In the Old Testament the dominating figure was Moses, but in the New it is Jesus the Christ. He it was who fulfilled Hebrew prophecy of a Messiah or Saviour, and who in founding Christianity, based upon his teachings, inaugurated a new era.
Made up of twenty-seven books, the New Testament was written basically in Greek, and for a Greek-speaking public. As early as the third century B.C.—following the days of Alexander the Great—had come the translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, known as the Septuagint (and usually identified by LXX). In the Mediterranean world, until well into the Christian era, the language of commerce and trade as well as of literature and art was Greek. The Greek of the New Testament was not classical or formal in character, but was what came to be known as the Koine, meaning "common tongue." This form of Greek would be familiar to Jesus' countrymen in Palestine as well as to those in the surrounding areas. Greek-speaking Jews were especially numerous in and around Alexandria in Egypt.
The Jews of Palestine and of "the Diaspora"—those who had scattered abroad from Palestine—could and often did also use Aramaic, a Semitic dialect of Hebrew, though the official religious language of the Jews continued to be Hebrew. It may be said that Aramaic holds somewhat the same relationship to the more formal Hebrew that the Koine holds to classical Greek.
