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 circulation by the end of the first century. Scholars hold a wide spectrum of views on exactly when the books of the new testament were written, with non-fundamentalist scholars tending to argue for later dates, and more conservative scholars arguing for an earlier one. Most contemporary scholars regard Mark as a source used by Luke (see Marcan priority). If it is true that Mark was written around the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, around 70, they theorize that Luke would not have been written before 70. Some who take this view believe that Luke's prediction of the destruction of