Word Finder - testaments

definition

A solemn, authentic instrument in writing, by which a person declares his or her will as to disposal of his or her inheritance (estate and effects) after his or her death, benefiting specified heir(s).

synonyms

• last will
• last will and testament
• will

definition

One of the two parts to the scriptures of the Christian religion: the New Testament, considered by Christians to be a continuation of the Hebrew scriptures, and the Hebrew scriptures themselves, which they refer to as the Old Testament.

definition

A tangible proof or tribute.

example

The ancient aqueducts are a testament to the great engineering skill of the Roman Empire.

definition

A credo, expression of conviction

example

The prime minister's speech was a glowing testament to the cabinet's undying commitment to the royal cause.

Thus the English canon of 1571 directs preachers "to take heed that they do not teach anything in their sermons as though they would have it completely held and believed by the people, save what is agreeable to the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments, and what the Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops have gathered from that doctrine."

The subjects are scenes from the Old and New Testaments, and the Last Judgment, with Heaven and Hell.

His special work was the exposition of the Old and New Testaments in the light of his great Oriental learning and according to his characteristic principle of "natural explanation."

It was Origen who created the dogmatic of the church and laid the foundations of the scientific criticism of the Old and New Testaments.

The exegetical labours of Origen extend over the whole of the Old and New Testaments.

This ethical teaching, which is indefinitely higher and purer than that of the Old Testament, is yet its true spiritual child, and helps to bridge the chasm that divides the ethics of the Old and New Testaments.

To Kohler and Gaster belongs the honour of re-opening the question of the Hebrew original of the Testaments.

Hence we conclude that the Testaments were written between 137 and 107."

In that case the Testaments were written between 109 and 107 B.C.

We have already shown that St Paul twice quoted from the Greek text of the Testaments.

But of still greater interest are the passages in the Gospels which show the influence of the Testaments, and these belong mainly to the sayings and discourses of our Lord.

In the interpretation of testaments it was to be assumed that members of the same family were not to be separated by the division of the succession.

We cannot here enter into the infinite details of the other subdivisions imagined by Joachim, or into his system of perpetual concordances between the New and the Old Testaments, which, according to him, furnish the prefiguration of the third age.

Gherardo, however, did not say, as has been supposed, that Joachim's books were the new gospel, but merely that the Calabrian abbot had supplied the key to Holy Writ, and that with the help of that intelligentia mystica it would be possible to extract from the Old and New Testaments the eternal meaning, the gospel according to the Spirit, a gospel which would never be written; as for this eternal sense, it had been entrusted to an order set apart, to the Franciscan order announced by Joachim, and in this order the ideal of the third age was realized.

In 1799 a new edition was brought out by the Society, and he managed to secure 700 copies of the io,000 issued; the Sunday School Society got 3000 testaments printed, and most of them passed into his hands in 1801.

The influence of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is still more apparent in the Pauline Epistles and the Gospels, and the same holds true of Jubilees and the Assumption of Moses, though in a very slight degree.

The Testaments were written about the same date as the Book of Jubilees.

The Praefatio begins by stating that the emperor Ludwig the Pious, desirous that his subjects should possess the word of God in their own tongue, commanded a certain Saxon, who was esteemed among his countrymen as an eminent poet, to translate poetically into the German language the Old and New Testaments.

In his principal work, Die geschichtlichen Bucher des Allen Testaments (1866), he sought to show that the priestly legislation of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers is of later origin than the book of Deuteronomy.

Annales Veteris et Novi Testaments, by Archbishop Ussher, whose dates have by some means gained a place in the authorized version of the Bible.

In this spirit he wrote commentaries upon portions of Aristotle, and upon the Summa of Aquinas, and towards the end of his life made a careful translation of the Old and New Testaments, excepting Solomon's Song, the Prophets and the Revelation of St John.

The first method distinguishes between uncial or majuscule, and cursive or minuscule; the second between papyrus, vellum or parchment, and paper (for further details see Manuscript and Palaeography); and the third distinguishes mainly between Gospels, Acts and Epistles (with or without the Apocalypse), New Testaments (the word in this connexion being somewhat broadly interpreted), lectionaries and commentaries.

Originally, the MS. contained the whole of the Old and New Testaments, including the Psalms of Solomon in the former and I and 2 Clement in the latter.

For details the reader may refer to Diestel, Geschichte des Alten Testaments (Jena 1869), and for the final form of orthodox Protestant views to Witsius, De prophetis et prophetia.

He invented a method of printing, perhaps somewhat akin to stereotyping - though the details are not clearly known, - whereby the Institute could produce Bibles and Testaments in Luther's version at a very low cost, and sell them, in small size, at prices equivalent to 10d.

During the year 1905-1906 the society's circulation reached the unprecedented total of 5,977,453 copies, including 968,683 Bibles and 1,326,475 Testaments.

In 1531 the Book of Jonah appeared with an important and highly interesting prologue, the only copy known of which is in the British Museum.6 Meanwhile the demand for New Testaments, for reading or for the flames, steadily increased, and the printers found it to their advantage to issue the Worms edition of the New Testament in not less than three surreptitious reprints before 1534.

The large sale of the New Testaments of Tyndale, and the success of Coverdale's Bible, showed the London booksellers that a new and profitable branch of business was o opened out to them, and they soon began to avail Matthew's P ?

John Roger's own work appears in a marginal commentary distributed through the Old and New Testaments and chiefly taken from Olivetan's French Bible of 1 535.

P the effect " that Convocation should nominate a body of its own members to undertake the work of revision, who shall be at liberty to invite the co-operation of any eminent for scholarship, to whatever nation or religious body they may belong "; and shortly afterwards two companies were formed for the revision of the Authorized Version of the Old and New Testaments.

Such considerations help us to understand the enormous importance attached in ancient societies to the right of intermarriage, as also to grasp the origin of wills and testaments.

The present article, after a brief glance at the conceptions of the future of the individual or the world found in other religions, will deal with the teaching of the Old and New Testaments, the Jewish and the Christian Church regarding the hereafter.

Fuerst (Kanon des Alten Testaments) that it is derived from the Persian bahar, " spring," and of Hitzig (Geschichte Israels), who derives it from the modern Arabic Phur, " the New Year."

No special development has to be reported, except the great extension of John Wilkinson's Mildmay Mission to the Jews, and its energy in the free distribution of Hebrew New Testaments.

His chief book was Undesigned Coincidences in the Writings both of the Old and New Testaments (1833; fuller edition, 1847).

Many of the alterations are found in the legendary anecdotes of the Jewish Haggada and the New Testament Testaments.

Still later, amid the satire and Reformation heat of Lyndsay we have the old manner persisting in the Testaments and in the tale of Squyer Meldrum.

Thus the opposition between God and the devil already plays a part in the Jewish groundwork of the Testaments of the Patriarchs, which was perhaps composed at the end of the period of the Maccabees.

He lectured on the Old and New Testaments, theology, apologetics and the history of the church in the 18th century.

On the death of Michaelis in 1788 he was elected professor ordinarius at Gottingen, where he lectured not only on Oriental languages and on the exegesis of the Old and New Testaments, but also on political history.

He took for granted that all the so-called supernatural facts relating to the Old and New Testaments were explicable on natural principles.

In 1828 the first volume of Hengstenberg's Christologie des Alten Testaments passed through the press; in the autumn of that year he became professor ordinarius in theology, and in 1829 doctor of theology.

He glorifies Levi's successors as high-priests and civil rulers, and applies to them the title assumed by the Maccabean princes, though he does not, like the author of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, expect the Messiah to come forth from among them.

The deists, differing widely in important matters of belief, were yet agreed in seeking above all to establish the certainty and sufficiency of natural religion in opposition to the positive religions, and in tacitly or expressly denying the unique significance of the supernatural revelation in the Old and New Testaments.

Blount, a man of a very different spirit, did both, and in so doing may be regarded as having inaugurated the second main line of deistic procedure, that of historico-critical examination of the Old and New Testaments.

But there is a stronger argument for a Hebrew original of certain sections to be found in the fact that the Testaments of the XII.

Bassaraba, besides reforming the canon law, issued a similar criminal code, with a number of civil enactments, based on Roman law, and regulating testaments, guardianship, &c. The next great advance began with the Russian protectorate over.

Far larger than the secular is the religious popular literature; it comprises many apocryphal tales from the Old and the New Testaments, and not a few of the heretical tales circulated by the various sects of Asia Minor and Thracia, which percolated into Rumania through the medium of Slavonic. A brief enumeration of the chief tales must suffice.

His great work was that of the critic. He was the first to reject with sufficient proof the equal value of the Old and the New Testaments, the uniform authority of all parts of the Bible, the divine authority of the traditional canon of Scripture, the inspiration and supposed correctness of the text of the Old and New Testaments, and, generally, the identification of revelation with Scripture.

But, in so far as it claims to deal with special revelation, it lifts itself out of the circle of the sciences, and turns away from natural know 1 Other usages of O€oXoyla are the Divine nature of Christ (St John Chrysostom, quoted in Konstantinides' Greek Lexicon), Old and New Testaments (Theodoret, ib.); Greek theology and Mosaic or revealed theology (Theodoret).