The New Testament is a collection of twenty-seven books written by over a dozen authors with diverse theological convictions. The books were written between circa 50 ce and 150 ce. Along with the Hebrew Bible, they are the normative scriptures of the Christian churches. They gained that status only after a long and complex process; the shape of the collection took definitive form for most churches only in the fourth century.

Neither Jesus nor the early Christians knew anything of a New Testament. Their Bible was the Jewish Bible alone. Originally, Christian traditions were oral, and a preference for the oral over the written lived on into the second century. But during the last thirty or so years of the first century ce, traditions about Jesus came to be transmitted in written sources that were read at Christian gatherings. Concurrently, some communities began to use several Pauline epistles...