Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE BACKGROUND OF THE NEW TESTAMENT Back of the New Testament is the Old Testament, and not only this, but an extensive literature that came into existence after the latest events of which the Old Testament treats. The Old Testament Scriptures are concerned, except for the opening chapters of Genesis, with the personages and events of about seventeen hundred years, from Abraham to Nehemiah; the New Testament, except perhaps the book of Revelation, with the personages and events of probably less than one hundred years. The Old Testament, while containing many biographies, falls much of it in the domain of national history, political as well as religious, though chiefly the latter. The New Testament, some of which falls in the domain of history, belongs rather to biography, containing as it does, except Revelation, accounts of the birth, life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the efforts to promulgate and interpret those teachings, and to organize a Church founded upon them. The Revelation, a type of literature represented in the Old Testament in Daniel, and in the Apocrypha in II Esdras, sets forth the events of the future as visions; there are to be a new heaven and a new earth, in which God shall dwell with man, " and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more." Revelation 2114. To the period between the Old Testament and the New belong some of the books of the Apocrypha. Thebooks of the Maccabees give us the history of the reaction against Greek power and influences. The Persian gave way to the Greek who was succeeded by the Roman. These changes from the conditions in the time of Ezra bring us to the Palestine of Jesus and his disciples. The four centuries immediately preceding the Christian era ...