What did the First Christians believe about the Old Testament? I might as well have asked what they believed about the Bible because, as the faith developed, the Old Testament was all the written word they had. Jesus himself laid the groundwork for a uniquely Christian understanding of the Scriptures.

Consider, for example, one fundamental difference between Pharisees and Sadducees. The Pharisees believed that God gave the law to Moses in two forms: oral and written. That is, that Moses got the written law (including the Ten Commandments) and then he got the Oral Law to go with it. This Oral Law was passed on to Joshua who received it and passed it on to the next generation, who in turn, received it and passed it on. Thus they believed that what they received from the earlier generation of Rabbis was what God told Moses on Sinai. The record of the oral law today is found in the Talmud.

The Sadducees believed no such thing. They believed that the written law was the only law that carried divine authority. I think Moses comes down on that side of the issue, because he said plainly that he wrote down everything God told him. You may wonder where this expression, Oral Law came from, for it is not found in the New Testament, nor the Old, for that matter. The New Testament writers knew about it, of course, but declined to refer to it in those terms. Rather, they called it the traditions of the elders. Let's look at several instances where these traditions were challenged.

When you think about it, it is a logical question. Why didn’t Jesus write his own book? For that matter, why didn’t an angel hand the prophets a golden plate with prophecies written by the hand of God himself? (The Ten Commandments, after all, were written with the finger of God on tables of stone—God can write.)

There is no reason why Jesus could not have written his story, so we are left to ponder why he did not. There is a reason, and it turns out to be of profound importance in dealing with that collection of books we call the New Testament.

In the first place, biblical law places great importance on witnesses. Just as in our constitution, no man could be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. And that due process included witnesses to the cause of action against a man. No man could be deprived of his life for murder without at least two witnesses to the crime. Then there is a very practical reason why Jesus did not write his own book, and he stated it in his own words. We’ll find them in John, chapter 5.

It is of some interest that the New Testament church soldiered on for some 20 years before anyone wrote down anything that has remained for us to look at. (The fact that transitory papyrus was often used as a writing medium certainly didn’t help.)

So, looking at your Bible, what is your best guess as to which of the New Testament books was written first? Matthew, perhaps? (It is the first one listed, after all.) No. As odd as it seems, the first of all the New Testament documents that we have is Paul’s letter to the Galatians, written 20 years after Christ’s resurrection.

It is hard to explain exactly why this was so. One reason may have been the early Christians’ expectation of the imminent return of Christ. (I think we can safely conclude that none of them imagined that they would be read 2,000 years into the future.) And so the first Gospel to be written wouldn’t appear for another 10 years after Paul’s letters to the Galatians and the Thessalonians. You can place all four of the Gospels between AD 60 and 70. And if we look at what was occurring during this period, we may begin to understand why they were finally written down.