Many of the words used throughout this investigation carry both a technical scholarly meaning and a looser popular meaning that don't fully match. This page defines them once, plainly, for reference across every other report.
Greek apostolos, "one sent out." Has two overlapping meanings that cause real confusion. Narrowly, it refers to the Twelve disciples Jesus chose during his ministry. Broadly — and this is the usage the New Testament itself often employs — it means anyone commissioned to spread the gospel: Paul calls himself an apostle despite never meeting Jesus in life, and Junia (Romans 16:7) is called an apostle and was a woman. The distinction matters for canon history, since books claiming apostolic authorship received preferential treatment — which is part of why so many disputed texts were attributed to apostles, genuinely or not.
Greek mathetes, "learner" or "follower." Broader than apostle — all apostles were disciples, but not all disciples were apostles. After the resurrection, the term becomes roughly synonymous with "Christian believer" throughout Acts.
In the Old Testament, a prophet (Hebrew navi, "one who speaks forth") was primarily someone who spoke on God's behalf to the present moment — a social critic and covenant enforcer, not primarily a forecaster of the distant future. In the New Testament, prophecy continued as a recognized spiritual gift in early churches (1 Corinthians 12–14), which created an ongoing practical problem: if anyone could prophesy, how does a community distinguish a true prophet from a false one. The Didache devotes significant attention to exactly this question.
From Greek euangelion, "good news." Technically means a proclaimer of the gospel. By later tradition it refers specifically to the four Gospel authors. In the New Testament itself (Ephesians 4:11) it names a distinct functional role in the early church, separate from apostle or prophet.
| Title | Greek | Early meaning | Later meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bishop | episkopos | Overseer of a local community | Regional authority over multiple churches |
| Elder | presbyteros | Community leader, drawn from Jewish tradition | Eventually equivalent to priest in many traditions |
| Deacon | diakonos | Servant or minister of practical needs | Formal ordained office |
These roles were fluid in Paul's earliest letters and became progressively more institutionalized by the time of the Pastoral Epistles (~100 CE) — part of the evidence scholars cite for questioning whether Paul himself wrote those later letters.
In the Old Testament context, scribes were professional copyists and interpreters of the Law — educated and socially significant figures, frequently paired with the Pharisees in the Gospels as opponents of Jesus. In manuscript history, "scribe" refers more broadly to the anonymous copyists who transmitted biblical texts by hand for centuries; their intentional and accidental choices are the central subject of textual criticism.
Greek euangelion, "good news." Originally a proclamation — "the good news that Jesus is Lord" — rather than a literary genre. It became a genre label only gradually. The four canonical Gospels are theologically motivated narratives, closer to ancient biography (bios) than to a modern biography, but the fit even with that ancient genre is imperfect.
A real distinction scholars draw: a letter is personal and occasional, addressed to a specific person or community about a specific situation — most of Paul's authentic writings fit this. An epistle is a more formal literary composition, written in letter form but intended for broader circulation rather than a specific occasion — Hebrews and James are closer to this category.
Writing attributed to a famous figure who did not actually write it. This was a widely accepted literary convention in the ancient world, not considered forgery in the modern sense — students commonly wrote in a teacher's name, and communities wrote in a founder's name to extend that founder's authority. Scholarly consensus holds several New Testament books are pseudepigraphical, including the Deutero-Pauline letters (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians), the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus), and 2 Peter — generally considered the latest New Testament book, written around 120 CE.
Greek kanon, "measuring rod" or "rule." A fixed, authoritative list of texts considered scripture. Both the Old and New Testament canons developed gradually rather than being decided at a single moment, and the exact list still differs between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions today.
Two labels for largely overlapping material. "Apocrypha" (Greek, "hidden things") is the Protestant and Jewish term for books excluded from their canons but present in Catholic or Orthodox Bibles, or for books outside all canons entirely. "Deuterocanonical" is the Catholic and Orthodox term for the same set of books, meaning "second canon" — a label about the timing of canonization, not a claim of lesser authority.
The Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, begun around 250 BCE in Alexandria. "LXX" is the Roman numeral for seventy, referencing a legend that seventy or seventy-two scholars independently produced identical translations — a story meant to establish the translation's divine authority. The early church primarily used the Septuagint, which is why New Testament quotations of the Old Testament frequently match the Greek wording rather than the Hebrew original.
Not criticism in the negative sense. The scholarly discipline of reconstructing the most likely original wording of a document by systematically comparing manuscript variants. Since no biblical autograph survives, textual critics work entirely from later copies, comparing their differences to determine what the earliest recoverable text most likely said.
The original manuscript written or dictated by an author. No biblical autograph survives for any book. Everything available today is a copy of a copy; the earliest surviving New Testament fragments date to the second century CE, decades after the texts were composed.
Orthodoxy means "correct belief" (Greek orthos + doxa) — whatever the dominant tradition ultimately declared to be true teaching. Heresy comes from Greek hairesis, which originally meant simply "choice" or "school of thought," and became a negative label applied retroactively by the winning theological faction to the losing ones. Heresy, in practice, is defined after the fact: positions now called heretical were often mainstream in particular regions before a council ruled against them.
Not a single movement but a family of related religious systems active in the second and third centuries CE, sharing several core ideas: that the material world is evil or inferior, created by a lesser divine being (the Demiurge); that salvation comes through secret knowledge (gnosis) rather than faith or works; that Jesus brought hidden spiritual knowledge rather than physical redemption; and that the body is a prison the spirit seeks to escape. Gnostic Christians produced their own gospels and letters, many of which were discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945.
The study of "last things" — end times, judgment, resurrection, the kingdom of God. Much of the New Testament is eschatologically urgent: the earliest Christians broadly expected Jesus to return within their own lifetimes, and the non-fulfillment of that expectation created a significant theological challenge the early church had to work through.
A specific literary genre, not simply "end-times prediction." Apocalyptic texts — Daniel, Revelation, 1 Enoch — share recurring features: visions received by a human mediator, symbolic and coded imagery (beasts, numbers, cosmic warfare), a dualistic worldview of this age versus the age to come, and composition during periods of persecution, using coded language to discuss real political situations without inviting reprisal. Understanding this genre is essential to reading Daniel and Revelation as their original communities would have — as resistance literature for the present, not as a literal timeline of the distant future.
A Jewish interpretive method, standard in the first century, that finds hidden or applicable meaning in an older text for a present situation. Several New Testament uses of Old Testament prophecy — Matthew applying Isaiah or Zechariah to events in Jesus' life, Peter applying Joel to Pentecost in Acts 2 — follow this method. It was not considered dishonest by the standards of the time, but it does mean these passages were typically being reapplied by later authors rather than understood by their original authors as direct predictions of Jesus.
Latin for "prophecy after the event" — a text written after the events it describes, then framed within the narrative as if predicting them in advance. Daniel is the clearest documented case in the biblical canon: its detailed "predictions" are historically accurate up through roughly 165 BCE, then become vague, marking the point where the book was most likely actually composed.
Several of these terms carry real weight in arguments throughout the other reports — pseudepigraphy in the Paul and doctrinal development reports, pesher in the apocalyptic literature report, heresy and orthodoxy in the canon report. Defining them once, plainly, here, means every other report can use them without re-explaining each time, and means a reader encountering one of these words for the first time has a single place to check it.