It is of course proleptic to class these writings together as the New Testament, a phrase not used until Tertullian in the second century and Lactantius in the third, and they did not mean a settled list of writings. That tended to be worked out as a matter of controversy within the Christian movement in the 3rd and 4th centuries; definite lists of what writings belonged to the New Testament were not made by the major Christian denominations until the Reformation.
The point is that generations of Christians lived and died without ever seeing (or thinking of) a New Testament. Christianity survived as a movement. Writings were accepted (or rejected) as authentic parts of the movement to the extent that they agreed (or disagreed) with the tradition that had been received. The tables were turned only in the
16th century, when an historical reading of the New Testament writings was made the basis for a critique of contemporaneous church teaching and practice. --CGE
Michael Smith wrote:
> ... Most scholars (faith-based and non-, apart from fundies) agree
> that the four gospels attained the form in which we now know them
> between 60 to 100 years after the events they narrate, or purport to
> narrate, and that they incorporate earlier texts and oral traditions.
> So speaking as a philologist, calling this language
> "non-contemporary" seems to commit us to a pretty exigeant sense of
> "contemporary."
>
> A faith-neutral philological/historical study of these quite
> interesting texts teases out a number of layers in their
> construction. Any given passage is quite likely to incorporate
> formative elements from various layers. It's not like doing
> archaeology, where you shovel away the stuff on top to get to the
> stuff that's lower down and hence older. You just can't pare away
> Talmud from Torah that way in the gospels -- it's all mixed up. You
> can make some shrewd guesses about how earlier material was re-shaped
> by somebody's theological or polemical agenda, and even about what
> the earlier material might have looked like -- but you can't really
> ever get back to it in any definitive way.
>
> BTW, very few people who know the languages and the texts and the
> scholarship, faith-based or non-, think that it's all just made up
> out of whole cloth. Everybody, apart from fundies, agrees that there
> are mythological and urban-legend elements there, but also that the
> point of departure for this elaboration of texts is a series of
> events that really happened. Backwoods Hasid from Galilee goes
> wandering around, attracting crowds, stirring people up, gets iced by
> the Romans, maybe with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Temple
> authorities, or maybe not -- this is a much-ground ax -- that's the
> arc, and there's a pretty good consensus that something like that is
> what started it all.