Posted on Sep 11, 2024 by Mike LeDuke
The Time Between the Testaments
Before considering the Christian scriptures, we must first consider that a period of hundreds of years passed between the last book of the Hebrew Bible, and the first book of the Christian Bible. After the Jewish exiles returned from Babylon and Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi finished their prophesying, the light of prophecy darkened for almost 500 years.
In that period, however, the Jewish people experienced significant change. Eventually, Alexander the Great overthrew the Persian empire. In doing so, he spread Greek culture and language throughout the world. Slowly, Jewish communities began to speak less Hebrew and more Greek. The Septuagint, the first-ever translation of the Hebrew Bible, was Greek. Even some of the Dead Sea scrolls are Greek.
It wasn’t just the Greeks, however, that influenced Judaism. During the years of Persian dominance, the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism affected Judaism. Belief regarding the devil and hell, almost nonexistent in the Hebrew Bible, soon appeared heavily in Jewish writings. The Book of Jubilees,a Jewish text written before the turn of the millennium, claims to retell the stories of Genesis but this retold version is full of demons which were absent from the real Genesis text. The Book of Enoch, another book written between the testaments, names numerous angels and demons as it too rehearses the story of Noah’s flood. The same is true of many of the apocryphal books. Elements of Zoroastrianism crept into the Jewish tradition. Tobit features a demon as one of its main characters. The sectarian Dead Sea scrolls also include this different type of supernatural element.
This is the world of Judaism into which Jesus was born. Judaism still read the books of the Bible, but in many cases, these books were read in a language other than Hebrew — sometimes in Greek, and sometimes in Aramaic. Many beliefs, previously foreign to the Bible, became prominent in society. Thus, when the Christian scriptures were written, their context was significantly different from that of the Hebrew scriptures. Nevertheless, God still saw the Jews as His people and therefore sent His son to them first.
When the Christian scriptures were initially written, they were written fairly soon after Jesus’ death and ascension to heaven. Their recipients were both Jews and non-Jews (Gentiles). However, these first writings were not the gospels. Those appear to have come later, after a number of the first writings which were letters. As letters, unlike the Hebrew Bible, many of them identified their writer. Thus, as we turn to consider the beginning of the Christian scriptures, we have a somewhat more straightforward task: to take these various letters, to note their author, and then to determine when they were written. Such will be the final piece in putting together the story of the Bible.
— Jason Hensley, PhD
