How to Use This Book

There is one chapter for every book of the New Testament, twenty-seven in all, in the order your Bible prints them. You can read straight through. You can also keep this beside your Bible and open it to whatever book you are reading.

None of these books existed while I was alive. Every one of them was written after I died, by people talking about me. So in each chapter I do not tell you how I read the book. I tell you who wrote it, when and why, what it says, and how it compares with what my first followers remembered of me.

Here is how each chapter works.

It opens with a box called At a Glance. It tells you who wrote the book, when, who it was written for, what it remembers of me, how close it stays to what I taught, and which chapters to read if you only have time for three. The judgment about how close it stays is not a score. It is a plain answer in words, measured against five things I taught, which I set out at the end of the opening essay.

Then comes Words to Know, so any unfamiliar word is defined before you meet it.

Then comes The Book in Brief: what the book says, or what happens in it, from beginning to end, in plain words. If you have never read the book, it is all you need to follow the rest.

Then the chapter itself, in short sentences and plain words. The big books get long chapters. The small ones get short ones. Some of these letters fit on a single page, and their chapters do too.

After it there is a box called Check It Yourself. It sends you to your own Bible so you can see whether I told you the truth.

At the end there is The Short Version, the few lines that hold the whole chapter.

Every chapter also has its own free page on LessonsOfJesus.com, at the name of its book, such as LessonsOfJesus.com/romans. The pages add Go deeper sections with the longer history, the manuscripts and the arguments behind the chapter.

At the back of the book there is a simple timeline, a Who’s Who of the people the book names, and the notes.

Two promises before we start.

One. You can check everything. Bible verses look like this: (Luke 4:18). That means the book of Luke, chapter 4, verse 18. History facts have a small number after them, and the notes at the back of the book tell you where each one comes from.

Two. I will not pretend to know more than anyone can know. Scholars argue about which of the words in the gospels go back to me and which were shaped by the people who told and wrote down my story. When I say the gospels remember me saying, that is what I mean. Remembered, and written down later by people who loved me. Where the experts disagree, I will tell you that they do.

Which Bible this book quotes. Every Bible quotation here comes from the World English Bible, a modern translation that is in the public domain. No one owns it, and anyone may copy it. Two of its habits are worth knowing before you start. Where most Bibles say church, it says assembly, which is closer to the Greek word. Where most Bibles say gospel, it often says Good News, which is what the word means. If your Bible words a verse differently, that is normal. Translators make choices. Where a choice changes the meaning, I will tell you.