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
Allegory in the Middle Ages it is usually an allegory for the burial and resurrection of Christ. Another common typological allegory is with the four major Old testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. These four prophets prefigure the four Apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There was no end to the number of analogies that commentators could find between stories of the Old Testament and the New. There also existed a tradition in the Middle Ages of "mythography"—the allegorical interpretation of pagan myths. Virgil's "Aeneid" and Ovid's "Metamorphoses" were standard textbooks throughout the Middle Ages, and each had a long tradition of allegorical interpretation.