If you are just beginning to explore, this is exactly where I would want you to land. Everything else on this site — the whole long story running back through the prophets and the kings all the way to the first pages of Genesis — leans toward this one life. So we begin here, with Him.

You don’t need any background to start. You don’t need to know the books of the Bible, or have any of it settled in your mind. Come as you are, with your questions, and read a little at a time.

📖 If you want to read immediately — open John chapter 1 →
Opens in a new tab — the GOD’S WORD Translation, free online. You do not need to own a Bible to begin.

Two ways in

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There are two good places to start, and they suit different people. Read one description, pick the one that sounds like you, and go. You can always come back for the other — most people eventually do both.

If you want to meet Jesus through the eyes of His closest friend →

Written by the friend who stood closest, the one who called himself simply “the disciple Jesus loved.” It reads less like a report and more like a portrait — an old friend telling you what he saw, and why it changed everything. Twenty-one short chapters. You could begin tonight and finish inside a fortnight.

Choose this if you would rather open a Gospel and simply read, and work out the background later.
A short guide to the book, a chapter-by-chapter map you can read straight from, and a link to the text itself.

If you want Jesus’ whole life in order →

Luke was a physician and a historian, and he tells us plainly what he set out to do: having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, he wrote an orderly account (Luke 1:1–4). His is the most chronological of the four, which is why we follow Luke’s order as the backbone of the walk below — bringing Matthew, Mark and John alongside as each event unfolds.

Choose this if you would rather have the whole story laid out and walk it from the beginning.
Seven parts, in sequence, with all four Gospels woven together.

What is in this section

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Four accounts woven into one story. John’s Gospel records three Passovers during the years of Jesus’ ministry, and they anchor a helpful means of understanding its chronology — which is how the walk below is ordered. Where all four writers describe the same moment, you’ll see all four together.

These pages are in the order of the reading path. Two set the scene, then the life itself, in order.

• The Gospel of John — The friend who stood closest — written so that you would come to know Him
• The Land in Jesus’ Day — Keep this open as you read — the geography explains a great deal
• The Birth — Two men wrote it down, from opposite sides of the same room
• The Women in the Line — Matthew opens the New Testament with a family tree, and puts the worst of it in writing
• Before the Ministry — The childhood glimpses, and the voice in the wilderness
• Year One: Baptism to the First Passover — The Jordan, the wilderness, Cana, and a scene in the temple
• Year One: Samaria to Tabernacles — The woman at the well, and the pool of Bethesda
• Year One: Galilee — Capernaum, the calling of the Twelve, and the Sermon on the Mount
• The Sermon on the Mount — Matthew 5–7 — the manifesto of an upside-down kingdom
• The Lord’s Prayer — Almost everyone can say it. Very few have read it.
• Year Two: The Second Tour — The five thousand fed, Caesarea Philippi, and the Transfiguration
• The Final Months — Tabernacles, Dedication, Perea, and Lazarus raised
• Passion Week — Seven days the Gospels slow down to tell almost hour by hour

Where this sits in the Bible

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If the shape of the Bible is unfamiliar, here’s the short version. It comes in two halves. The first — the Old Testament — is the long story before Jesus. The second is the New Testament, twenty-seven books written in the first century, in four kinds of writing: the Gospels (four accounts of the life of Jesus — this is where we are), Acts (what happened next), the Letters (working out what it means for how we live), and Revelation (the end of the whole story). More about the New Testament →

Coming here from Malachi?

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If you’ve walked the long way with us — from the garden, through Abraham and the Exodus, the kings and the prophets, all the way to Malachi — then you’ve watched a promise grow for centuries. A deliverer was coming. And then the Old Testament simply stops, mid-expectation, with the promise still unkept.

Four hundred years pass before the New Testament opens — four centuries you can walk through in The Four Hundred Years. The promise had not been forgotten. What arrives is not merely another prophet, but the One every prophet had been pointing to — and every thread you’ve been following since Genesis 3:15 — the first promise, spoken in Eden, that one born of woman would undo what was done there — gathers here, into one person. The Four Hundred Years — the world He was born into →

However you begin — a Gospel tonight, or the whole story in order — take it slowly. You don’t have to understand everything at once, and you don’t have to have it all settled. I’m simply a fellow traveler here, pointing out what I’ve seen along the way. Let the Holy Spirit be your teacher, and let the questions come.