If you have walked with us this far — from the garden in Genesis, through Abraham and the Exodus, the kings and the prophets, all the way to Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament — then you have watched a promise grow. A deliverer was coming. The prophets said so, again and again, in more detail as the centuries passed. And then the Old Testament simply stops, mid-expectation, with the promise still unkept.

Four hundred years of silence

---

Then, silence. Four centuries pass between Malachi’s last words and the opening of the New Testament — no prophet, no new word from God. Empires rise and fall over the land, the temple is desecrated and cleansed, and a foreign king rebuilds it. What happened in those years is worth knowing, and why it happened when it did is worth knowing more.

The New Testament opens with the silence broken — and what arrives is not merely another prophet, but the One every prophet had been pointing to. This is where the story turns, and where every thread we have been following since Genesis 3:15 — the first promise, spoken in Eden, that one born of woman would undo what was done there — finally gathers into one person.

If you are new here and this is where you have landed first, you are welcome to start right here. You don’t need the earlier part of the story to begin — though I think you’ll find, as we go, that it makes far more sense of the why.

What’s in the New Testament?

---

Twenty-seven books, written across the first century, in four kinds of writing. If the shape of it is unfamiliar, here is the whole thing at a glance.

The Gospels — Four accounts of the life of Jesus: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Not four competing stories, but four witnesses to the same life, each remembering what struck him most. Four books.

Acts of the Apostles — What happened next. Luke continues his account into the story of the first followers of Jesus, the birth of the church, and the journeys of Paul. One book.

The Letters — Letters written to those early churches and to individuals, working out what all of this actually means for how we live. Most are Paul’s; the rest come from other early leaders. Twenty-one books.

Revelation — The last book: the end of the whole story, and the promise of everything set right at last. One book.

Where we begin

---

We’ll walk the New Testament the same way we walked the Old — in order, following the story as it actually unfolded. And that means beginning with Jesus Himself.

Rather than reading the four Gospels one after another and meeting the same events four times over, we’ll lay them side by side and follow the life of Jesus as a single story. John’s Gospel records three Passovers during the years of His ministry; they anchor a helpful means of understanding its chronology. Where all four writers describe the same moment, you’ll see all four together.

After the Gospels, Acts and the Letters carries the story on: the church born at Pentecost, scattered by persecution, and carried across the empire by a man who had been trying to destroy it — with each of Paul’s letters placed at the point in the journey where he wrote it.

Begin the Life of Jesus →
Continue with Acts & the Letters →