(Koine Greek, not modern Greek)

After finishing the Septuagint, I decided that the logical next step would be to read the entire Greek New Testament to get a better sense of the way that the Septuagint was quoted and drawn on. I had read several of the books in the GNT before, but I had never read all of them in Greek, and several I had never even read in English, so over the last few days I corrected that situation.

I am very glad that I did read the GNT immediately after the Septuagint. Certain words and phrases that are used in the GNT took on new meaning because they were the exact same words that were used in a slightly different context in the Septuagint. Some of the terms that took on new meaning are controversial ones, like the word “justification”. When Paul talks about “justification”, he uses the term the same way it is used in the Septuagint, where it is always brought up as a metaphor: just as gold is justified (purified) by heating it, so faith is justified (purified) when it is tested. The concept, which has set Catholic and Orthodox Christians at odds with Protestants, takes on a different texture when we see its origins in metallurgy.

However, even simpler words and phrases acquired new context, and the end result was that the New Testament seemed to be a continuation of the Old in a way that it hadn’t even when I had read the Septuagint. Whatever one’s opinion of Christianity may be, the authors of the New Testament books knew their Judaism and they used the Old Testament to their full advantage to prove that Jesus was the promised Messiah. As I said when reviewing the Septuagint, it is clear that the Jewish community abandoned the Greek translation of their texts after Christianity arose, because the Greek of the Old Testament is clearly and unambiguously in favor of the Christians. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians almost certainly sowed massive dissent in the Jewish community. I found it far more pointed and convincing than the Epistle to the Hebrews, which made a far more attenuated argument for Jewish conversion in more obtuse terms.

As with the Septuagint, the style and tone of the Greek used varied wildly. Matthew reads very much like the Septuagint books of the Torah, with Hebrew-style syntax, while some of the letters are written in full high classical style, much like the later books of the Maccabees were in the Septuagint. Ultimately, I enjoyed the style of the books supposedly authored by John the best – the Gospel of John, the letters ascribed to John and the Apocalypse of John, also known as the Book of Revelation.

From the standpoint of quality, the Gospel of John was far and away the best book in the New Testament and, in my opinion, in the entire Bible. I also enjoyed the other gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, even though the latter book was a bit uneven. Paul’s Letter to the Romans was magisterial and probably deserves to be considered a fifth gospel of sorts. I also found that 1 Corinthians and Galatians were wonderful. Other books, like the letters to the Thessalonians, the letters of Peter and the so-called Pastoral Letters, were incredibly tedious. I am also at a loss as to what value the very shortest of the letters actually bring to the Bible, such as Titus, Philemon, 2 John, 3 John, Jude and a few others.

It is interesting that the New Testament places a different emphasis on faith and proper conduct than the Old Testament does. The notions of charity remain, but there is a real fear that comes through, particularly in the Pauline letters, that the newly minted Christian communities are susceptible to reverting to pagan ways, especially considering that the Early Church’s formulation of the “New Covenant”, promised in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and elsewhere, involves a suspension of many of the Jewish purity laws, including the dietary prohibitions (also supported by the gospels, as Christ says that it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles a person, not what goes in) and circumcision. Paul goes to great lengths to emphasize that Christians can eat anything as long as they don’t know that it was dedicated to a pagan god. He even recommends that Christians not ask pagan friends, because only if they ask and learn that food was dedicated are they prohibited from eating it.

It seems that many of the statements that cause the most consternation, such as the anti-homosexual statements found in Romans, 1 Corinthians and Jude, are the product of this concern. They are almost always mentioned in a list of activities that show “reversion” to pagan ways and apostasy, along with idolatry. At the same time, many of the earlier writings betray the expectation that many seemed to have that the Second Coming would happen within a few years of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and there was an effort to encourage total chastity as a means of ensuring that baptized Christians didn’t sin carnally in what was thought to be a brief period of waiting for the End Times. The proto-communist nature of many Christian communities reflects this consensus – after all, if the end is coming soon, does it matter if one gives away all one has to the community? Who needs to worry about the future at all? It is unclear how much this general feeling contributed to statements about submission to authority, the permissiveness with respect to slavery and other statements that cause problems in the modern world.

Some of the later letters address this point and reiterate the gospels’ injunctions that no man can know when the Second Coming will occur. However, when these points were made no further authoritative statements were made regarding sexual relations, private property or power dynamics. As a result, religious communities have come up with widely divergent views on many contentious issues, and the Bible has been used on both sides to support radically opposed opinions.

It seems to me that all of these arguments are really beside the point. Taking the key themes of books like the Gospel of John and Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the fundamental points of Christianity are encompassed in the notion of loving one’s neighbor and even one’s enemy, and the idea that faith removes sin. Because I am not a Protestant, I would add the admonition from the Letter of James that faith without works is dead faith.

It was a fast read – a little over a week, in contrast with three months for the Septuagint, but the New Testament is much shorter than the Old, and the Old Testament of the Septuagint is longer than the Protestant Old Testament that most people are familiar with. All I can do now is quote Christ from John 19:30: Τετελεσται. It is finished.