The New Testament comprises the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline epistles, various other epistles, and the Book of Revelation. They were gathered together in a long process beginning at some point a few decades after Jesus’s death, when the first of these documents was written (the early epistles of Paul) and solidifying into a canon similar to one we would recognize today at some point in the fourth century AD.Like so many other good things, the term ‘the New Testament’ comes from Tertullian. The fiery theologian wrote in his Against Marcion (c.AD 208):
For it is certain that the whole aim at which he has strenuously laboured even in the drawing up of his Antitheses, centres in this, that he may establish a diversity between the Old and the New Testaments, so that his own Christ may be separate from the Creator, as belonging to this rival god, and as alien from the law and the prophets.Tertullian was writing in Latin, and so his original phrase was ‘novum testamentum’: this was influenced ultimately by the Hebrew of Jeremiah where a related phrase was used to describe a ‘new covenant’ with God. The key development here - which Tertullian helped to bring about, along with other 2nd/3rd-century writers - was to make the shift from thinking about the new testament/covenant as a divine-human pact, to seeing it as a concrete collection of canonical books.
Consulted:
Stevenson, J., ed: A New Eusebius, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church to AD 337 (1957)
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Hmmmmm....
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