Before We Start: The Books About Me

Not one line of your New Testament is in my hand. In all four gospels, there is only one moment when anyone sees me write anything. A woman had been dragged in front of me, and I bent down and wrote on the ground with his finger (John 8:6). Nobody recorded what I wrote.

And that story is not in the oldest copies of John. It was added to the gospel later.¹

So the first thing to know about the New Testament is that it is not my writing. It is twenty-seven books by other people, about me, written after I was gone.

Twenty years of talking

I was executed around the year 30. For about twenty years after that, as far as anyone can tell, nothing that survives was written down about me at all.

That does not mean I was forgotten. My followers told the stories out loud. They told them in Aramaic, my language, in the villages of Galilee and in Jerusalem. Then they told them in Greek, in the cities of the empire. They repeated my sayings, sang hymns, broke bread together and argued about what it all meant.

The oldest book in your New Testament is probably a short letter from a man named Paul to a small congregation in the Greek city of Thessalonica, written around the year 50.² Paul never met me during my life. He says he saw me after my death, last of all, as to the child born at the wrong time (1 Corinthians 15:8).

Paul wrote letters for about ten years. In all of them, he quotes my words only a handful of times. He passes on what I said about divorce and about workers being paid, and what I said over the bread and cup on my last night (1 Corinthians 7:10; 9:14; 11:23–25).³ Most of what he writes is about what my death and resurrection meant. Very little of it is about what I taught on the hillsides.

Then the gospels

The four gospels came after Paul’s letters. Most scholars date them like this.⁴

Mark came first, around the year 70, the year Rome burned Jerusalem and its Temple.

Matthew and Luke came next, probably in the 80s or 90s. Both of them had Mark in front of them and copied large parts of it.

John came last, probably in the 90s or a little later.

So the earliest account of my life was written about forty years after I died. That is roughly the distance between you and something your parents lived through. It is not nothing. Some of the people who had known me were still alive. Most were not.

Luke tells you plainly how he worked. He was not there. He says that many others had already written accounts, that he had collected what the eyewitnesses passed down, and that he was now putting it in order (Luke 1:1–3).

The names on the books

The four gospels do not tell you who wrote them. None of them names its author.

The titles in your Bible, according to Matthew, according to Mark and so on, were added later. They appear on the oldest copies of the gospels that still have their opening pages, from around the year 200.⁵ The earliest writer we know of who connects a gospel to Mark and another to Matthew is a bishop named Papias, writing in the early 100s.⁶

I knew a Matthew. He collected taxes, and I called him to follow me. I knew a John, the son of Zebedee, whom I nicknamed one of the Sons of Thunder (Mark 3:17). Whether either of them wrote the book that carries his name is one of the oldest questions about these books. I will tell you what the evidence says in each chapter.

Written in someone else’s language

I spoke Aramaic. Every book of the New Testament was written in Greek.

That means almost every word you read from my mouth is a translation, made by people retelling my story in another language. A few of my actual Aramaic words survived, because they were too precious to translate. Mark keeps them. Talitha cumi, when I took a dead girl by the hand (Mark 5:41). Ephphatha, “Be opened” (Mark 7:34). Abba, the everyday Aramaic word for father, in the garden on my last night (Mark 14:36). And on the cross, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? (Mark 15:34).

When you read those words, you are as close to my voice as the page can bring you.

Your order is not their order

Your New Testament opens with the four gospels, then Acts, then the letters, then Revelation. That is a sensible order for reading. It is not the order they were written in.

Paul’s letters are the oldest books in it, and they come after the gospels and Acts. Within Paul’s letters, the order is not by date either. It is roughly by length, longest first. Romans comes first because it is the longest letter, not because it was the first one written. The letters to churches come before the letters to individuals, and little Philemon, one page long, comes last.⁷

Who chose the twenty-seven

No one handed down a list of these books, and for a long time there was no agreed list at all.

Around the year 140, a wealthy shipowner named Marcion made the first known list. It had one gospel, a shortened Luke, and ten letters of Paul. He threw out the scriptures I grew up on altogether. The churches rejected him, but he forced them to start deciding what they did accept.⁸

For the next two centuries, they argued. The four gospels and most of Paul’s letters were accepted early and widely. Other books were disputed for a long time: Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation. Around the year 325, the church historian Eusebius sorted the books into the accepted, the disputed and the rejected, and several of the books in your Bible were on his disputed list.⁹

Some books that did not make it into your Bible were read in churches as scripture. One of the oldest Bibles that survives, the Codex Sinaiticus, copied in the 300s, ends with two books you have never heard read on a Sunday: the Letter of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas.¹⁰

The first list that matches your twenty-seven books exactly comes from Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, in a letter he wrote for Easter in the year 367.¹¹ That is more than three hundred years after my death.

Copies of copies

No one has the original of any of these books. Not one page. What survives are copies, and copies of copies, made by hand for fourteen centuries before printing.

There are more than five thousand Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, whole or in pieces, more than for any other ancient book. The oldest is a scrap of John about the size of a credit card, usually dated somewhere in the 100s.¹² No two of the manuscripts agree in every word. Most of the differences are spelling, word order and slips of the pen. A few are larger.

You will meet the largest ones in these chapters. The ending of Mark after chapter 16, verse 8. The story of the woman caught in adultery. A sentence about the Trinity in the first letter of John that was in many older English Bibles and is not in any Greek manuscript before the Middle Ages.¹¹³

Different Bibles handle these differently. Most modern Bibles print the ending of Mark and the woman caught in adultery, set off in brackets or with a note. The World English Bible follows the majority of the later Greek copies, so it prints both of them without brackets. When a passage I quote is one of these, I will tell you.

Letters in other people’s names

Thirteen letters in your New Testament carry Paul’s name. Most scholars are confident that seven of them are his: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. The others are argued over, and many scholars think some or all of them were written after his death by people who wrote in his name.¹⁴

That was a common practice in the ancient world, among Jews, Greeks and Christians alike. You wrote in the name of a great teacher to say what you believed he would say now. It was also criticized in its own time. I will not pretend the question is settled where it is not. In each chapter I will give you the case on both sides.

How I will read these books with you

My Bible was the scriptures of my people, the books Christians call the Old Testament. The New Testament was not my Bible. It was written about me.

Some of it I would recognize at once. Some of it sounds like men who knew me well. Some of it sounds like men who never met me, writing for churches I never saw, about questions nobody asked me in Galilee.

So in each chapter I will tell you who wrote the book, as far as anyone can tell, when and for whom. I will tell you what it says, what it says about me, and where it holds on to what I taught and where it went somewhere new.

You will notice that I keep coming back to the same few things: the poor, the hungry, the stranger, the debts people owe, and what people do with power. I kept coming back to them when I was alive. The question for every book that follows is whether it kept coming back to them too.

What I will measure them by

In each chapter’s At a Glance box there is a line called How close it stays to me. It is not a score. It is a plain answer, and this is the yardstick I hold every book against: five things, each one from my own mouth as the gospels remember it.

One. God’s kingdom, coming on earth. Not a place you go when you die. Let your Kingdom come. Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).

Two. The poor and the outcast first. Blessed are you who are poor, God’s Kingdom is yours (Luke 6:20).

Three. Forgive debts and enemies, and do not strike back. Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors (Matthew 6:12). Love your enemies (Matthew 5:44). Whoever strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also (Matthew 5:39).

Four. Love your neighbor, and the stranger counts. You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31). I was a stranger, and you took me in (Matthew 25:35). When a lawyer asked me who his neighbor was, I answered with a story about a Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37).

Five. The greatest serves, and no one lords it over anyone. You know that they who are recognized as rulers over the nations lord it over them … But it shall not be so among you, but whoever wants to become great among you shall be your servant (Mark 10:42–43).

A book can be close on some of these and far on others. Most are. Where a book stays close, I will say so gladly. Where it drifts, I will show you where, and you can open your Bible and judge for yourself.