Book Three of The Lessons of Jesus · Free

Understanding the New Testament

Jesus explains the books written about him

Every book of the New Testament, one chapter each, in his own voice: what it says, who wrote it, when and for whom, what it remembers of him, and how close it stays to what he taught. Every claim has a source. Every verse is one tap away.

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Twenty-seven chapters, one for every book. Every quotation is from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.

The cover of Understanding the New Testament: two fish and a basket of loaves stamped in gold above the title, on black leather.

Contents

Twenty-seven chapters, in the order your Bible prints them.

New here? Start at the top, with How to Use This Book. Or open any chapter. Each one stands on its own.

Before the chapters

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How the chapters work, how these books came to be written, and the yardstick I measure them by.

Part One

The Gospels

The word gospel is old English for good news. It translates the Greek euangelion. In my world that word was also used for an emperor’s announcements: a victory, a birth in the ruling family, a new reign. These four books are the only accounts of my life that your Bible kept.

Part Two

The History

5Acts: What My Friends Did Next

Part Three

The Letters of Paul

Thirteen letters in your Bible carry Paul’s name. Almost all scholars agree that he wrote seven of them: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. The other six are disputed. For the letters to Timothy and Titus, most scholars are now confident that Paul did not write them. They are printed in your Bible roughly by length, longest first, not in the order they were written.

Part Four

Hebrews and the General Letters

The last eight letters in your New Testament are not by Paul. Hebrews names no author at all. The other seven are called the General Letters, or the Catholic Letters, because most of them are addressed to believers in general rather than to one church. Catholic here means universal. Several of these books were among the last to be accepted into the New Testament.

Part Five

The Prophecy

Your New Testament ends with a single book of prophecy, the only one of its kind among the twenty-seven. It was written to be read aloud in seven small churches. Many early Christians doubted it, and few books in the Bible have been argued over more.