The New Testament I. Name ; II. Description ; III. Origin ; IV.
Transmission of the Text ; V. Contents, History, and Doctrine .
Testament come from testamentum , the word by which the Latin
ecclesiastical writers translated the Greek diatheke . With the
profane authors this latter term means always, one passage of
Aristophanes perhaps excepted, the legal disposition a man makes
of his goods for after his death. However, at an early date, the
Alexandrian translators of the Scripture, known as the
Septuagint, employed the word as the equivalent of the Hebrew
berith , which means a pact, an alliance, more especially the
alliance of Yahweh with Israel. In St. Paul ( 1 Corinthians
11:25 ) Jesus Christ uses the words "new testament" as meaning
the alliance established by Himself between God and the world,
and this is called "new" as opposed to that of which Moses was
the mediator. Later on, the name of testament was given to the
collection of sacred texts containing the history and the
doctrine of the two alliances