APPENDIX 1
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Paul’s letters
The earliest documents in the New Testament are some of the epistles attributed to Paul; they can be used as a check on what might be concluded from the gospels. In particular, the epistles to the Corinthians (two), Galatians, Philippians, Romans, and Thessalonians (two) are regarded as the genuine letters of Paul to the churches in the titles; they were most likely to have been written during the 50s ce. Mary is not mentioned in these epistles, although Paul confirms that Jesus was a Jew and ‘born of a woman’ (Gal. 4.4).
Mark’s Gospel
Among the gospels, Mark’s is the earliest, the only one that might have been completed before 73 CE, the end of the seven-year Jewish War of revolution against Roman rule. It is not clear that Mark’s Gospel is a ‘book’ in the sense of a finalized, complete edition, as Matthew and Luke were quite content to expand on Mark’s Gospel and amend it. In Mark, Mary is mentioned along with brothers and sisters of Jesus (although the sisters are not named). Other Marys appear in the texts involving the crucifixion, burial, and empty tomb of Jesus.
Matthew and Luke
Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source and may have been written very roughly around 80 CE, Matthew appearing first. They also used a collection of Jesus’ teachings that they seem to have shared (including sections like the Beatitudes, for example) but, if such a source existed, it is no longer in existence. Matthew and Luke include the only narratives in the New Testament about the conception, birth, and childhood of Jesus and Mary’s part in them. They also develop Mark’s information about the women at the cross and tomb. The three gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke have a good deal of material in common that leads to them being known as the ‘synoptic gospels’.
John’s Gospel
John’s Gospel was completed last, perhaps towards the very end of the first century CE, but some of the material that fed into it may be much earlier. There are clearly some traditions that John shares with Matthew, Mark, and Luke. However, it is radically different from the synoptic tradition in some areas, such as the timing of the crucifixion with respect to Passover. In John’s Gospel, Mary is referred to as ‘the mother of Jesus’ without a name; she appears in texts describing the wedding at Cana and the crucifixion. The cross and tomb stories also include other Marys.
The gospel authors
The naming of the authors of the gospels was not established until the second century among the churches; no one knows whom first-century Christians reading the original texts regarded as the authors, as they are not named in the gospels themselves. It is clear that the most important criterion in the second century was that the writer was a key witness to the ministry of Jesus in some way: thus Matthew and John were assumed to have been the disciples with these names, Mark the scribe of Peter, and Luke a physician and follower of Paul (a Mark and a Luke are mentioned in the Pauline epistles at Col. 4.10–14; 2 Tim. 4.11; Philemon v. 24; and a Mark at 1 Peter 5.13).
Acts of the Apostles
The Acts of the Apostles was clearly written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke. The presence of passages in the first person (‘we’) in Acts chapters 16, 20, 21, 27, and 28 suggests that the writer either accompanied Paul on some of his travels or that his testimony fed into the final text. Mary the mother of Jesus is mentioned just once, after the Ascension and before Pentecost at 1.14, although there is another Mary at 12.12.
New Testament letters overall
All epistles in the New Testament bar Hebrews and the three letters attributed to John are explicitly ascribed to an apostolic author: Paul, James, Jude, or Peter. It cannot be proven that these were written by the claimed authors, but the ascription of a work to an author who did not actually write it was not the fraud that it would be considered in the modern world. It was a means of honouring the person named and an attempt to discern the spirit of his teaching as applied to a later generation. We can be confident that the three letters of John were written by the same author as the Gospel.
Revelation
Revelation was the final book of the New Testament to be accepted into the canon; it was ascribed to John, but it is unlikely to have been written by the same person as the author of the epistles and gospel. It was probably written during a time of Roman persecution, and the 90s CE is the dating most favoured by scholars, but the book also refers back to suppression during the reign of Nero in the 60s CE. There is a vision of the mother of the Messiah in chapter 12, which is a mythical description of the events at the origin of the Church.
NOTE: We should also consider the development of the manuscripts on which the New Testament was written. The complete manuscripts are dated no earlier than the fourth century, when the New Testament canon was finalized. However, there are many sizeable sections of text produced in an earlier time than this, and there are also quotes from the New Testament in the work of second and third-century Christian theologians. Generally, the evidence suggests that the original books of the New Testament, written mostly in the first century, do not deviate substantially from the earliest manuscripts that we have, although some of the fine detail may have been affected by scribal alteration. There are two exceptions: Mark 16.9–20 and John 7.53–8.11, whole sections which do not appear to have been in some of the earlier manuscripts, so we can assume them to have been inserted at a later point. In the case of Mark’s Gospel, this was for the purpose of including resurrection appearances which were missing in Mark; the original form of this gospel would have been the only one where the risen Jesus is not clearly manifest in the narrative.