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 the Apostle "ho mathētēs hon ēgapā ho Iēsous") or, in , the Beloved Disciple (, "hon ephilei ho Iēsous") is used five times in the Gospel of John, but in no other New Testament accounts of Jesus. claims that the Gospel of John is based on the written testimony of this disciple. The disciple whom Jesus loved is referred to, specifically, six times in John's gospel: None of the other Gospels has anyone in the parallel scenes that could be directly understood as the Beloved Disciple. For example, in , Peter alone runs to the tomb. Mark, Matthew and Luke do not