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
Matthew 5 Matthew 5 Matthew 5 is the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. It contains the first portion of the Sermon on the Mount, which will also take up chapter 6, and chapter 7. Portions are similar to the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6, but much is found only in Matthew. In John Wesley's division of the Sermon, chapter five outlines the ethical principles of the truly religious. It is one of the most discussed and analyzed chapters of the New Testament. Kissinger reports that among Early Christians no chapter was more often cited