New Testament - Relationship To Earlier and Contemporaneous Literature

Relationship To Earlier and Contemporaneous Literature

Further information: Non-canonical books referenced in the Bible

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.

Read more about this topic:  New Testament

Famous quotes containing the words relationship to, relationship, earlier and/or literature:

    “Whatever may be our just grievances in the southern states, it is fitting that we acknowledge that, considering their poverty and past relationship to the Negro race, they have done remarkably well for the cause of education among us. That the whole South should commit itself to the principle that the colored people have a right to be educated is an immense acquisition to the cause of popular education.”
    —Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)

    “It would be a fallacy to deduce that the slow writer necessarily comes up with superior work. There seems to be scant relationship between prolificness and quality.”
    —Fannie Hurst (1889–1968)

    “The very locusts and crickets of a summer day are but later or earlier glosses on the Dherma Sastra of the Hindoos, a continuation of the sacred code.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.”
    —Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)