New Testament - Relationship To Earlier and Contemporaneous Literature

Relationship To Earlier and Contemporaneous Literature

The books which later came to form the New Testament, like other Christian literature of the period, originated in a literary context that reveals relationships not only to other Christian writings, but also to Graeco-Roman and Jewish works. Of singular importance is the extensive use of and interaction with the Jewish Bible and what would become the Christian Old Testament. Both implicit and explicit citations, as well as countless allusions, appear throughout the books of the New Testament, from the Gospels and Acts, to the Epistles, to the Apocalypse. Other early Jewish and Graeco-Roman literature, though far less utilized, is also cited in books that would come to form the New Testament.