Morality, the New Testament, and the Structure of Christian Scripture
Jewish Morality and the New Testament
Moral: The morality of the Jewish people is not a consequence of religiosity, but one of its constituent elements. Yahweh is the author; the one who has rights over man. Through the covenant, Israel is a legislator with holy law, ordered for the health and happiness of the individual and society.
The New Testament as a Will
New Testament: A will is a legal act, *mortis causa*, unilateral, solemn, and revocable, by which the grantor disposes of their property, rights, and obligations in favor of someone after their death. In the context of the Last Supper, Jesus, about to face death, establishes his last wishes. This is the physical picture, which coincides with what the Church has always understood as the legacy that Christ gives to man the night before his slaughter. This will is the institution of the Eucharist, something distinct from self-sacrifice. It is the gift of daily sustenance with his flesh and blood. In the sacrifice of the Cross, there is no communion; God is the sole beneficiary of the victim, a sacrifice comparable to the Holocaust. However, the institution of the Eucharist gives a purpose to the sacrifice of the cross, making it a peace offering: the people become the offeror and participate in the body and blood of the slain victim.
This is great news: blood, strictly forbidden by the Law of Moses (only God can offer the blood of the victims; man is only given it to wash their sins), is now offered to man to drink: “Take and drink, all of you, this is the cup of my blood…” In the Old Testament, God gave his people the promised land and the Tabernacle, where he wanted to be in their midst through the tables of the law and the precepts, the staff that guided Moses. But in the new Tabernacle and the New Testament, Christ gave himself as food, renewing daily the sacrifice of communion in which men share with God the Body and Blood of the God-Man, making them all children of God. If these mysteries are fascinating for theology, they are no less so for anthropology, because they also concern man.
Structure of the New Testament
Structure of the New Testament: The first three Gospels (Greek = preaching, testimony, joyful proclamation of the message) are Matthew, Mark, and Luke (also called the Synoptic Gospels).
- Saint Matthew was the first to write the apostolic teaching, between the years 40 and 50 AD in Aramaic. Some 20 years later, a writer rewrote it to give more coherence to the letter of doctrine.
- Saint Mark, a disciple of Saint Peter, wrote down the teachings that the Apostle taught in Rome (60-63 AD).
- Saint Luke, a physician of pagan origin and companion of Saint Paul in his travels, wrote the gospel that bears his name and the Acts of the Apostles around the year 63 AD.
The Gospel of Saint John has a different style. He is a disciple of Jesus, a truthful witness to what happened, so that we might believe. His teaching is, in essence, the same as the other Gospels, but he leaves out much that is already known and focuses on the teachings that Jesus gave about himself.
The Acts of the Apostles is the name of a book of the Bible, the fifth of the New Testament. In the beginning, it was a part of Luke’s Gospel, but the texts were separated before the surviving manuscripts were written. This separation sought to cultivate knowledge of the Gospels as a sacred unit, to which the Acts served as a sort of appendix. It is of unique historical value and interest: there is no other book like it in the New Testament.
The Apostles’ letters in the New Testament are sometimes called epistles. Moreover, “epistle” can also refer to a poetic form in which the author addresses a specific receiver, real or imagined, considered absent. The usual metric form of these poems is the chained tercet or blank verse.
Revelation is the last book of the New Testament. Also known as the Revelation of Jesus Christ, from the title given to it at first, and in some Protestant circles simply as Revelation. For its genre, it is considered by most scholars the only New Testament book of a purely prophetic nature. Revelation is perhaps the richest in symbols of the entire Bible. The number of symbols, events, and processes complicates the task of interpreting the totality of Revelation, and as such, it has been the subject of numerous investigations, interpretations, and debates throughout history.