How Did the New Testament Come to Be?

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.

CHAPTERS

1. The Fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures (0:00-13:51)
2. What the Gospels Are and How They Came to Be (13:51-25:42)
3. The Crew Who Shaped the New Testament (25:42-47:19)
4. The Letters That Lasted (47:19-52:35)
5. Sacred Scribal Abbreviations (52:35-1:05:01)
6. Conclusion to Series (1:05:01-1:08:15)

OFFICIAL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

View this episode’s official transcript.

REFERENCED RESOURCES

• The Didache
• Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham
• The Formation and Significance of the Christian Biblical Canon: A Study in Text, Ritual and Interpretation by Tomas Bokedal
• Check out the The Deuterocanon / Apocrypha video series.
• You can view annotations for this episode—plus our entire library of videos, podcasts, articles, and classes—in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.
• Check out Tim’s extensive collection of recommended books here.

SHOW MUSIC

• “at the pictures” by Lofi Sunday, Cassidy Godwin
•  “little adventures” by Lofi Sunday, Cassidy Godwin
•  “Church Pew ft. Oly.Lo, WISDM-02” by Lofi Sunday
•  “Yo-05” by Lofi Sunday, Just Derrick
• BibleProject theme song by TENTS

SHOW CREDITS

Production of today’s episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer, and Cooper Peltz, managing producer. Tyler Bailey is our supervising engineer, who edited today’s episode and provided the sound design and mix. JB Witty does our show notes, and Hannah Woo provides the annotations for our app. Our host and creative director is Jon Collins, and our lead scholar is Tim Mackie. 

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