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 — 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 people wait, and go on waiting, wondering whether the promise had been forgotten.

It had not been. 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 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 — anchored to a timeline built from the three Passovers that mark His three years of ministry. Where all four writers describe the same moment, you’ll see all four together.

Still to come: Acts and the letters — the story of the first church and the journeys of Paul — will follow as this study continues. This site is a work in progress, and always has been.

Begin the Life of Jesus →