Where Did the New Testament Come From?

So we pull open our trusty King James Version of the Bible to the New Testament and we see right away the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 1, verse 1. But where did this text come from?

I remember as a child being in Primary, off in the wing of the building, during Sharing Time, and after hearing one of the leaders read from a story about Jesus, asking who saw that happen. They couldn’t really answer me. I recall them telling me that people wrote down the stories of Jesus and that’s what we read in the Bible. And I recall being confused: somebody had to have seen Jesus perform this miracle. Who was it that told the story? I suppose it seemed obvious to me that whichever gospel we were reading from, the person associated with it, say, Matthew, didn’t himself observe anything but was writing the story down. Just the way it’s all written sounded like he wasn’t there and wasn’t speaking from direct experience, I guess.

That question only grew for me. Who exactly is responsible for these stories? It’s not clear from reading the New Testament alone. And that’s just the Four Gospels; what about the epistles and the Book of Revelation?

Well, the history of the book/compilation/biblia called the New Testament answers a lot of this question, though not completely. We know quite a bit about the provenance of these texts, how they originated and were copied and translated and canonized and distributed. In telling this provenance, I make sense of it in reverse chronology—so let’s start with that King James Bible in our hands and work our way back to the texts’ inception.

King James Version

Shortly after the accession of James IV of Scotland to the English throne (as James I) in 1603, a petition containing more than a thousand signatures was presented to the new king asking that the doctrine of scripture supersede the authority of the clergy and tradition of the church. James embraced debate and convened a conference to decide what to do with this petition. An assembly of bishops and moderate Puritans came to Hampton Court Palace for a three-day discussion, earning this gathering the name “Hampton Court Conference.” One contention arose: that the English Bibles allowed during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI perpetuated corrupt translations of the original manuscripts. The conference agreed a new Bible should be prepared and dedicated to the new king as an endorsement of his status as head of a monarchical-national church and further insistence that the people of England should obey their king as they obey God.

The conference accepted the Bishops’ Bible of 1568 (an English translation) as the authoritative source text for their revision instead of developing a new translation from manuscripts, and the chapter and verse divisions in the Geneva Bible of 1560 as the standard for passages and cross-references. The assembly also agreed to consult the Tyndale, Matthew, Coverdale, Whitchurch, and Geneva Bibles for alternative renditions in English. Editors were selected, committees were formed, and work began on this new English version to be presented later for King James’s approval.

They called the committees “companies,” since these had received official commission from the king and served the interest of the crown. The First Westminster Company took Genesis through 2 Kings; the First Cambridge Company took 1 Chronicles through Song of Solomon; the First Oxford Company took Isaiah to Malachi; the Second Cambridge Company took the Apocrypha; the Second Oxford Company took the Four Gospels, Acts, and Book of Revelation; and the Second Westminster Company took the New Testament epistles.

So, the New Testament as we read it in church meetings, was shaped word-for-word by the Second Oxford and Second Westminster Companies. The men of these companies were deans, chaplains, and Anglican bishops from Oxford, Eton, and Cambridge who largely held Calvinist views of Protestant theology. They approached the text one verse of the Bishop’s Bible at a time, considering as a group which of the other English renditions sounded best, sometimes debating ancient Greek texts but mostly guided by their preferences for style and theology. At times, company revisors consulted Patristic texts to settle theological disputes, considering the “Early Church Fathers” closer to the original texts and appropriate arbiters of orthodox belief.

The debate that most often surfaced in company discussions was over John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination; Anglicans often contended over this idea, that because God worked from all-knowledge, God therefore destined each human being for salvation or damnation at the moment of their creation. Words like “foreordained,” “foreknown,” and any that implied foreknowledge received intense scrutiny by the revisors. Ultimately, their version says more about their arbitrary concerns than whatever the original Greek texts say—and predestination wasn’t the only theological thorn in the project.

Earlier English Versions

The KJV companies utilized the second edition of the Bishops’ Bible as the base text for their rendition of English verses of the New Testament. The Bishops’ Bible resulted from anti-Calvinist Anglican clergymen incensed by the Geneva Bible, a Calvinist-oriented translation for which they disagreed over theology. In preparing this edition, several Anglican bishops revised the second edition of the Great Bible mostly considering the prose and trying to elevate it to a royal tone while also rephrasing places that sounded overly Calvinist or similar to the Geneva Bible. Twenty editions of the Bishops’ Bible were published, the last one in 1602.

Before the Bishops’ Bible, the “Great Bible” of 1539 served as the first authorized English translation in England, and by royal decree was placed in every church in the land. This New Testament was prepared by Miles Coverdale, who developed this edition as a revision of Thomas Matthew’s Bible. (Matthew was the pseudonym of John Rogers; some moderns therefore refer to Matthew’s Bible as Roger’s Bible.) In preparing “Matthew’s Bible,” John Rogers used both William Tyndale’s final New Testament edition and Miles Coverdale’s earlier 1535 Bible.

William Tyndale (of rather broad fame today) undertook a translation of the New Testament in 1524 and published part of the translation in 1525, then the whole New Testament a year later. He had graduated with multiple degrees from Oxford and between 1517 and 1521, worked at Cambridge as a linguist and deacon. At least one Anglican bishop rebuffed Tyndale’s request for church sponsorship of a New Testament translation into English, so Tyndale traveled to continental Europe where he collaborated with Protestant scholars on Greek translation methods and sources. (Contrary to popular folklore, Tyndale was not likely arrested and executed for translating the Bible into vernacular English; the charge of heresy appears to have centered on Tyndale’s opposition to King Henry VIII and Henry’s status as head of the (Anglican) church; King Henry himself commissioned Bible versions that used Tyndale’s work.)

Tyndale (as well as Coverdale and Rogers) drew from Desiderius Erasmus’s reproduction of the Greek and Latin New Testament that Erasmus had finished revising by 1522. Erasmus himself used five manuscripts from the 1100s and two manuscripts from the 1400s to form the Greek text, and was aware at the time of many medieval mistakes in copying that had occurred; Erasmus “corrected” such errors by inserting translations of the Latin Vulgate New Testament into Greek.1 Modern scholars have identified further problems with Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, particularly typographical errors, but during Tyndale’s translation work, it was this Greek edition Tyndale and his contemporaries all considered “the original text.”

In summary—the pathway for biblical texts into English ran through a burst of scholarly interest in the 1520s and 1530s, with parallel versions coming into circulation among clergymen and laity. Although John Wycliffe had produced a Middle English translation of the Bible in the 1300s, the King James Version’s provenance ran through Tyndale, Coverdale, and Rogers, and ultimately through Erasmus’s reproduction of Greek copies of copies of manuscripts. Prior to the KJV, there was no “universally” adopted English Bible, and opinions varied considerably over proper expression of biblical verse. What English parishioners experienced as scripture was virtually always refracted through Latin because of church tradition—it was Latin that had held supreme status in the West European churches prior to the Protestant Reformation, and even in the emergence of Protestantism, clergymen maintained a Latin primacy in their own theological correspondence and in their priorities of scriptural interpretation.

Manuscripts

All roads backward from the KJV to its sources run through Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, which Erasmus based on manuscript sources available to him in Basel, Switzerland, at the Dominican Library there. In 1515 when he began collating Greek passages into a complete New Testament edition, he had limited access to knowledge of the many manuscript sources that had survived and would persist into our time. Simply reading from the seven manuscript items in the Basel Dominican collection persuaded Erasmus he had accessed the original New Testament.

We don’t know precisely which sources copyists used to produce these seven manuscripts. Scholars analyze the script and word variants against the many other biblical manuscripts to approximate candidate sources, but ultimately, we’re left with 12th and 15th century copies as the end of the line. We have good reason to believe these copies weren’t inventions but do constitute copies because of how much of their words align with earlier Greek manuscripts. We have a sizeable gap in the provenance, then, between (at the latest) the 1100s and the previous 1,000 years. Put another way, we in 2023 are closer to the 1100s production of Erasmus’s manuscript sources than those manuscripts were to their own original sources.

Canonization

During that 1,000-year sequence of Greek manuscript copies proliferating, churches across Europe, both Catholic and Orthodox, engaged in disputes over the meaning of “scripture,” over what constituted authoritative Christian literature, and over what qualified as dissident or heretical literature. The idea of a canon—a “legal” status afforded to a text—emerged quite early in the Roman period, as Roman officials established and enforced written edicts and laws. As Rome increasingly adopted Christian religion, its institutions also increasingly came to bear on textuality and the use of texts to enforce doctrine. By the 400s, both Catholic and Orthodox networks of churches and clergy had more or less defined for themselves respectively their selections of Christian texts as holy scripture.

What made the cut got copied and distributed in the early medieval modes of textual transmission—mainly loose leaf copying and then compiling into codices. In this entire process of selecting texts for canonization, debating canonical status of texts, copying approved texts, copying official compilations, and so on, individual clergy took occasion to emend the text to comport with their church’s stances on orthodoxy, theology, and policy. Language stylings also crept into the reproduction of texts. For these reasons, biblical scholars working in New Testament manuscripts have had and will continue to have plenty of technical, word-level issues to sort through. To put it in perspective, scholars already have noted more variations across copies of the New Testament manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Story Units

The furthest back our journey into the origins and development of the New Testament into King James English can go is into the non-textual realm, the auditory culture of the first Christians and their mode of oral transmission of stories, folklore, and teachings. Our access to their stories stops at the earliest manuscripts that have survived, which are all textual. Scholars can discern breaks in between individual stories, what we refer to as “pericopes,” and also sometimes the structure of epistles that set off individual letters. If we concentrate on the pericopes and the standalone letters, we can reasonably imagine earliest Christians communicating these texts by memory, by creative retelling, and by ritual recitation.

Whence the New Testament

If I could revisit my Primary-age self, I’d answer his question by saying that people who witnessed the events and heard the teachings captured in the New Testament told others those stories and teachings, and their audiences retold and recited those stories and teachings until groups of fellow believers committed those narratives to writing. Their writings circulated across the Mediterranean for centuries until men leading several opposing churches tried to build their own official libraries of those writings and establish a standard collection for their own churches. Once their collections became widely adopted by fellow churches, others set out to copy and preserve those texts with copies and copies of copies. A European reader of Greek in the early 1500s, Desiderius Erasmus, read from seven such compilations to produce a Greek version of a standard collection called by then the New Testament. Three Englishmen decades later used his Greek version and a couple other copies in Latin to produce English Bibles. Their English Bibles were consulted by many church leaders in England to provide King James I with an official Bible he could enforce throughout his country. That Bible is what we still read in our classes at church today.

Sources

• Gordon Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 2nd German ed., translated by the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler Press, 1996).
• Joseph Verheyden, “The New Testament Canon,” chap. 17 in The New Cambridge History of the Bible: From the Beginnings to 1600, edited by James Carleton Paget and Joachim Schaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 389–411.
• David C. Parker, “The New Testament Text and Versions,” chap. 18 in New Cambridge History of the Bible, 412–454.
• Erika Rummel, ed., Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
• William W. Combs, “Erasmus and the Textus Receptus,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 35–53.
• Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Luther A. Weigle, ed., The New Testament Octapla: Eight English Versions of the New Testament in the Tyndale–King James Tradition (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962).
• Sabine R. Huebner, Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
• Matthew D. C. Larsen, Gospels before the Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
• David Lyle Jeffrey, ed., The King James Bible and the World It Made (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011).