Testament originally meant a will, thanks to a curious Greek translation choice
The Hebrew word brit meant a pact or alliance, nothing more. But when Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated scripture into Greek, they chose diatheke, a word Greeks used almost only for a will left at death. Latin turned that into testamentum, and Christians read it as pointing to Jesus's death.
Why the Septuagint translators, working in the third and second centuries BC, picked diatheke instead of an ordinary Greek word for alliance is still debated; only one exception, in Aristophanes, shows it meaning a covenant. Christian theology nonetheless made much of it, and the new covenant was read as completing the one given through Moses at Sinai, a claim Judaism has traditionally rejected. Tertullian is the first known writer to call a set of Christian Greek writings the New Testament, around 208 AD, and by the 4th century the idea of two Testaments was settled even if their exact contents were not.
The collection holds 27 texts written in Koine Greek: four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, letters attributed to Paul and others, and Revelation. Its canon formed slowly through argument, the rejection of texts judged heretical and the recognition of writings considered apostolic, and it was fixed at 27 books by the late fourth century. Irenaeus of Lyon, around 180, was the first to name the four canonical gospels explicitly, in Against Heresies.
Gospel comes from the Old English god-spell, good news, matching the Greek euangelion. Each gospel tells of Jesus's life, death and resurrection, though Mark in its original form stops at the empty tomb without describing appearances of the risen Jesus. Matthew opens with a genealogy and the visit of the magi.
Literary analysis dates many of the texts to the middle and later first century, though scholars disagree about when the last was written. Apart from the possible exception of Papyrus 52, the oldest surviving manuscripts come from the late second or early third century, and thousands of copies with variant readings allow textual critics to reconstruct the earliest recoverable wording. Catholics and Orthodox read it alongside sacred tradition, Protestants hold to scripture alone, and many evangelicals regard it as without error.
Source: New Testament
