I'm reading the New Testament to learn about Jesus. Can you tell me who wrote the New Testament?

The New Testament was written by nine or ten different authors. But in this post let me start with the authors of the Gospels and save discussion of the rest for a second post.

The word “Gospel” means “Good News.” And so, when we speak of the Gospels we are talking about the “Good News” about Jesus according to Matthew, to Mark, to Luke and to John. If you want to learn about Jesus, then, the Gospels are the best place to start. But who were Mathew, Mark, Luke and John? Let’s talk about that:

MATTHEW the son of Alpheaus (also called Levi), was a tax collector in or near the town, which Jesus used as home base for a time. Matthew was one of the men Jesus chose be one of the twelve Apostles.

 MARK, who wrote what is usually considered the earliest of the four gospels, was the son of a Christian woman named Mary who had a large household in Jerusalem where the Christians met in the earliest days of the Church. He was also the cousin of Barnabas, the Apostle Paul’s missionary associate. Mark also traveled with Paul and Barnabas for a time. Mark was not one of the Twelve.

LUKE was a physician and probably a convert of the Apostle Paul. We are not sure where he was from or whether he was of Jewish or Gentile extraction. We do know however that he was a trusted missionary associate of the Apostle Paul. Luke also wrote the book of Acts which stands between the Gospels and the letters of the Apostle Paul and explains how Paul became a Christian and an Apostle after starting out as a persecutor of the Church.

JOHN and his brother James along with their father Zebedee had a fishing business on the north end of the Sea of Galilee near Capernaum. They were some of Jesus’s earliest followers and Jesus chose both to be among his twelve Apostles. They were members of Jesus’s inner circle as was their partner in the fishing business, Simon Peter. John had very likely also been a disciple of John the Baptist before following Jesus. His mother was very ambitious for her sons and his had connections in high places so that John was personally known to the high priest at the time of the trial of Jesus. John also wrote three letters of John and possibly the book of Revelation. 

THE APOSTLE PAUL

The Apostle Paul wrote 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament. They are all letters to churches or individuals. Paul was a Roman citizen born in city of Tarsus in Cilicia (in Modern Turkey) but raised in Jerusalem where he was trained as a Rabbinic scholar under the prominent Rabbi Gamaliel I (Acts 22:3). He was not a member of the original Twelve Apostles nor had he known or traveled with Jesus during his earthly ministry. Paul was the name he used in all his letters to Gentiles, but his Hebrew name was Saul.  Rather he became an extremely zealous opponent of Christianity in the earliest days of the Church (Acts 8:1, Philippians 3:5, 1 Corinthian 15:9).

It was while on the road to Damascus in hopes of arranging the arrest of Christians that Paul had a direct encounter with the risen Jesus that changed the direction of his whole life. He became a follow of Jesus (Acts 9), from whom he received his calling to become the Apostle to the Gentiles. He fiercely defended his Apostolic office as coming directly from Christ, and not from any of the other Apostles or early Christian leaders (Galatians 1:1).

He knew members of Jesus’s intimate circle personally, including, for example, Peter, John, son of Zebedee, and Jesus’ brother James (Galatians 2:7-8). He sometimes butted heads with them and sometimes also collaborated with them (Galatians 2:11; Acts 21:24). According to Paul, they viewed his calling to preach to the Gentiles as the same as Peter’s to preach to the Jews (Galatians 2:7). During the course of his ministry, Paul spent a good deal of time in prison, whence he wrote a number of his letters. According to tradition Paul was beheaded in Rome in the time of the Emperor Nero.