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.

🗺 Open the map of the land in Jesus’ day →
Opens in a new tab — keep it beside you as you read.

Two ways in

Some people want to open a Gospel tonight and simply read. Others would rather have the whole story laid out and walk through it in order. Either is a good beginning — take whichever fits you right now.

John — if you want to meet Him

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. If you would rather just open a Gospel tonight and read, begin here.

Start with John →

Luke — if you want to walk the 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.

Walk the life in order, following Luke →

The walk, in seven parts

Four accounts woven into one story, following His three years as they actually unfolded — anchored to the three Passovers that mark them. Where all four writers describe the same moment, you’ll see all four together.

• 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
• 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

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?

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 — no prophet, no new word from God. The people wait, and go on waiting, wondering whether the promise had been forgotten. It had not been. 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 gathers here, into one person. Read more about the years between the Testaments →

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.