New Testament letter composed under the guise of a presumably lost letter of the Apostle Paul, the Epistle to the Laodiceans. The books of the New Testament were all or nearly all written by Jewish Christians—that is, Jewish disciples of Christ, who lived in the Roman Empire, and under Roman occupation. Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, is frequently thought of as an exception; scholars are divided as to whether Luke was a Gentile or a Hellenistic Jew. A few scholars identify the author of the Gospel of Mark as probably a Gentile, and similarly for
New Testament term διαθήκη "diathḗkē" varies in Bible translations into English. John Wycliffe's 1395 version is a translation of the Latin Vulgate and so follows different terms in Jeremiah and Hebrews: Use of the term "New Testament" to describe a collection of first and second-century Christian Greek Scriptures can be traced back to Tertullian (in "Against Praxeas" 15). In "Against Marcion", written "circa" 208 AD, he writes of the Divine Word, who is doubly edged with the two testaments of the law and the gospel. And Tertullian continues later in the book, writing: it is certain that the whole aim at which