49. The Sacred Books of the New Testament. Historical Books, Didactic Books, and the Apocalypse

With the last apostle the last eyewitness of Christ’s deeds on earth went to the grave—that witness who “had seen His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father” (John 1:14). But with the close of the apostolic age the Church was not to be deprived of the apostolic word, for otherwise she would have been left without proper guidance in matters of faith and life, the memory of the deeds and teaching of Christ and the apostles might with the passage of time have grown dim, and through this, false teaching could have obtained still greater opportunity to cloud the bright truth of the Gospel with its human inventions. Therefore the apostles and their first followers soon came to the conviction, inspired from on high, that the true word of the Gospel proclamation should be committed to writing and thus preserved for all time. Thus arose the sacred books of the Christians, which over the course of time formed the New Testament canon—that is, the rule of faith and life of the New Testament Church. The first books were the epistles of the apostles, called forth by the necessity of instructing churches from afar; but then came also the historical books, in which was set forth in detail, for the instruction of future generations, the history of the earthly life of Jesus Christ and of His principal apostles. As in the Old Testament the dispensation of God was first carried out orally and then enclosed in the written Law, so also the New Testament dispensation was destined in time to be committed to writing—specifically, with the aim of providing an unalterable rule of faith to which one could always appeal in refuting any arising heresy. This was precisely the aim that the sacred writers of the New Testament had in view, as can be seen from their own statements. Thus St. John wrote his Gospel with the purpose “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:31). In fulfilling this great task the apostles had the highest assistance of the Holy Spirit sent to them, Who taught them all things and brought to their remembrance all that Christ had said to them, the founder of the New Testament. Therefore what they wrote has absolute truthfulness, as the beloved disciple himself declares: “This is the disciple who testifies of these things, and wrote these things; and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24).

The sacred books of the New Testament were written by various persons, at different times, and for different reasons; but since the writers were guided by the one same Holy Spirit, in the diversity of books the same truth is revealed from different sides, so that all the New Testament books, united in the canon, form as it were one whole book divided into parts. There are twenty-seven books in all in the New Testament canon, and they are divided into historical, didactic, and prophetic. To the historical books belong the four Gospels and the Book of Acts of the Apostles; to the didactic books all the apostolic epistles, numbering twenty-one; and to the prophetic books the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse. The greater part of these books were written in the Greek language, which, as the most widely spoken at that time, was the best instrument for the spreading of truth. Books written in it could be freely read by people of the most diverse nationalities—from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates—since knowledge of this language was considered a necessary mark of education among all the peoples that formed part of the Roman Empire; and even in Rome itself the educated classes not only considered it their duty to study this language and its literature, but even used it in daily life as a fashionable and refined language.

The earliest of the historical books is considered to be the Gospel of Matthew. According to tradition, it was written eight years after the Ascension, probably in Palestine. Its author is the Apostle Matthew, raised by Christ to the high apostolic dignity from the despised position of a tax collector. As a collector of dues, he was necessarily required to know how to read and write, and this knowledge, first used for the lowly task of recording collected dues, he employed after his elevation to apostleship for the written exposition of the life of that Divine Teacher Who had called him to a higher spiritual life. According to tradition, he wrote his Gospel in the Hebrew language, as he intended it for the instruction of his own people—specifically for the scribes—with the aim of showing from the Holy Scriptures that all the prophecies in the Old Testament concerning the Messiah were fulfilled in Jesus. But the Hebrew original was soon translated into Greek, and this translation, having appeared in the apostolic age and consequently under the highest oversight of the apostles or even of the Apostle Matthew himself, has a significance equal to the original. In accordance with the purpose of the Gospel, it is written with the aim of showing converted Jews that Jesus of Nazareth is the very Messiah they had been awaiting. Following all the events of the earthly life of the Savior, the Evangelist Matthew at each point notes how this or that event stands in the closest correspondence with Old Testament prophecy. Hence in his Gospel the saying constantly recurs: “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet who says” (Matt. 1:22; 2:15; 2:23, and others). Every more important communication is confirmed by a reference to the Old Testament, and there are no fewer than 65 such references in his Gospel—more than in any other evangelist—of which in 43 cases a literal quotation is given, and in the rest only an indication of the general meaning. The Gospel consists of twenty-eight chapters, begins with the exposition of the genealogy of Jesus Christ from Abraham, and ends with Christ’s farewell discourse to the apostles before the Ascension, when He commanded them to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and gave them the glorious promise to remain with them “all the days until the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20).

The Second Gospel was written by St. Mark, who in his youth bore the double name of John Mark, the latter name—fairly common among Romans—having been adopted at first as a surname but then over time having completely supplanted the first, so that in the epistles of the Apostle Paul he is mentioned only under this latter name. He was the son of the well-known Mary, in whose house the apostles assembled more than once in Jerusalem after the Ascension. It was to the house of this same Mary that the Apostle Peter came after his miraculous deliverance from prison (Acts 12:12), and it was there that at that time “many were gathered together and praying.” From this time it appears that the young John Mark became deeply attached to the chief apostle. Burning with youthful zeal to labor for Christ, he went with the Apostle Paul and Barnabas (to whom he was a nephew—Col. 4:10) as an assistant during their first great missionary journey, but could not endure all the hardships connected with it and returned home from Perga (Acts 12:25; 13:13). This circumstance later became the subject of no small quarrel between the Apostle Paul, who was dissatisfied with Mark’s breach of the obligation he had undertaken, and Barnabas, who as uncle sought to extenuate his nephew’s fault and wished to take him even on the second missionary journey, to which the Apostle Paul was firmly opposed. But this in no way diminished Mark in the eyes of the keenly discerning apostle, who later himself summoned him during his second imprisonment in Rome as a man who was needed for his ministry (2&Tim. 4:11) and who had already proved his diligence in serving the apostle during his first imprisonment (Col. 4:10; Phil. 1:24). He was precisely the link between the Apostles Paul and Peter, and from Rome he traveled—apparently on an errand from the prisoner Paul—to distant Babylon, where Peter was preaching. For the latter he was an “interpreter”—whether in the literal sense of that word, or in the sense of an expounder of the Apostle Peter’s teaching, as he appears in his Gospel, which according to tradition was written down from the very words of the Apostle Peter. From Babylon he accompanied his teacher to Rome, and after the martyrdom of the Apostle Peter was sent to preach in Egypt, where he founded a church in Alexandria, was bishop of the church he had founded, and there too suffered martyrdom. Mark wrote his Gospel at the request of the Apostle Peter’s listeners, who wished to receive from him a written exposition of the exact teaching of the chief apostle. In response to this request Mark set forth in detail all that he had heard from the Apostle Peter about the earthly life of Jesus Christ, and as a result his account is distinguished by extraordinary vividness and picturesqueness, revealing precisely the witness of the nearest eyewitness of the events described. He evidently intended his Gospel at first for Gentiles; hence it is of an entirely different character from the Gospel of Matthew. References to the Old Testament are rare in it, but various Jewish customs are frequently explained—such as the eating of unleavened bread at the feast of Passover, the washing of hands and vessels—explanations that would have been entirely superfluous for Jews, as the Evangelist Matthew indeed passes them over in silence. The Gospel was written either in Rome or in Alexandria, between the years 50 and 60. It depicts primarily the time of the triumphant ministry of the Messiah, when He went forth victoriously against sin and the wickedness of the world, and its theme is as it were the words of the Apostle Peter: “how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him” (Acts 10:38). The Gospel consists of sixteen chapters, begins with a portrayal of the appearance of John the Baptist, and ends with the account of how after the Ascension of Christ the apostles “went out and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them and confirming the word through the accompanying signs” (Mark 16:20). In it alone, among other things, is told the story of that unknown young man who, on the night of Christ’s arrest by soldiers, ran out into the street wrapped only in a linen cloth, and when one of the soldiers seized him by the cloth, he, wriggling free from the soldier’s grasp, left the cloth in his hands and fled completely naked (Mark 14:51–52). According to tradition and probable conjecture, this young man was the narrator himself—the holy Evangelist Mark—who omitted his own name.

The Third Gospel was written by St. Luke, the well-known co-worker of the Apostle Paul during his missionary journeys. The name Luke is an abbreviated form of Lucanus or Lucilius. He was a native of Syrian Antioch, but his origin is unknown. By education he was a physician, and the Apostle Paul calls him his “beloved physician” (Col. 4:14), having probably availed himself more than once of his medical skill for his various ailments that so frequently afflicted him during his great labors. But medical education was not the possession of the upper classes in antiquity, and often on the contrary was the province of slaves trained specially for this purpose. It may be supposed that he practiced medicine in seacoast cities and on ships themselves, and it was during one of the Apostle Paul’s journeys that he became for him a “beloved physician.” According to another tradition, he was also a painter, and the icons he painted are venerated by the Orthodox Church to this day as a special sacred object. It is not known exactly when he was converted to the Christian faith, but according to one tradition he was among the seventy disciples of Christ and was thus an eyewitness of the events of His earthly life. The first historical evidence of his person finds him in Troas, where he joined the Apostle Paul and shared with him the journey to Macedonia, as a result of which, in describing this journey in the Book of Acts of the Apostles, he from this point uses the first person plural “we” (Acts 16:10). His conversion certainly took place earlier, for otherwise something would have been said about it; instead he passes over his own conversion entirely in silence and joins the apostle as someone already thoroughly known to him. St. Luke traveled together with the apostles as far as the city of Philippi and apparently remained there, for he is no longer mentioned in the narrative covering the rest of the second missionary journey. During the third journey he again joined the apostle—specifically at Philippi (Acts 20:6)—and traveled with him through Miletus, Tyre, and Caesarea to Jerusalem, where he was evidently present during all the disturbances that led to the imprisonment of the Apostle Paul. From this time he no longer parted from the Apostle Paul, traveled with him to Rome, and shared all the horrors of the terrible shipwreck so vividly and in such detail described by him in the Book of Acts. After the death of the Apostle Paul, history is completely silent about him, but he evidently continued the work of his great teacher, who himself had earlier highly valued his “beloved physician” and in the second epistle to the Corinthians had spoken flatteringly of him as “the brother whose praise is in the gospel throughout all the churches” (2&Cor. 8:18). According to tradition he suffered martyrdom, thus receiving the crown like the majority of the apostles. — He wrote his Gospel apparently around the year 60 A.D. During his journeys with the Apostle Paul he had come to understand deeply his teaching as the most forceful and profound reproduction of the teaching of Christ in its manifold applications, and as an eyewitness of Christ’s deeds he knew in detail the earthly life of Christ Himself. This, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, served as his motive for writing the Gospel, which he intended in particular for a certain “most excellent Theophilus” (Luke 1:3), who evidently enjoyed great respect in the Christian Church and wished “to know the certainty of those things in which he was instructed” (Luke 1:4). Before this time the Gospels of Matthew and Mark were already in circulation, as well as various other accounts of “things which have been fulfilled among us” (Luke 1:1); but the Evangelist Luke wished “having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write to the most excellent Theophilus in orderly sequence” (Luke 1:3) the earthly life of the Savior, insofar as he himself was an eyewitness of it and had learned of it from other “eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word” (Luke 1:2). Since Theophilus was, according to conjecture, a Gentile, so too the entire Gospel was generally written for Christians from among the Gentiles. Therefore the genealogy of Christ in it is traced not merely from Abraham, as in the Gospel of Matthew, but from Adam, as the forefather of all mankind. The life of Christ is expounded primarily from its historical side, and the narrative is distinguished by circumstantiality, especially in the first chapters, where the events preceding the birth of the Savior are described. The Gospel consists of 24 chapters and ends with an account of the Ascension of Christ to heaven, after which the apostles “returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the Temple, praising and blessing God” (Luke 24:52–53).

The Fourth Gospel was written by the “beloved disciple” John, who for the height of his teaching about God the Word received in the Church the exalted title of Theologian. The Gospel was written by him in Ephesus, already in the advanced years of his life. After the destruction of Jerusalem, Ephesus had become the center of the Christian Church in the east, and at the same time was the center of intellectual life in general, since in it representatives of both Greek and Eastern thought met. There precisely taught the first heresiarch, Cerinthus, who was distorting Christianity precisely by the introduction into it of Greco-Eastern elements, which he in turn had drawn from Alexandria. Under such circumstances it was especially necessary for the Church to have a guide for its faith that would protect against the surrounding errors. Having in the person of the Apostle John one of the nearest witnesses and eyewitnesses of “the ministry of the Word,” the Christians of Ephesus began to ask him to describe for them the earthly life of the Savior. By that time the Gospels of the first three evangelists already existed, but only one of them—namely Matthew—was from among the twelve; yet even he had been called after John, and in any case did not belong to the circle of the most select disciples, to which John had been counted worthy to belong. When the Christians brought John the very books of the first three evangelists, he praised them for the truth and accuracy of their narrative, but found that much of great importance had been omitted. In narrating about Christ who came in the flesh, it is necessary to speak of His Divinity, for otherwise people will over time come to think of Christ only as He appeared in earthly life. In view of this statement the Christians asked him to write the Gospel in precisely this spirit, and he consented to their request. Therefore he began his Gospel not with an exposition of the human side of Christ’s life, but precisely the Divine side—with the indication that the incarnate Christ is the original Word, the very one that “in the beginning was with God and was itself God” (John 1:1)—that Word through which all things were made that have been made. Such an indication of the Divinity and pre-eternal existence of Christ was also necessary in view of the errors spread by Cerinthus regarding Jesus, whom he regarded as merely a simple man who had temporarily taken upon Himself the Divinity—in the period from baptism to the Passion—as well as in view of the Alexandrian false teachings about reason and the word in their application to the relationship between God and His original Word. As for the narrative itself, it serves as a supplement to the previous three Gospels. All three earlier evangelists had described primarily the ministry of Christ in Galilee, so that many important events that took place in Judea had been passed over by them in silence. Supplementing them, the Evangelist John describes primarily Christ’s ministry in Judea, narrating in particular the visits of Christ to Jerusalem on the great annual feasts together with other pilgrims. Although thus the Gospel of John does supply many events in Christ’s life left unrecorded in the earlier Gospels, yet His life is so immeasurable in its activity that, in the Evangelist John’s own declaration, if all were written in detail, even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written (John 21:25). The Gospel of John consists of twenty-one chapters and ends with Christ’s prophecy about the future lot awaiting Peter and John, as well as with the testimony of John himself that “his testimony is true” (John 21:24).

The Four Gospels together exhaust the earthly life of Christ from four perspectives, insofar as its immensity can be exhausted by divinely inspired witnesses of truth. But for the instruction of Christians it was not sufficient to describe only the life of Christ Himself, since it was the apostles who continued His work—their task consisting not only of watering the sown seed of the Gospel, but also of spreading it among all the peoples of the earth, beyond the borders of the Promised Land. Such activity could not but have a very important influence on the life of the Church, and therefore it was necessary to have knowledge of the activity of the apostles, at least in the period shortly after the Ascension of Christ to heaven. This need of the Church was met by the Evangelist Luke when, after his Gospel, he wrote a second book to the same most excellent Theophilus, known by the title “The Acts of the Holy Apostles.” This book begins from where the Gospels leave off—that is, with the account of the Lord’s Ascension, after which the apostles returned to Jerusalem and, going up into the upper room, “all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication” (Acts 1:14). In the first chapters it is described how, by the election of Matthias, the sacred number of the twelve apostles was restored—disrupted by the vile treachery of Judas—and how these disciples received the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, that Comforter Spirit Who, by the promise of Christ, was to clothe them with power from on high and remind them of all that He Himself had said to them. Then it is related how the divinely inspired apostles began to preach about the risen Christ to Jews and Gentiles, and how both were admitted into the Church. The principal agent in the early period was the Apostle Peter, upon whom fell the honor of gaining the first converts from the Jews and of bringing the first Gentiles into the Church of Christ. But since, in view of the unbelief of the majority of Jews, the Church in the future was chiefly to gather her children from among the Gentiles, God raised up a special apostle of the Gentiles—the Apostle Paul—with the description of whose labors the entire remaining portion of the Book of Acts is occupied. The “Book of Acts of the Apostles” consists of twenty-eight chapters and ends with an account of how the Apostle Paul, upon arriving in Rome as a prisoner, “lived there two whole years in his own rented house, and preached the kingdom of God and taught the things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ with all confidence, no one forbidding him” (Acts 28:30–31). This conclusion partly determines the time of its composition. It was written evidently at the time of the Apostle Paul’s first imprisonment in Rome, when, with the ever-worsening state of government in Rome, it was difficult to hope for his release from bonds, and it was therefore fitting to regard the activity of the apostle to the Gentiles as it were completed.

After the five historical books in the New Testament canon follow the seven catholic epistles of the Apostles James, Peter, John, and Jude. They are called “catholic” either because they were sent not to any one particular church but to a whole region or council of churches, or because they were sent on behalf of the universal Church. After the catholic epistles come the fourteen epistles of the Apostle Paul to various churches and persons, and the New Testament canon is concluded by the prophetic book—the Apocalypse, or “Revelation of the Holy Apostle John the Theologian.”

The Apocalypse, according to the testimony of St. Irenaeus, was written by John the Theologian “at the end of the reign of Domitian.” This was a time of persecution against Christians, and the Apostle John himself was in exile on the island of Patmos. There, in this involuntary solitude on a rocky and sparsely inhabited island, the apostle was granted the great revelation concerning the future destinies of the Church. Being “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day,” he heard a loud voice proclaiming to him: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last; what you see, write in a book” (Rev. 1:10–11). Then one “like the Son of Man” (Rev. 1:13) commanded the apostle to write letters to the angels (bishops) of the seven Asian churches, expressing in those letters praise or censure for the state of each church. From these letters it is evident what is required of the Church by her supreme Head and what deeds specifically may lead to her flourishing as well as to her decline, and in them there is sketched a Divine plan for the activity of the Church’s pastors for all ages. After the letters came a new vision: “and behold, a door standing open in heaven, and the first voice which I heard, like the sound of a trumpet speaking with me, said: come up here, and I will show you things which must take place after this.” Then follows a whole series of mysterious visions in which, under the symbols of seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls of wrath, the future destinies of the Church in history are progressively depicted. The Church was and is to endure a multitude of sorrows and calamities, but since He is with her Who said that even the gates of Hades shall not prevail against her, everything will conclude with judgment upon the serpent as the embodiment of the primordial hater of mankind and upon his servants; and then shall come the endless triumph of Christ, the marriage of the Lamb with His bride the Church, and the complete renewal of the world. “Behold, I am coming quickly, the Son of Man said in conclusion, and My reward is with Me, to give to every one according to his work” (Rev. 22:12). And the witness of all this mysterious and great revelation responded: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20)—and after him all the truly believing children of the Church who await the second coming of the Lord to judge the living and the dead repeat this.

Thus the canon of the books of Holy Scripture of the New Testament was formed. But these books were the divinely inspired embodiment of the faith of the Christian Church only in its most essential content and by no means exhausted everything that constituted the subject of that faith. Alongside Holy Scripture the Church had yet another no less important source of teaching—namely, oral tradition. By tradition is meant the entire sum of religious knowledge that did not enter into the books of Holy Scripture and remained the possession of the Church in oral transmission from one generation to another. And this sum is vast, because not even the entire life of Jesus Christ entered into the books; so many of His deeds and miracles remained unrecorded that if they were described in detail the world itself could not contain the books that would be written (John 21:25). The majority of the apostles also left no writings behind, and so all their teaching became the possession of the Church only in the form of tradition. Even those apostles who did record their teaching left much of it unrecorded, though it was highly essential for the faith (2&Thess. 2:15; 1&Cor. 11:2, and others). Some of the very books of Holy Scripture were composed by writers who—like the Evangelists Mark and Luke—were not personal eyewitnesses of all the events they describe, but described them on the basis of the oral testimony of eyewitnesses, and consequently by tradition. Hence tradition in its content is much broader than Holy Scripture and even served to define the canon and to interpret the latter. Only with the help of tradition could one determine which books had been written by the divinely inspired teachers of Christianity, as distinct from spurious compositions; and only with its help could one rightly interpret all those places in the sacred books that proved difficult to understand (2&Pet. 3:16). Being the possession of the Church, holy tradition was preserved in its purity owing to the fact that it was continuously proclaimed by pastors and maintained by the flock, was embodied in the entire structure of church life—in feasts and rites, in pious customs, in public and private prayers, in the Creed, in the canons and in the ordinances of Christian society. All this together, serving as the embodiment of tradition, was the treasury to which the Church always resorted in subsequent centuries when it was necessary to clarify this or that religious truth and to refute this or that error.