How Was the New Testament Written?
If you live in a culture in which most people are able to read and to write, it’s easy to make wrong assumptions about what it meant to be an author in ancient times.
Have you ever wondered exactly how the texts in the New Testament were written? Did Paul sit down with a fountain pen and a piece of papyrus? Did Peter and James sketch out an outline before they wrote their letters? And what caused the apostles to write their letters in the first place?
The earliest texts about Jesus began to be produced in the mid-first century. The purpose of this first wave of writings — the epistles of Paul and perhaps James — wasn’t to provide people with fresh information about Jesus. The recipients of these epistles had already heard and received the most central claims of the Christian message. The goal was to apply the message of Jesus in the lives of people who had already committed their lives to Jesus, and these texts from the eyewitnesses and their close associates carried the same authority in the churches as the words of Jesus himself (1 Corinthians 14:37).
How People Wrote Back Then Wasn’t the Same as How You Write Today
If you write an email today, you’ll most likely compose and send the email without anyone else’s help. That’s because you’re completely capable of formulating the sentences and typing the words, and the World Wide Web will take care of delivering your electronic epistle.
It wasn’t that way in the first century.
In the first century, it wouldn’t have been uncommon for an epistle or literary production to require a team of trustworthy men and women to write and to convey the words from the author to a community of recipients.
In the first place, it’s unlikely that Peter or James or Paul ever sat down with a pen in hand to write a letter in his own handwriting. Instead, the apostles spoke to secretaries who shaped the oral content into written letters.[1] Each letter was then reviewed and — at least in some instances — signed by the author (2 Thessalonians 3:17; see also 1 Corinthians 16:21; Galatians 6:11; Colossians 4:18). Most of these secretaries have remained anonymous over the centuries. A couple of them are, however, mentioned by name in the apostles’ letters. Tertius composed Paul’s letter to the Romans, for example, while Silvanus probably crafted Simon Peter’s first letter (Romans 16:22; 1 Peter 5:12).[2]
How Did the Secretaries Write?
Secretaries like Tertius and Silvanus used reed pens, sharpened and slit at the tips. The tips of the reeds were dipped in a mixture of water, soot, and sap. Words were then inked on sheets of papyrus. If a letter was lengthy, papyrus sheets were pasted together to form scrolls that could measure as many as thirty or thirty-five feet when unrolled.[3]
Once a letter was completed, a trustworthy messenger carried the scroll to a local church and probably read the contents in a public assembly.[4] Messengers mentioned by name in the New Testament include Phoebe, Epaphroditus, and Tychicus (Romans 16:1–2; Ephesians 6:21–22; Philippians 2:25; Colossians 4:7–9). After a letter reached a church, it was frequently copied and shared with other churches (Colossians 4:16).
That’s how first-century churches produced, gathered, and preserved the texts that we find in the New Testament today. Yes, the words came from individuals like Mark and Luke, Peter and Paul . Yet it took an entire community of people to turn their words into texts and to preserve these texts as authoritative documents that were received as the wisdom of Jesus himself for his people.
[1] Even an individual as literate as Josephus required literary assistance to compose his works in Greek: “χρησάμενός τισι πρὸς τὴν Ἑλληνίδα φωνὴν συνεργοῖς οὕτως ἐποιησάμην τῶν πράξεων τὴν παράδοσιν” (Contra Apionem, 1:50).
[2] Silvanus may have been the secretary, the courier, or both secretary and courier for the letter now known as 1 Peter; the wording in 1 Peter 5:12 is ambiguous.
[3] Richard Burridge and Graham Gould, Jesus Now and Then (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 51; George Eldon Ladd, The New Testament and Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 56; Bruce Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 17–18
[4] On the interplay between oral performance and written content in the ancient world, see Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind (New York: Routledge, 1997), 160–201; H. G. Snyder, Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2000), 191- 227; Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 36–40, 124–125.
