The World's Greatest Book by Lawrence H. Schiffman

Author:Lawrence H. Schiffman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Worthy Publishing
Published: 2017-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

So, the first three centuries of Christianity were marked by continual, often intense persecution. The church didn’t get a respite until Constantine become emperor in 313 CE. But attacks from without weren’t the church’s only problem. The church also had to deal with spiritual confusion that likely prompted many of the New Testament epistles (letters). The apostles began corresponding with congregations and church leaders—answering a host of spiritual questions and weighing in on a number of fierce theological debates, many of which revolved around the nature of Jesus.

Thus, over the final half of the first century, in addition to the accepted Jewish Scriptures (the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible), a number of newer writings began to circulate among the churches.

There were the Gospel records from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, explaining who Jesus was and what he said and did. There was the book of Acts, Luke’s carefully researched history of the early church, highlighting key events through approximately 60–61 CE. There were twenty-one pieces of epistolary literature (letters attributed almost entirely to Paul, John, Peter, and James). Some of these letters contained broad theological teaching; others gave practical instructions for personal piety and corporate worship. Finally, there was the cryptic book of Revelation, an apocalyptic prophecy traditionally attributed to the apostle John.

By about 100 CE or soon after, all twenty-seven books of what is now known as the New Testament had been written and sent by apostles to congregations or church leaders. But in a primitive era with no copying machines, no FedEx, and no Internet, these writings were scattered over much of the Roman Empire and to the East as well. It would be years, decades even, before Christian communities in other parts of the world had copies of all the writings included in the New Testament canon.

Early copies also began appearing in other languages, with perhaps the earliest being a harmony of the Gospels in Syriac, by Tatian around 170 CE, known as the Diatessaron. Two partial copies of an Old Syriac Version of the Gospels from the fifth century CE survive, as well as a Peshitta (or “simple” and without textual comments) version of much of the Old and New Testaments, also from the fifth century. Around 350 manuscript copies of the Peshitta exist.

Around the same time the Peshitta first appeared, various Coptic Old and New Testament manuscripts were being copied in Egypt, indicating likely translations from the Greek in the third century CE. We saw earlier that some Coptic manuscripts from Nag Hammadi created sensational interest. Some of the Nag Hammadi texts built on earlier copies of the Bible. Besides Greek copies of the New Testament, known in large part from discarded materials from the Oxyrhynchus dump site, these Egyptians also had various copies in Coptic. Some of the most recognized ones today, because of their early dates and state of preservation, are the Bodmer Papyri (named for Martin Bodmer, who purchased them). These were found in 1952 not far from the Nag Hammadi site, and many were taken to Switzerland and the Chester Beatty Library.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.