New Testament

The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian Bible. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events relating to first-century Christianity. The first division, known as the Old Testament (based primarily on the Hebrew Bible), together with the New Testament constitutes the sacred scripture of Christianity. The New Testament is a collection of 27 Christian texts written in Koine Greek by various authors. It includes four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, epistles attributed to Paul and other authors, and the Book of Revelation. The New Testament canon developed gradually over the first few centuries of Christianity through a complex process of debate, rejection of heretical texts, and recognition of writings deemed apostolic, culminating in the formalization of the 27-book canon by the late fourth century. It has been widely accepted across Christian traditions since Late Antiquity. Literary analysis suggests many of its texts were written in the mid-to-late first century. There is no scholarly consensus on the date of composition of the latest New Testament text. The earliest surviving New Testament manuscripts date from the late second to early third centuries AD, with the possible exception of Papyrus 52. The New Testament was transmitted through thousands of manuscripts in various languages and church quotations and contains variants. Textual criticism uses surviving manuscripts to reconstruct the earliest recoverable text and to trace the history of its transmission. It has varied reception among Christians today. It is regarded as inspired holy scripture by the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, evangelicals and many other Protestants. Catholics and Orthodox receive the New Testament together with sacred tradition as a source of divine revelation, whereas Protestants hold that doctrine is to be derived from scripture alone, without tradition. Evangelicals and some other Protestants believe the New Testament, as...