<P> Historically, throughout the Christian world and in the context of Christian missionary activity, the New Testament (or portions thereof) has been that part of the Christian Bible first translated into the vernacular . The production of such translations grew out of the insertion of vernacular glosses in biblical texts, as well as out of the production of biblical paraphrases and poetic renditions of stories from the life of Christ (e.g., the Heliand). </P> <P> The 16th century saw the rise of Protestantism and an explosion of translations of the New (and Old) Testament into the vernacular . Notable are those of Martin Luther (1522), Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (1523), the Froschau Bible (1525--1529, revised in 1574), William Tyndale (1526, revised in 1534, 1535 and 1536), the Brest Bible (1563), and the Authorized Version (also called the "King James Version") (1611). </P> <P> Most of these translations relied (though not always exclusively) upon one of the printed editions of the Greek New Testament edited by Erasmus, a form of this Greek text emerged as the standard and is known as the Textus Receptus . This text, based on the majority of manuscripts is also used in the majority of translations that were made in the years 100 to 400 AD . </P> <P> Translations of the New Testament made since the appearance of critical editions of the Greek text (notably those of Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort, and von Soden) have largely used them as their base text . Unlike the Textus Receptus, these have a pronounced Alexandrian character . Standard critical editions are those of Souter, Vogels, Bover, Merk, and Nestlé - Aland (the text, though not the full critical apparatus of which is reproduced in the United Bible Societies' "Greek New Testament"). </P>

Who wrote the majority of epistles contained in the new testament