New Testament Literature

The New Testament contains 27 separate writings or "books." Several types of writings are included.

Gospels | The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all tell the story of Jesus' life, ministry, death and resurrection.

Historical Narrative | The Acts of the Apostles describes the activities of the followers of Jesus in the first decades after his death and resurrection. About half of Acts chronicles the missionary work of Paul, who had not been one of the original disciples of Jesus.

Letters | Of the 27 books in the New Testament, 21 are in the form (more or less) of letters. Of these 21, 13 bear the name of Paul.

Apocalypse | The Greek word, apocalypsis, means "revelation." The gospels and Paul's letters have apocalyptic sections in them, and other Christians wrote apocalypses in the early church, yet the book of Revelation is the only full-length apocalypse in the New Testament.

Grouping Practice Activities

If there are only four types of literature in the New Testament, why does Into the New Testament have six different sections to choose from when you are practicing exegesis? The answer has to do with three things. The grouping here is based not only on (1) type of literature, but also on (2) similarities between books and (2) probable authors.

Here are comments on how and why the practice activities are grouped the way they are.  To find out more about the book or collection of books introduced here, click on the heading.

The gospel according to ________.
Nowhere do the gospels bear the name of their authors. However, two disciples' names (Matthew and John) and two names of followers not among the twelve (Mark and Luke) have been associated with the books since at least the second century.

Synoptic Gospels

We might practice exegesis by grouping together all four gospels, but there's a better way. Both in terms of structure and content, the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are all much more like each other than any of the three is like John.

In fact, the first three are called the synoptic gospels because it is as if "seeing together" (syn + optic) as they tell their stories. So the synoptic gospels get their own category for practice exegetical activities.

The Gospel and Letters of John

Into the New Testament's second category is "The Gospel and Letters of John." I decided to put these writings together because their themes, key words and way of talking about what God has done in Jesus are quite similar to each other. We do not know if these books were all written by the same person, but we can tell from their content that they were written by people who "spoke the same language," as it were, when it came to making sense of Jesus.

Acts

Acts gets its own category since it is the only non-gospel narrative book in the New Testament.  Since the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts were written by the same person, sometimes in your exegesis of Acts, you will look back at Luke's Gospel to see how material there connects with what you are seeing in Acts.

Letters of Paul

Thirteen letters bear Paul's name; Paul's authorship of seven of those thirteen is called "undisputed." In short, everyone agrees Paul wrote these seven:

• Romans
• 1 Corinthians
• 2 Corinthians
• Galatians
• Philippians
• 1 Thessalonians
• Philemon

About the other six letters that bear Paul's name, there is widespread disagreement about exactly what role Paul may have had in their writing.

• Did he dictate them verbatim, as he had done with his other letters?
• Did he perhaps work with a more self-directed assistant/scribe on these other letters, which might explain vocabulary and stylistic differences?
• Were some or all of these letters written by his students, which might explain not only stylistic differences by also theological ones?
• If the letters were written by students, were they written before or after his death?

Reasonable, thoughtful Christians and others disagree about the answers to these questions. Into the New Testament's practice activities do not require you make a judgment on the question of whether Paul was equally involved in the writing of all the New Testament letters that bear his name. I believe that he had actually died before at least a few of them were written, but you do not have to agree to work through activities here.

The question of authorship will occasionally arise as we interpret the letters. At some points in the practice activities, I will point out differences in results of interpretation that surface when we consider either just a part of the Pauline corpus or the whole corpus.

Later Pauline Letters

Under the category of Pauline Letters, Into the New Testament includes practice activities on these later Pauline letters. They bear Paul's name, but some scholars think that some or all of the letters in this list were written by people imitating Paul:

• 2 Thessalonians
• Colossians
• Ephesians
• 1 Timothy
• 2 Timothy
• Titus

Hebrews & Other Letters

While we call Hebrews a letter, it is less like a letter than it is a sermon whose theme is the direct access that humans have to God through Christ, our "great high priest" (Heb 4:14). The letter has sometimes been associated with the apostle Paul, but it does not claim be authored by him, and from the earliest centuries of Christianity, commentators have recognized its differences in style and substance from Paul's writing. The church father, Origen (185-254 CE) is supposed to have said, "Only God knows who wrote Hebrews."

The New Testament books of James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John and Jude are also known as the "Catholic Epistles" because they envision a wider, general audience than Paul's letters, which were written to particular communities. (One of the meanings of "catholic" is "universal" or "of broad scope.") Since you will be reading texts from the Johannine letters in another section of Into the New Testament's practice activities, I've placed activities that work with texts from James, Jude and 1 & 2 Peter into a group called simply, "other letters."

Revelation

Spell Check: Revelation
The last book of the New Testament is called Revelation. There is no book called "Revelations" (with an "s") in the New Testament.

The Revelation to John is a special type of literature in which a seer comforts and challenges an oppressed or persecuted group by writing down what has been revealed to him or her about the vindication of the elect at the end of time. Revelation gets its own set of Into the New Testament practice activities.

What's Next

Click on one of the literature titles above for more background on that part of the New Testament, or click the next button to go to the Activity Grid and choose a problem to start working on.

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