Acts picks up right where the Gospel of Luke leaves off. It has the same author, writing to the same man — and he simply keeps going, telling the ongoing story of Jesus as it was lived out by His earliest followers. That is where the book gets its title: the Acts of the Apostles.

From there the story turns toward a Jewish Pharisee who came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah his people had awaited for centuries. That man is Saul of Tarsus, better known to us as Paul. Like many Jews living in the Roman world, he had both names from the beginning — Saul among his own people, Paul among Romans. Luke begins calling him Paul as the story turns toward the Gentile world, not at his conversion.

From here on it is Paul you will meet. Every letter that bears his name opens the same way — “Paul, an apostle…” — he never once signs himself Saul. The old name returns only when he tells the Damascus road story himself and repeats the voice that stopped him: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Even then it is not what he calls himself. It is what he heard.

Paul wrote many of the books you will meet later in the New Testament, and Acts is the history standing behind them. It records him starting the very churches he would later write to, encouraging and correcting them by letter. Read Acts first, and those letters stop being abstract — you know who he is writing to, and why he cared.

How this series runs

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In order, from the resurrection to the death of the last apostle — about seventy years. Three strands are woven together as we go: the story Luke tells in Acts, the letters as they were written, and what became of the men who had walked with Jesus.

That order is not mine. Acts is history — Luke setting down what happened, in the sequence it happened — and the chronology of these letters is based largely on Paul’s journeys as Acts records them. So this section does not follow the order the letters sit in your Bible. That arrangement groups them by kind; this one puts each letter back into the moment it was written out of.

Two honest notes before we begin. The dates you will see — Galatians around A.D. 51, Romans around 57 — are careful reconstructions by scholars, not dates the Bible gives. They are reliable enough to show you the shape of the story, and genuinely debated at the edges. And most of what we know about how the apostles died comes from later church tradition, not from Scripture. Only one apostle’s death is recorded in the New Testament: James the brother of John, killed by Herod (Acts 12:2). Where I tell the rest, I will say plainly that it is tradition.

The parts, in order

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• The Church Begins — Forty days, an upstairs room, and a morning in Jerusalem
• Scattered — A killing in Jerusalem, and a message that travels because of it
• The Persecutor Converted — Damascus, Arabia, and years nobody writes about
• Antioch and the First Journey — A Roman soldier, a new name, and the first deliberate mission
• The Council and the Second Journey — The question that nearly split the church, and the first letters
• The Third Journey — Three years in Ephesus, a difficult church at Corinth, and the letter to Rome
• Arrest, Trial and Rome — Four years in custody, and the letters written from it
• The Last Letters — Fire in Rome, and the generation that had seen Him begins to die
• Jerusalem Falls — A.D. 70, and what it meant for a faith born in the temple courts
• The Last Apostle — John at Ephesus, and the closing of the eyewitness generation
• The Women — Phoebe, Junia, Prisca, Lydia — and the two passages that seem to say the opposite.
• Where the Letters Fall — Every letter in its place on the timeline

One of those is a reference page rather than a part of the story, and can be used at any point: Where the Letters Fall — all twenty-one letters in the order they were written, with the year, the place and the part of the story each belongs to.

Where it ends

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The series closes with John. He outlived them all, and when he died the last living link to the earthly life of Jesus was gone — from then on the church had only what had been written down and handed on. That is a fitting place to stop. The book of Revelation, which John also wrote, belongs to a study of its own.

Begin with Part One — The Church Begins.