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
John Wenham introductory Koine Greek textbook. In 1992 John Wenham published "Redating Matthew, Mark and Luke" which discusses the dating of these gospels and the relationship of the gospels to one another (prior to Wenham's work, John A.T. Robinson, a liberal theologian, had written a widely known book titled "Redating the New Testament" which advocated an early date of the gospels). Wenham accepted the church father evidence of authorship, and inferred a very early date for each of the synoptic gospels. Wenham's work is well regarded by those who supported the Augustinian hypothesis which is the traditional view of gospel authorship. Scholars