ABSTRACT
Apart from familiar church buildings, the New Testament is surely the feature of the Christian religion most taken for granted. It is read in every church service and its language colours prayers and hymns. Even in secularized Western countries, it plays a part in school education and figures in many current idioms of speech. Judges and lawyers reach for it when they want to insist on adherence to oaths (even though the New Testament itself is against oath-taking!). Scarcely ever is it thought of as other than a single unit, even more so than the Bible as a whole, and it might as well have existed from the furthest reaches of time.
