The words "New Testament" name a covenant before they name a book. Before anyone could hold twenty-seven writings in a single binding, the Church already had the thing the name first pointed to: a cup, blessed on Holy Thursday, and an instruction to keep doing what Jesus had just done.
So what, then, is the book? If the covenant came first and the writings followed, what are the writings for? And if Scripture is a sign, what exactly is it a sign of?
Scott Hahn put the claim plainly in a recent conversation with Joshua Benson on The Road to Emmaus, the St. Paul Center's podcast. This essay follows his lead, checks it against the text, and takes it a little further than there was time for in the episode.
The short version
- "New Testament" is an inherited translation of the covenant word the New Testament itself reports over the cup at the Last Supper.
- Jesus gave the apostles an action to carry out, and the Church was keeping it before the books were written or collected.
- The books are inspired and honoured, and they point beyond themselves to the sacrament and to Christ.
The book is the late arrival, and the name is older than the binding
Most of us meet the New Testament as an object. It is a thin-paged volume in a pew, an app on a phone, the usual occupant of a hotel drawer. The habit is natural, and it carries an assumption that rarely gets examined: that the faith began with the New Testament as a text, and that everything else, the Mass included, grew up around it.
The order of events says otherwise. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, written around AD 53 to 57, contains the earliest written account of the Last Supper, and Paul introduces it by saying he is passing on what he himself received (1 Cor 11:23). The practice was already being handed on when the words about it were set down. The Gospels came later. The Church was still settling the edges of its list of twenty-seven books in the fourth century, with Athanasius's Festal Letter of 367 and the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) among the milestones (Catholic Encyclopedia). Through all of that, Christians were gathering to break bread.
At the Last Supper, Jesus names a covenant over the cup
Luke and Paul both report what Jesus said over the cup: it is the new covenant in his blood (Luke 22:20; 1 Cor 11:25). The Greek word behind "covenant" in both places is diathēkē, and it is worth a slow look, because it holds two meanings at once.
In everyday Greek, a diathēkē was usually a will: the arrangement a person makes about what he leaves behind and to whom. The Greek Old Testament, the translation many first-century Jews and the earliest Christians read, used the same word for the Hebrew berith, the covenant by which God binds himself to his people. English reaches us by a third step. Latin translators rendered the word testamentum, and "Testament" is what ended up on the cover. So the title of the book is an inherited translation of the word the New Testament reports over the cup.
The phrase also carries two older echoes. At Sinai, Moses sealed the covenant with sacrificial blood and called it "the blood of the covenant" (Exod 24:8). Centuries later, Jeremiah promised a new covenant that God would write on the heart (Jer 31:31-34). A listener at the table who knew those texts would hear Jesus drawing both together over a cup.
The Letter to the Hebrews leans on both senses at once. It says a will takes effect only at the death of the one who made it, and then says Christ's death is what inaugurates the new covenant (Heb 9:15-17). A covenant sealed in blood and a will that takes effect through death meet in one event, and Jesus names that event at table before it happens.
Hahn's observation is that this is where the phrase begins its life. It starts at the institution of the Eucharist, as a name for what is in the cup, and not as the title of a collection of writings (he makes the point at 25:38).
Jesus tells the apostles to do something, and writes nothing down
Luke has Jesus add an instruction after the bread: "Do this in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19). Paul reports the same command (1 Cor 11:24-25). Matthew and Mark give the words over the bread and cup without it, so the instruction is carried by Luke and Paul, not by all four accounts, and it is worth saying so plainly.
Hahn's attention goes to what the instruction leaves out. Jesus does not tell the apostles to write this down. He tells them to do it. The natural question is what "this" refers to, and Hahn answers without ceremony: what we now call the Eucharist, Jesus called the New Testament. That is how he arrives at the sentence that gives this essay its shape. The New Testament, he says, was "a sacrament long before it becomes a document" (26:16).
Paul's version of the story shows the same instinct. Right after repeating the command, he says that whenever the Corinthians eat the bread and drink the cup, they proclaim the Lord's death until he comes (1 Cor 11:26). The word he uses is proclaim. The rite is itself a way of announcing the gospel, and it is being practised before the Gospels exist.
The earliest descriptions of Christian worship fit that picture. Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, describes the Sunday assembly: the memoirs of the apostles, which Justin says are called Gospels, or the writings of the prophets, are read for as long as time permits, the president speaks, and then bread and wine are brought forward (First Apology 67). In Justin's account the Gospels are read aloud inside the gathering where the covenant is celebrated.
The document is a sign, and the sacrament is what it signifies
Aquinas defines a sacrament as a sign of a holy thing in so far as it makes people holy (Summa Theologiae III, q. 60, a. 2). A written text is a sign as well, so the comparison is more than a figure of speech. Both point beyond themselves. They differ in what they point to and in what they do about it.
Hahn presses the same line from the other side. The sacrament, he says, does not retire the document or move it to a lower shelf. The document stays what it is: a sign pointing past itself to the sacrament and, through the sacrament, to something more than a ritual, however sacred. It points to Jesus himself (26:23 to 26:41).
It might be objected that this lowers Scripture. If the sacrament comes first, the book starts to look optional. The Church's own teaching blocks that conclusion twice. The books are inspired, with God as their author and human writers as true authors (Dei Verbum 11). And the Council says the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Body of the Lord, because in the liturgy she receives the bread of life from two tables, that of God's word and that of Christ's body (Dei Verbum 21). The Catechism says the same of the Mass: the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the Eucharist form one act of worship (CCC 1346).
Pointing beyond itself is what a sign is for. Christ himself wrote nothing down. This essay asks what he did give, and what the writing serves.
A saint reads the page by living what it points to
The interview is about Francis of Assisi, and Hahn comes back to him straight after making the point. Benson's book on Francis treats his devotion to the Eucharist as a thread running through his whole life and writings, not as an extra (Benson says so at about 2:49).
Hahn says Francis did not need to turn the covenant into a lecture or a book. He lived it, and grasped it, in Hahn's comparison, the way Mary received the Word in her heart before she conceived him in her womb, a line Hahn attributes to Augustine (compare De sancta virginitate 3; 27:16 to 27:38). Later, speaking of the Emmaus breaking of bread, he jokes that it takes him four or five minutes to explain the recognition and a saint like Francis about four milliseconds (44:28).
I won't claim more for Francis here than Hahn does. The point I'd draw is narrower. If the New Testament began as something done and received, then the saints are the readers who have kept closest to that order. They do not first master the text and then wonder how to apply it. They live inside what it points to, and the text opens as they go.
What follows for how we read
If the covenant came first, the book is rightly read in the gathering where it was first proclaimed: at the table. This is not a rule against private reading. It is an observation about where private reading gets its bearings. The Gospel at Mass comes before the Eucharist for a reason deeper than liturgical tidiness. The Church hears the covenant described and then receives what was described.
The Church's own treatment of the book fits the same logic. At Mass the Gospel is read from the book of the Gospels, the people stand for it, and the priest or deacon kisses the book when the reading is done (GIRM 60, 134, 175, 273). Nobody kisses a reference manual.
It also changes what counts as understanding. If the text is a sign, understanding it is partly a matter of following where it points. A reader can know the Greek vocabulary and still miss where it points.
What this does not settle
This essay rests on a spoken remark, and a remark is not an argument. Hahn builds the full case in his book Consuming the Word, and anyone who wants to test the claim should go there first. I don't know how much weight the Greek word can carry by itself. Diathēkē has a range, and the accounts of the cup differ in wording across Matthew, Mark, Luke and Paul, a difference I have not tried to resolve here. Nor does the argument settle the dating of the Gospels, the formation of the canon, or what the earliest liturgies looked like in detail. And it does not set Scripture and Tradition against each other as competing sources: the Church teaches that both flow from the same divine wellspring (Dei Verbum 9).
So the open questions are the ones worth carrying into Sunday. When the Gospel is read at Mass this week, what changes if you hear it as the account of a covenant the Church is about to receive, and not only as a text to follow on a page? What do you suppose the apostles understood themselves to be doing when they obeyed the instruction? And if the book is a sign, where is it pointing when you close it?
Sources & further reading
- Scott Hahn with Dr. Joshua Benson, The Road to Emmaus (St. Paul Center), "Read Scripture Like St. Francis." Covenant segment at 25:03 to 26:44; Francis passage at 27:16 to 27:38; Benson on Eucharistic piety at 2:49.
- Scott Hahn, Consuming the Word: The New Testament and the Eucharist in the Early Church. St. Paul Center.
- Luke 22:14-20, Matthew 26:26-29 and Mark 14:22-25, RSV-CE. Luke, Matthew and Mark on Bible Gateway.
- 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, RSV-CE. Bible Gateway.
- Exodus 24:3-8 and Jeremiah 31:31-34, RSV-CE. Exodus and Jeremiah on Bible Gateway.
- General Instruction of the Roman Missal, nn. 60, 134, 175 and 273. USCCB, chapter 4 and chapter 2.
- Hebrews 9:15-17, RSV-CE. Bible Gateway.
- Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, nn. 9, 11 and 21. Vatican.va.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1346. Vatican.va.
- Augustine, De sancta virginitate, ch. 3. New Advent.
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 60, a. 2. New Advent.
- Justin Martyr, First Apology, ch. 67. New Advent.
- "Canon of the New Testament," Catholic Encyclopedia. New Advent.
Written by Harvey, who designs Catholic apparel at 99sheep.co after bedtime. All profits fund Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery and St. Joseph's Seminary, Xuan Loc Diocese, Vietnam.