The Apostles and the Writing of the New Testament

The New Testament did not arrive on stone tablets from heaven. It was written over about half a century by roughly ten different authors — almost all of them Jews — to real churches facing real crises. Most of the letters were written to fix a problem. Most of the Gospels were written as the eyewitnesses began to die. Understanding how that happened strengthens our confidence in what we read on Sunday — because it was already being read on Sundays by Christians who had met the Apostles.

This lesson answers four questions: (1) Who were the Apostles? (2) What did they write, when, and for whom? (3) How did oral teaching become written Scripture? (4) How did the early church recognize which books were and were not Scripture?

“Apostle” (Greek ἀπόστολος, apostolos) means “one sent out.” In the New Testament the word carries two related meanings: the Twelve whom Jesus chose during his earthly ministry, and a wider circle of commissioned witnesses including Paul, Barnabas, and others.

The Twelve (per Matthew 10:2–4, with parallels in Mark 3, Luke 6, and Acts 1): Simon Peter, Andrew, James (son of Zebedee), John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, James (son of Alphaeus), Thaddaeus (Lebbaeus / Judas son of James), Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot. After Judas’ betrayal, Matthias was chosen by lot to replace him (Acts 1:26).

Paul (Saul of Tarsus) stands on his own line. He was not one of the Twelve; he was added by a direct commissioning of the risen Christ on the Damascus road (Acts 9). He defends his apostleship in 1 Corinthians 9:1 and Galatians 1–2, insisting that his gospel came “not from any man” but by revelation (Gal 1:12).

The New Testament as bound in our Bibles is not in chronological order. If we re-sort by approximate date of composition, we can watch the church’s self-understanding develop in real time.

Note on dating: these are the ranges most commonly given by evangelical and mainstream historical scholarship. Some conservative scholars place Mark as early as the mid 50s and John as early as the 60s. The key point: every New Testament book was probably written within one human lifetime of Jesus’ death and resurrection, by eyewitnesses or their direct associates.

For roughly twenty years after the resurrection, Christian teaching was mostly oral. The reason is not sinister; it is practical. The Apostles were alive. They could be asked. Travelling preachers carried the same story from town to town because they had heard it from the same small circle. Paul’s earliest letter (Galatians, c. AD 48) already assumes his readers know the gospel story without his having to retell it.

Three pressures pushed that oral teaching onto parchment:

This is why Luke opens his Gospel with a deliberate historical statement:

A detail often missed in our English Bibles surfaces when we read the closing greetings of Romans 16. Paul has finished the most carefully argued letter of his life. He has named twenty-seven co-workers, most of them people he wants the Roman church to greet by name. And then, tucked between verse 21 and verse 23, a voice breaks in that is not Paul’s:

Paul did not hold the pen. He dictated Romans to a scribe named Tertius, who inserts his own greeting at the end. This was standard ancient practice: the Greek term is amanuensis, a professional or trained scribe who took dictation. In the 50s AD, writing on papyrus with a reed pen was slow, skilled work. An educated traveller like Paul would dictate; a skilled scribe would inscribe. Paul is the author; Tertius is the writer. Both are real, and the New Testament wants us to know both.

Two other people move through Romans 16 who are just as essential to how we got this letter:

How we know this is a pattern, not a one-off. Paul regularly used scribes and then signed his letters personally at the end — the ancient equivalent of a signature authenticating the document:

The pattern is unmistakable. For most of a letter, Paul’s scribe writes neat professional script; then at the close Paul takes the pen and — evidently in a visibly larger, rougher hand (Gal 6:11) — signs his own greeting. This was how the Roman world authenticated a document. It also means that when we read Romans, three Christians have put ink on our manuscript: Paul the author (speaking), Tertius the scribe (writing), and Phoebe the deacon (carrying). Scripture honors each of them by name.

Peter did the same. At the end of 1 Peter he names his own amanuensis:

What this tells us theologically. The doctrine of inspiration has sometimes been imagined as a lonely apostle hearing divine dictation and writing it down. Romans 16:22 and its parallels quietly correct that picture. The Spirit worked through Paul’s mind, Tertius’s pen, and Phoebe’s feet. Inspiration is a team sport. The Apostle’s authority is not diminished by naming his scribe; it is dignified by it. And the church that received these letters received them as a letter the Lord sent us through Paul, by Tertius, in the hand of Phoebe. That is how God works with his people: in communion, with many members, none of them dispensable.

Paul’s letters were read aloud in the gathered church on the Lord’s Day (1 Thess 5:27; Col 4:16) and then copied and passed along. Colossians and Philemon were evidently carried by the same courier, Tychicus. Within a generation, churches were trading copies of the Apostles’ letters the way small churches today trade study guides.

By the time 2 Peter was written, Paul’s letters were already circulating as a recognizable collection, and being treated with the authority of Scripture:

That single Greek word — graphas — is electric. Peter (or one writing in his name) places Paul’s letters alongside the Hebrew Scriptures. Within a single apostolic generation, the apostolic writings are already being read as Scripture.

The word “canon” (Greek κανών, a measuring-reed) came to mean the authoritative list of books. A full formal list is a later development; but the instinct of canon — these writings are apostolic, Spirit-breathed, and binding on the churches — is present already in the first generation.

The Church History of Eusebius of Caesarea (c. AD 325, Book 3.25) preserves an invaluable fourth-century snapshot: he divides Christian writings into homologoumena (universally accepted), antilegomena (disputed), and rejected — giving us a window into the century just before formal conciliar action.

The New Testament reached us because a small group of first-century witnesses and their direct associates wrote it down — under persecution, while travelling, from prison cells — and because small churches scattered from Jerusalem to Rome loved it enough to copy, read, and die for it. The canon was not voted on; it was recognized, the way a mother recognizes her child’s voice on the phone. The books that made it in were the ones the churches already could not live without.

This gives us two disciplines. First, a deep confidence: the Bible we open on Sunday is not a later invention. Its earliest readers were catechumens who had shaken Peter’s hand. Second, a deep reverence: each book arrived somewhere, for someone, at a cost. We read it best when we read it as the church that first received it did — aloud, on the Lord’s Day, among brothers and sisters, expecting to be changed.