What is the time span between the Old and New Testaments?
Mods: is this really a Great Debate, or a question of fact (GQ)? Or would it depend on what does the question mean?
mwbee, please clarify: do you mean what is the time between the original compilation of the last “OT” book and the start of writing of the first “NT” epistles?
It is a Great Debate as you shall soon see.
From the perspective of the Catholic Church, which recognizes as Scripture the Books of the Maccabees as well as several other books viewed as Apocryphal by Protestants, the OT was completed at the end of the second or beginning of the first century BCE while the NT begins with Paul’s first Letter to the Thessalonians around 45 or 48 CE.
From the perspective of Fundamentalist Christianity and Orthodox Judaism, all of “real” Scripture was completed by around 400 BCE.
Between those two interpretations are those who allow only the books that the Orthodox and Fundamentalists recognize, but use various methods of literary analysis to conclude that some of those books were written as recently as the second century BCE rather than earlier.
- d&r *
You mean fundamentalist Christians think the New Testament was written four centuries before Christ, or else do not consider the New Testament to be “real scripture”?
Yes, JRDelirious, that is what I mean.
There is about 450 years inbetween Malachi(the last book in OT to be written) and the New Testament(Mark being the first book, written in about 50 A.D.).
I would say there is a plus/minus of around 50 years in there, however.
Sorry, the follwing sentence is corrected by the inclusion of the originally lost “OT”.
I was under the impression that it was pretty much accepted even by Evangelical Protestant scholars that the first NT books to be compiled as we know them were the Letters, and the Gospels and Acts were completed around the time of the destruction of the Temple (70 CE)
tomndeb does give a good run-down on the various schools on the issue. I guess it would be germane to mention that the final standardisation of the list of exactly what makes up the orthodox Jewish scripture – a.k.a. the OT of Evangelicals – regardless of when actually written, is also post-Temple.
tomndebb wrote:
Somewhere along the way, I learned that the term “Scripture” properly only referred to the Old Testament, and that the books of the New Testament were referred to as, um, something else. Maybe the person who gave me this definition was coming from the ;j perspective and not the Christian perspective (which of course would have meant that (s)he didn’t consider the NT to be sacred writings), but I could have sworn that (s)he was giving me the Christian definition.
But now, after reading the above, I moseyed on over to the on-line Merriam-Webster dictionary, and it said that Scripture (capitalized) can refer to any part of the Bible, Old Testament or New. Darn it, now I’m confused. 
The religious tolerance website has some good information on the dates of all the books in the standard Protestant canon.
OT: http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_otbk.htm (scroll down a bit)
NT: http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_ntbk.htm (ditto)