The New Testament as Jewish Literature

What Is the New Testament?

The New Testament, or New Covenant, is the portion of the Christian Bible dealing with the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the development of the early Jesus movement. It consists of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which tell the story of Jesus’ life, crucifixion, and resurrection; the Acts of the Apostles, which narrates the emergence of the early Jesus movement; twenty-one letters, or epistles; and the book of Revelation, a visionary work about the coming of Christ at the end of days. These writings are not included in the Jewish Bible and are not considered scriptural by most Jews. However, many have Jewish authors, and all are rooted in the Judaism of the Roman period, in which Christianity first emerged as a Jewish sect. Jesus’ teachings, his followers’ belief that he was the Messiah, his disciples’ accounts of his resurrection, and the New Testament’s many discussions of the end of days all assume knowledge of Jewish scriptures and can only be fully understood in the context of ancient Judaism.

The excerpts from the New Testament included in the Posen Library have been selected for the light they shed on the Judaisms of late antiquity, particularly that of the Jewish followers of the early Jesus movement. While Jews of this period revered the same scriptures and shared many core beliefs and practices, they also differed on many matters, ranging from beliefs about the afterlife to the details of ritual purity law. Jesus and his early followers, including the authors of the New Testament, took part in these debates. As Christianity spread to a growing number of gentiles, the question of whether and how to maintain Jewish practices such as circumcision, adherence to dietary laws, and observance of the Sabbath and festivals became more acute. Yet even as Paul and other early church leaders argued that gentile Christians had access to salvation without conversion to Judaism or adherence to Jewish law, they did so by interpreting Jewish scriptures, which became part of the Christian Bible as the Old Testament.