{"id":5206,"date":"2020-11-04T10:18:38","date_gmt":"2020-11-04T16:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.tyndale.com\/tyndalebibles\/?post_type=article&#038;p=5206"},"modified":"2020-12-08T10:16:08","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T16:16:08","slug":"what-are-the-old-testament-and-new-testament","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/sites.tyndale.com\/tyndalebibles\/article\/what-are-the-old-testament-and-new-testament\/","title":{"rendered":"What are the Old Testament and New Testament?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The word \u201ctestament\u201d in the designations \u201cOld Testament\u201d and \u201cNew Testament,\u201d given to the two divisions of the Bible, goes back through Latin <em>testamentum <\/em>to Greek <em>diatheke<\/em>, which in most of its occurrences in the Greek Bible means \u201ccovenant\u201d rather than \u201ctestament.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In Jeremiah 31:31, a new covenant is foretold that will supersede that which God made with Israel in the wilderness (cf. Exod. 24:7ff.). \u201cBy calling this covenant \u2018new,\u2019 he has made the first one obsolete\u201d (Heb. 8:13, NIV). The New Testament writers see the fulfillment of the prophecy of the new covenant in the new order inaugurated by the work of Christ; his own words of institution (1\u00a0Cor. 11:25) give the authority for this interpretation.<\/p>\n<p>The Old Testament books, then, are so called because of their close association with the history of the \u201cold covenant\u201d; the New Testament books are so called because they are the foundation documents of the \u201cnew covenant.\u201d An approach to our common use of the term \u201cOld Testament\u201d appears in 2\u00a0Corinthians 3:14, \u201cwhen the old covenant is read,\u201d although Paul probably means the law, the basis of the old covenant, rather than the whole volume of Hebrew Scripture. The terms \u201cOld Testament\u201d and \u201cNew Testament\u201d for the two collections of books came into general Christian use in the later part of the second century; Tertullian rendered <em>diatheke <\/em>into Latin by <em>instrumentum <\/em>(a legal document) and also by <em>testamentum<\/em>; it was the latter word that survived, unfortunately, since the two parts of the Bible are not \u201ctestaments\u201d in the ordinary sense of the term.<\/p>\n<p>This is an excerpt from <em>The Origin of the Bible <\/em>by F.\u00a0F.\u00a0Bruce, J.\u00a0I.\u00a0Packer, Philip Comfort, and Carl F.\u00a0H.\u00a0Henry. To read more, you can purchase this book from many Christian bookstores and online retailers, including Tyndale.com: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tyndale.com\/p\/the-origin-of-the-bible\/9781414379326\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/www.tyndale.com\/p\/the-origin-of-the-bible\/9781414379326<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Bruce, F. F., et al. <em>The Origin of the Bible.<\/em> Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","article_categories":[264],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tyndale.com\/tyndalebibles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/5206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tyndale.com\/tyndalebibles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tyndale.com\/tyndalebibles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tyndale.com\/tyndalebibles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tyndale.com\/tyndalebibles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tyndale.com\/tyndalebibles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_categories?post=5206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}