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Which Books Make Up the New Testament? 59
ministry of the Spirit. “He will glorify me.” The promise that the Holy
Spirit would reveal the glory of Christ alerts us to the way Scriptures
would be confirmed in the life of the early church. The light of that
glory would shine through the inspired word into the hearts of God’s
people and verify the divine origin and character of the Scriptures
(2 Cor. 4:4–6).
Paul and the Twelve
The apostle Paul was not one of the original twelve apostles. But he
wrote thirteen of the twenty-seven books that are now our New Testament.
The place of his foundational authority in the early church, along
with the Twelve, was fully established during his lifetime. But it was
not unchallenged. How did he come to have this apostolic authority?
Paul was called by the risen Christ to be an apostle to the Gentiles
(non-Jews). Paul began one of his earliest letters this way: “Paul, an
apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and
God the Father, who raised him from the dead” (Gal. 1:1). At first, this
was a suspicious surprise to the Twelve. But after a meeting together
Paul reports,
When they [Peter, James, and John] saw that I had been entrusted
with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted
with the gospel to the circumcised (for he who worked through Peter
for his apostolic ministry to the circumcised worked also through
me for mine to the Gentiles), and when James and Cephas and John,
who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me,
they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we
should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. (Gal. 2:7–9)
So Paul was accepted and affirmed by the Twelve as a genuine apostle
of the risen Lord Jesus. Paul himself was utterly stunned by the risen
Jesus breaking into his life on the Damascus Road as he was persecuting
Christians (Acts 9:1–9). He acknowledged that the risen Christ had
appeared “to Cephas [another name for Peter], then to the twelve. Then
he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of
whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared