Scripture and God in Christianity

of a single century, under the auspices of disciples of Jesus or their immediate successors. The
collection is unlike the Koran in that it contains not a word written by the founder of the community,
though his spoken words are recorded by evangelists and apostles and reflected in almost all
the documents." 18
The New Testament, as said, consists of twenty seven different books written by different individuals
at various places, communities, and times. It has four widely known Gospels: the three
Synoptic Gospels, as the term has been commonly used for Matthew, Mark, and Luke since the
nineteenth century, and the fourth Gospel of John, the Acts of Apostles, fourteen Pauline Epistles
(the Greater as well as Pastoral) i.e., Romans, I & II Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians,
Colossians, I & II Thessalonians, I & II Timothy, Titus, Philemon and Hebrews, and the
seven "Catholic" (meaning "universally accepted") Epistles i.e., the letters of James, I & II Peter,
I, II & III John, Jude and finally the book of Revelation.
The New Testament with its present shape, number, and order, was not available to the early
Christians for centuries after the departure of Jesus and his disciples. The New Testament writings,
observes Clarke, were "written for the special needs of particular groups of people, and the
idea of combining them into one authoritative volume was late and not in the mind of the authors.
Christians, therefore, and the Christian Church might conceivably have gone on indefinitely
without Christian scriptures." 19 One of the leading factors may had be the existence of an
already compiled Hebrew Bible. "Throughout the whole patristic age", observes Kelly, "as indeed
in all subsequent Christian centuries, the Old Testament was accepted as the word of God,
the unimpeachable sourcebook of saving doctrine." 20 The compilation, collection, and identification
of this particular group of writings (the canonization process) as a distinct and authoritative
entity resulted from a complex development within the Christian Church. It took the Church 367
years to produce a list of writings and a canon that would contain all the present day (New Testament)
canonical writings. The oldest indisputable witness to the New Testament canon is Athanasius,
a fourth century bishop of Alexandria. 21 He in his Easter letter of 367 wrote, "Forasmuch
as some have taken in hand, to reduce into order for themselves the books termed apocryphal,
and to mix them up with the divinely inspired scriptures... it seemed good to me also ... to set before
you the books included in the Canon, and handed down and accredited as Divine." 22 The list
that follows this prologue then contains the twenty seven books of our present New Testament
though not in the same order. 23 These books are, according to Athanasius, "the springs of salvation,
so that he that is thirsty can fill himself with the ( divine ) responses in them; in these alone
is the good news of the teaching of the true religion proclaimed." 24
The New Testament scholars differ widely over the process of compilation, authors, places,
sources, dates, and history of the New Testament canon. The traditional or Orthodox scholars attribute
almost all the New Testament writings to the disciples or the immediate apostles; therefore
declaring the New Testament as an absolutely authentic and inspired work of the disciples or
apostolic age, the first century A.D. For instance, R. L. Harris claims, that "It seems clear that the
New Testament books arose in the latter half of the first century A.D., and almost all of them
were clearly known, reverenced, canonized, and collected well before a hundred years had
passed." 25 Philip Scaff is more specific regarding this issue: "Nearly all the books of the New
Testament were written between the years 50 and 70, at least twenty years after the resurrection
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