commence with the New Covenant, but begins with the Gospels which culminate in it. The New Covenant is the means by which God has enabled man to re-enter his kingdom; a kingdom from which Adam was expelled but which was first established in Genesis 1:26, thus:

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creepers creeping on the earth.”

So, the distinction between what we call the New Testament and the Bible calls the New Covenant is a vital one to understand. The fact is the New Covenant is foreshadowed all over the Old Testament, while the Old Covenant is only finally fulfilled in the New Testament. When we fail to understand the difference, much of what Jesus taught can be misapplied because much of what he said was directed at an Old Covenant audience. It could not have been otherwise. And it is not until nearly the end of his ministry that he revealed to his disciples a vital key to the rest of the New Testament, in John 16:12-15:

“I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when he, the Spirit of Truth, has come, he will guide you into all truth. For he shall not speak of himself, but whatever he hears, he shall speak. And he will announce to you things to come. He will glorify me, for he will receive of mine and will announce it to you. All things that the Father has are mine. Therefore I said that he will take of mine and will announce it to you.”

Jesus was speaking of the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, whom no-one could receive until the New Covenant had been established in his Blood. The Cross changed everything and Jesus’ Resurrection confirmed it. That’s why we have the rest of the New Testament; because if we only had the four Gospels, we would only have part of the story and, as vitally important as they are, they do not constitute everything God that wants us to know about what his Son Jesus purchased for us on the Cross and made available to his children.

The Book of Acts, was written by the same man as the third Gospel account (a physician called Luke) and it has been postulated that both were produced in order that they might be presented in court as a legal defence of the Apostle Paul, who was tried as a criminal by the Roman authorities, on charges relating to his Christian ministry. As such, it is inextricably linked to the Gospels and quite distinct from the epistles.

Such teachings emerged as the Holy Spirit moved among the early Church and revealed the more of the relationship between the Gospel and the Kingdom of God to his people, through the apostles writings in the form of epistles. An epistle is a letter, but not just any letter. It was one that was literally in the Greek, ‘sent on the occasion of’. In other words, it was a letter written in response to some query or need and intended for wider distribution.

By far the greatest number of these which survive are those of the apostle Paul, but we also have epistles by James, Peter and John, as well as an anonymous letter addressed to the Hebrews.

Finally, we have The Revelation or The Unveiling, which is the Greek Apocalupsis literally means. It was written by John in a style that was familiar to every Biblically literate Jewish believer, unsurprisingly known as the apocalyptic style, which is found frequently among the writings of the Old Testament prophets.

As it speaks of times at the very End of the Age, Revelation is placed at the very end of the Christian Bible, but this is more than a formality. It is also, as we saw in Part One, a fulfilment of Jesus’ words in Revelation 22:13, where he says of himself:

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the Ending, the First and the Last.”

And again in Revelation 3:14, where he is described thus: And to the angel of the church of the Laodicea write:

‘The Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Head of the creation of God, says these things’.

Words which are fulfilled in the identification of Jesus as it is written: as the First and Last Words of Scripture, which are Bereshith (In-the-Beginning) and Amen.