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
Old Testament messianic prophecies quoted in the New Testament the colt; the reference in Zechariah is a Jewish parallelism referring only to a single animal, and the gospels of Mark, Luke, and John state Jesus sent his disciples after only one animal. Several explanations have been suggested, such as that Matthew misread the original, the existence of the foal is implied, or he wanted to create a deliberate echo of a reference in 2 Samuel 16:1-4, where there are two asses for David's household to ride on. In the most ancient Jewish writings Zechariah 9:9 is applied to the Messiah. According to the Talmud, so firm was the belief