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jesus, interrupted
WHO WROTE THE OTHER BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT? Much of what has already been said can also be said of the remaining books of the New Testament. Some of them are anonymous, specifically the letter to the Hebrews and the books called 1, 2, and 3 John. As many authors already in the early church realized, there is no reason to think that Paul wrote Hebrews, but it was eventually included in the canon by church fathers who argued that it was Paul’s. In fact, the writing style is completely different from Paul’s; the leading themes of the letter are absent from Paul’s other letters, and the mode of argumentation is not at all like his. And why should one think Paul wrote it? Unlike his own writings, this book is anonymous. The so-called epistles of John also don’t claim to have been written by John; epistles 2 and 3 are by someone who calls himself “the elder,” and the author of 1 John doesn’t say anything about himself. The author could be almost any leader of the church near the end of the first century. Other books are homonymous. The author of James makes no claim to be any James in particular, let alone the James who is known from other traditions to have been Jesus’ brother. The book of Jude claims to be written by a Jude who is the “brother of James,” so this may be interpreted as a claim to be Jesus’ brother, since according to Mark’s Gospel two of his brothers were named James and Jude. But it is odd that if he wanted to be thought of as Jesus’ own brother, he didn’t come out and say so in order to invest his book with even more authority. Both Jude and James were common names in Jewish antiquity and in the Christian church. Later Christians who were establishing the canon claimed that these two were Jesus’ relatives, but they themselves never say so. It is also hard to believe that these letters could have been written by two lower-class Aramaic-speaking peasants from Galilee (whose more famous brother is not known to have been able to write,