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 3:7 This lecture is also found in Luke, with this verse being very similar to . This section is not found in Mark and most scholars believe that Matthew and Luke are both copying from the hypothetical Q. The most important difference between the versions of Matthew and Luke is that in Luke's Gospel, John the Baptist speaks to the multitude that have come to see him, while Matthew has John addressing the Pharisees and Sadducees in particular. The Pharisees and Sadducees were two powerful and competing factions within Judaism at the time. Throughout the New Testament, and especially in Matthew,