Criticism of the New Testament

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Ancient Versions of the New Testament. The New Testament is a collection of books and letters written originally in Greek, which it seemed good to the Christian Church to place side by side with the Sacred Books that the Church had inherited from the Jews. A generation after the crucifixion of our Lord...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Ancient Versions of the New Testament. The New Testament is a collection of books and letters written originally in Greek, which it seemed good to the Christian Church to place side by side with the Sacred Books that the Church had inherited from the Jews. A generation after the crucifixion of our Lord the Church had already become to a great extent a Greek-speaking community, and the process was completed by the great catastrophe of the Jewish War. The Church of Jerusalem practically ceased to exist, and the Aramaic-speaking Christianity of Palestine perished with it. It is not too much to say that for more than two generations after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus the Christian Churches were communities of people who spoke Greek and very little else. This is the dark age of Christianity. At the THE CHURCH IN ROME 69 close of the period, that is to say about the middle of the second century of our era, the Catholic Church emerges, undeveloped indeed, but still recognisably the same as the Church of succeeding ages in its organisation, its theology, and its sacred books. The New Testament of the latter half of the second century is in its main features?the Four Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles of Saint Paul?identical with the New Testament which we receive to-day. It was about this time, during the latter half of the second century, that Christian communities sprang up in which Greek was a foreign tongue. For a long time, we do not know how long, the Church in Rome was a Greek-speaking body. The early Bishops of Rome had Greek names. The letter of S. Clement of Rome, written about the end of the first century to the Christians of Corinth, is in Greek. Justin Martyr, who lived at Rome about the middle of the second century, wrote in Greek; so also did his c...