Unit 3 · The Biblical Lens II: The New Testament

In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 3, the writer dates the start of the story like a historian. He names the Roman emperor Tiberius, the governor Pontius Pilate, and a local ruler named Herod. That sentence tells a reader where the story sits. Judea, the region around Jerusalem, had come under Roman power when the general Pompey entered the city in 63 BCE. Rome ruled it first through a client king and then directly through governors.

The client king was Herod the Great, who ruled from 37 to 4 BCE. He rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem on a grand scale and built the port city of Caesarea. After he died, his kingdom was split among his sons. In 6 CE Rome removed one son and placed Judea under its own officials. Galilee, in the north, stayed under Herod Antipas, another son. Pontius Pilate, a Roman prefect, governed Judea from about 26 to 36 CE. A stone found at Caesarea in 1961 carries his name and title.

Roman rule meant Roman taxes, Roman soldiers and Roman law. Tax collectors, called publicans in older English Bibles, were often local men who worked for the empire and were widely disliked. Several Gospel scenes turn on this: Jesus eats with tax collectors, and people object. Everyday people spoke Aramaic, a language close to Hebrew. Greek was the shared language of trade across the eastern empire, and the Gospels themselves were written in Greek. Hebrew was the language of scripture and prayer.

For readers today, this background matters. When a Gospel mentions a centurion, a coin with Caesar’s face, or a cross, it is describing Roman power. In Roman Judea, crucifixion was a Roman punishment, used especially for slaves and rebels. Christians read these details as the setting for what they believe was a saving event. Historians read them as evidence for how a small Jewish movement began inside a large empire. Both kinds of readers need the same facts about the place and the time.

Picture the Temple in Jerusalem around the year 30. Herod’s builders had made it one of the largest sacred complexes in the Roman world. Priests offered daily sacrifices there, and Jewish pilgrims came from across the empire for the great festivals, especially Passover. Outside Jerusalem, Jews gathered in a local synagogue to read the Torah and pray. The Gospels show Jesus teaching in synagogues in Galilee and visiting the Temple at festival time.

The Jewish historian Josephus, writing later in the first century, described several groups within Judaism. The Pharisees were teachers who took the written Torah seriously and also followed oral traditions about how to keep it. They believed in the resurrection of the dead and were popular with ordinary people. The Sadducees were linked to the priestly families and the Temple. They accepted only the written Torah and did not believe in resurrection. A third group, the Essenes, lived apart in strict communities. Many scholars connect them with the Dead Sea Scrolls found near Qumran.

There were also people who wanted to fight Rome. By the time of the revolt in 66 CE, an armed group known as the Zealots was active. The Samaritans were not a Jewish group at all but a related people living between Galilee and Judea. They kept their own version of the Torah and worshiped on Mount Gerizim, not in Jerusalem. Jews and Samaritans generally avoided each other. That hostility is the background of the story Maria told on the bus.

The Gospels present Jesus arguing most often with Pharisees and scribes, but the arguments are inside Judaism, about how to keep the Sabbath, what makes a person clean, and which commandment is greatest. Modern scholars, Jewish and Christian, note that Jesus and the Pharisees shared much, including belief in resurrection. Reading these debates as one Jew talking with other Jews, rather than as Jesus against Judaism, is the approach most historians take today. It also helps avoid a long history of misreading.

Open the Gospel of Luke and you find a preface, one long sentence addressed to a man named Theophilus. The writer says that many have already tried to set down an account, that he has followed everything carefully from the beginning, and that he writes so that Theophilus may know the certainty of what he was taught. That is a clue to the genre. This is not a diary or a court record. It is a carefully arranged account with a purpose.

The word gospel comes from an Old English word meaning good news, which translates the Greek word euangelion. Mark opens with it: the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The four books we call Gospels were written in Greek, in the second half of the first century. Most scholars date Mark to around 70 CE, Matthew and Luke to the 80s, and John to the 90s, though these dates are estimates and debated. That places them roughly forty to sixty-five years after the events they describe.

In those decades the stories about Jesus were passed along by word of mouth, in preaching and teaching. Scholars call this oral tradition. The books do not name their authors inside the text. The names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from church tradition in the second century. Christians hold that the Gospels faithfully preserve what Jesus said and did. Historians study how the stories were shaped as they were told and written. A student in a public school learns to do the second while respecting the first.

The Gospels resemble ancient biographies of famous teachers in some ways: they focus on a person’s deeds and sayings and devote much space to his death. But they also announce something. John states his purpose directly near the end: these things are written so that readers may believe. Reading a Gospel well means asking the questions from unit 1. Who wrote this, for whom, when and why? Those questions do not settle whether the message is true. They do tell you what kind of book you are holding.

Lay Matthew, Mark and Luke in three columns and read the story of the paralyzed man carried to Jesus by his friends. The same scene appears in all three, often in the same words and the same order. Scholars call these three the Synoptic Gospels, from a Greek word meaning seen together. Most explain the overlap this way: Mark was written first, and Matthew and Luke each used Mark as a source, adding material of their own.

Matthew and Luke also share about two hundred verses that are not in Mark, mostly sayings of Jesus, such as much of the Sermon on the Mount. Many scholars think these came from a lost written collection they call Q, the Q source, from the German word Quelle, meaning source. Others think Luke used Matthew directly. No copy of Q has ever been found, so it remains a scholarly theory, though a widely held one.

Each Synoptic writer has a voice. Mark is the shortest, only sixteen chapters, and moves fast; the word immediately appears again and again. Mark stresses Jesus’ suffering and the disciples’ failure to understand. Matthew opens with a family tree reaching back to Abraham and quotes the Hebrew scriptures often to show what Christians believe was fulfilled. It groups Jesus’ teaching into five long speeches. Luke, who also wrote Acts, gives special attention to the poor, to women, to outsiders and to prayer. Only Luke has the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.

Reading synoptically means noticing the differences, not smoothing them out. Matthew’s Beatitudes say blessed are the poor in spirit; Luke’s say blessed are the poor. Christians have read both as true and complementary. Historians ask what each writer wanted his readers to hear. Either way, the comparison teaches a reading skill from unit 1: the same event told by two authors for two audiences will be told two ways.

The Gospel of John does not begin in Bethlehem or at the Jordan River. It begins before creation. In the beginning was the Word, it says, echoing the first words of Genesis. Christians read this opening as a statement that Jesus existed with God before the world was made and then, as the text says, became flesh and dwelt among us. The Greek word for Word here is Logos, a term Greek thinkers used for the reason that orders the universe.

John’s differences from the Synoptics are large. There are no parables in the Synoptic style and no Sermon on the Mount. Instead Jesus speaks in long conversations and speeches. He makes a series of I am statements: the bread of life, the light of the world, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life. John calls Jesus’ miracles signs, and readers often count seven of them, including turning water into wine at Cana and raising Lazarus. In John, Jesus goes to Jerusalem several times, and the cleansing of the Temple comes near the start rather than the end.

John also tells the reader why he wrote. Near the end, in chapter 20, he says the signs were written so that readers may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and have life in his name. That sentence is a plain statement of purpose. Most scholars date John to the 90s CE and see in it a community reflecting for decades on who Jesus was. Christians across traditions treasure John for its theology; the opening verses are read at Christmas in many churches.

For a comparative reader, John is a lesson in how one tradition can hold four accounts at once. The early church chose to keep all four rather than blend them into one. Around 180 CE the bishop Irenaeus argued that there should be exactly four Gospels, as there are four winds. The differences were not hidden. They were kept, and readers were expected to hold them together.

In Luke, chapter 4, Jesus stands up in the synagogue at Nazareth, his hometown, and reads from the scroll of Isaiah. The passage speaks of good news to the poor, freedom for captives and sight for the blind. Then he sits down and says that the scripture is fulfilled that day. Luke places this scene at the start of Jesus’ public work. It sets a pattern: teaching in synagogues, quoting Israel’s scriptures, and claiming that something long awaited is happening.

The Synoptics center that work in Galilee, the northern region of farms, hills and fishing towns around a large lake. Capernaum, a lakeside town, serves as a base. Jesus calls followers. Each disciple, or student, leaves work behind to follow a teacher. The first are fishermen: Simon, later called Peter, his brother Andrew, and the brothers James and John. Matthew, also called Levi, is a tax collector. From a larger group he chooses twelve, a number that echoes the twelve tribes of Israel.

Healing fills the early chapters of Mark. In Mark 2, four men carry a paralyzed friend to a crowded house, cannot get in, and lower him through the roof. In Mark 5, a woman who has bled for twelve years touches Jesus’ cloak in a crowd, and the daughter of a synagogue leader named Jairus is raised. Christians believe each was a real miracle showing God’s power. Historians note that the Jewish historian Josephus also described Jesus as a doer of remarkable deeds, and that the Gospels present each healing as a sign of the coming of God’s rule.

Teaching and healing brought crowds and also conflict. Several stories involve the Sabbath, the weekly day of rest commanded in the Torah. Jesus heals on the Sabbath and defends it with an argument from scripture: the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. Some Pharisees objected. This was a live debate among Jewish teachers of the time about what work the Sabbath forbids. The Gospels show Jesus taking one side of it, not rejecting the day itself.

Matthew, chapters 5 through 7, presents Jesus going up a mountain, sitting down as a teacher would, and speaking to his disciples with a crowd listening. Christians call this the Sermon on the Mount. It opens with the Beatitudes: blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted for doing right. Each blessing names a group the world tends to overlook and promises a reward, beginning and ending with the kingdom of heaven.

Then come six sayings built on a pattern: you have heard that it was said, but I say to you. Each takes a commandment from the Torah and pushes it inward. Do not murder becomes do not nurse anger. Love your neighbor becomes love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Jesus says he has come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it. Jewish and Christian scholars note that other Jewish teachers of the period also taught intention and mercy; the sermon’s demands are intense, but its roots are in the Torah.

The middle of the sermon holds the Lord's Prayer, which Christians of nearly every branch recite. It addresses God as our Father. It asks that God’s name be honored and God’s kingdom come. Then it asks for daily bread, for forgiveness as we forgive others, and for rescue from evil. The sermon also warns against practicing piety to be seen, against storing up treasure on earth, and against judging others. Near the end comes the Golden Rule: do to others whatever you would have them do to you, which Matthew says sums up the law and the prophets.

Luke has a shorter parallel, the Sermon on the Plain in chapter 6, where the blessings are blunter, blessed are you poor, and are paired with woes to the rich. Readers have long debated how to live the sermon. Some Christians have read it as a rule for all believers, others as an ideal that shows human need for grace, others as a rule for a special few. The Hindu leader Gandhi, who was not a Christian, said the sermon went straight to his heart. It has been read far beyond the church.

A parable is a brief story drawn from ordinary life, a farmer, a lost coin, a wedding, that carries a meaning beyond itself and asks the hearer to respond. Jewish teachers of the period used parables, and the Synoptic Gospels record dozens from Jesus. They are not fables with a moral tacked on. They usually end with a twist or a question that leaves the hearer to decide. The Good Samaritan, in Luke 10, is the best-known example.

Luke frames it with a conversation. A scholar of the law asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him what the law says, and he answers by joining two commands from the Torah: love God with all your heart, from Deuteronomy, and love your neighbor as yourself, from Leviticus. Jesus approves. Then the man asks, and who is my neighbor? That question is about limits. Where does my duty stop? The parable is the answer.

A man traveling from Jerusalem down to Jericho is beaten and left half dead. A priest sees him and passes on the other side; so does a Levite, a member of the tribe that served in the Temple. Then a Samaritan comes, feels compassion, bandages his wounds with oil and wine, sets him on his own animal, brings him to an inn, and pays the innkeeper two silver coins with a promise to cover more. For Luke’s first hearers, the shock was the hero’s identity. Samaritans and Jews were hostile neighbors, as the previous lesson explained.

Jesus then reverses the question. He does not ask who counts as the wounded man’s neighbor. He asks which of the three was a neighbor to him. The scholar answers, the one who showed mercy, and Jesus says, go and do likewise. Christians have read the story as a call to love without limits, and some early readers also read it as an allegory of Christ rescuing humanity. Either way, notice the method: the story makes the listener give the answer he did not want to give.

Luke 15 opens with a complaint: Pharisees and scribes grumble that Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them. Luke answers with three parables about lost things, a sheep, a coin and a son. In the third, a younger son demands his share of the inheritance early, travels to a far country, wastes everything, and ends up feeding pigs during a famine. He comes to himself and heads home, rehearsing an apology. Older English Bibles call him the prodigal, meaning wasteful.

Before he can finish speaking, his father sees him from far off, runs to him, embraces him, and calls for a robe, a ring and a feast. The elder brother, who stayed and worked, refuses to come in. The father goes out to him too and says: you are always with me, but your brother was dead and is alive again. The story ends without telling us whether the elder brother goes in. That open ending is the point. The hearers who grumbled are left to decide what they will do.

The Sower, in Mark 4, works differently. A farmer scatters seed. Some falls on the path and birds eat it; some on rocky ground, where it sprouts fast and withers; some among thorns, which choke it; some on good soil, where it yields thirty, sixty and a hundred times over. Mark then has Jesus explain it privately: the seed is the word, and the soils are kinds of hearers. Scholars note this is one of the few parables the Gospels themselves interpret, as an allegory in which each part stands for something.

These two parables show the range of the form. One is a family drama with no explanation; the other is a picture with a key attached. Christians have read the Prodigal Son as a portrait of God’s forgiveness, and preachers have asked which brother the listener resembles. The Sower has been read as encouragement to keep preaching despite failure. Rembrandt painted the father’s embrace; the story has shaped art and music far beyond the church. To read a parable, ask who is listening in the story and what the ending leaves open.

Every Gospel gives a large share of its pages to one week. Christians call this the Passion, from a Latin word for suffering. It begins with Jesus entering Jerusalem at Passover time, riding a donkey while crowds spread branches and cloaks. Matthew links the scene to the prophet Zechariah’s picture of a humble king. Jesus then overturns the tables of money changers in the Temple courts, an act that the Gospels present as angering the Temple authorities.

On the night before his death, the Synoptics describe a Passover meal with the twelve. Jesus breaks bread and shares a cup, saying this is my body and this is my blood of the covenant. Christians call this the Last Supper, and most churches repeat its words in worship as communion, the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper. Afterward, in a garden called Gethsemane, Jesus prays in distress. Judas, one of the twelve, arrives with an armed group, and Jesus is arrested.

The trials follow. Jesus is questioned before the high priest Caiaphas and a council, then handed to Pilate, the Roman governor. The Gospels and most historians hold that only the Roman governor could order an execution. The Gospels show him reluctant, offering to release a prisoner, but yielding to pressure. Historians stress that crucifixion was a Roman penalty, and that the charge written above Jesus’ head, King of the Jews, was political. Roman soldiers carry out the sentence at a place called Golgotha outside the city wall, with two others crucified beside him.

Mark’s account is stark. At the ninth hour Jesus cries out in Aramaic the first line of Psalm 22, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, and dies. A member of the council named Joseph of Arimathea asks Pilate for the body and lays it in a rock-cut tomb before the Sabbath begins. Christians observe this week as Holy Week, with Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday and Good Friday. For centuries many Christians blamed the Jewish people as a whole for the death, a charge used to justify persecution. Many churches today, as in the Catholic declaration Nostra Aetate of 1965, reject that charge and stress that Rome carried out the execution.

Early on the first day of the week, according to Mark, three women went to the tomb with spices to anoint the body: Mary Magdalene, another Mary, and Salome. They found the stone rolled away and a young man in white who told them Jesus of Nazareth had been raised and was not there. Mark says they fled, trembling, and said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. The oldest manuscripts of Mark end right there, at verse 8 of chapter 16. Longer endings were added later.

Matthew, Luke and John go on to describe appearances. Matthew has the risen Jesus meet the disciples on a mountain in Galilee and send them to all nations. Luke tells of two followers who walk to the village of Emmaus with a stranger and recognize him when he breaks bread. John describes Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in the garden, and Thomas doubting until he sees the wounds. In every Gospel, women are the first at the tomb. The four accounts differ in details, and readers have compared them for centuries.

For Christians, the resurrection is not a detail but the foundation. Paul, writing to Corinth around 55 CE, before any Gospel was finished, passes on what he says he received: that Christ died, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to Peter, to the twelve, and to many others. It is the earliest written list of those to whom Jesus appeared, and one of the earliest statements of the belief. Paul adds that if Christ was not raised, Christian preaching is empty. Christians hold that the resurrection shows God’s victory over death and promises their own.

Historians work differently. They do not claim to prove or disprove a miracle. They can establish that the earliest followers believed Jesus had been raised, that the belief appeared within a few years of his death, and that it drove the movement’s growth. Christians celebrate the resurrection every Sunday and above all at Easter, the oldest yearly Christian festival and, for most Christians, the most important. Most Orthodox churches calculate the date differently, so Easter often falls on different Sundays in Chicago’s Greek Orthodox and Catholic churches.

Mark reports the first words of Jesus’ preaching this way: the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe the good news. That phrase runs through the Synoptic Gospels. It does not mean a place with borders. It means God’s rule, God reigning as king over the world. Matthew usually says kingdom of heaven, meaning the same thing; many scholars explain this as a reverent Jewish habit of speaking of God indirectly. Jews of the time already hoped for God’s rule; the Gospels announce that it is arriving in Jesus.

Many parables describe the kingdom. It is like a mustard seed, the smallest seed, that grows into a great shrub where birds nest. It is like yeast a woman hides in flour until the whole batch rises. It is like treasure found in a field, or a pearl worth selling everything for. The pictures share a pattern: something small and hidden, then something large and total. The kingdom belongs, Jesus says, to the poor, to children, and to those who become like them.

Is the kingdom now or later? The Gospels say both. Jesus tells people the kingdom is among them, and he also teaches them to pray thy kingdom come, in the Lord’s Prayer. Scholars use the word eschatology, from a Greek word for last things, for teaching about the end and God’s final purpose. Some emphasize that Jesus expected the end soon; others that he saw God’s rule already present in his healings and meals. Most now say the Gospels hold the two together: begun, not finished.

Christians have drawn different conclusions. Some have understood the kingdom mainly as heaven after death. Others, including many in the Social Gospel movement in American cities like Chicago around 1900, understood it as a call to remake society with justice now. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant teaching all include both dimensions in some form. A comparative reader can note that this question, how God’s purpose meets human history, appears in Judaism and Islam too, each with its own answer.

The book of Acts, or the Acts of the Apostles, picks up where the Gospel of Luke stops. Both books address a man named Theophilus, and most scholars agree the same author wrote them. Luke told the story of Jesus. Acts tells the story of his followers over about thirty years. It moves from Jerusalem to Rome. It ends with Paul under guard in the capital of the empire, still preaching.

Acts, chapter 2, opens at Pentecost. This was the Jewish harvest festival of Shavuot, held fifty days after Passover. The name comes from the Greek word for fiftieth. Jews from across the empire had come to Jerusalem. According to Acts, the followers of Jesus were gathered in one place when a sound like wind filled the house. Something like tongues of fire rested on each of them. They began to speak in other languages, and visitors heard them in their own tongues.

Christians understand this as the coming of the Holy Spirit, the presence and power of God that Jesus had promised. Peter then speaks to the crowd. He quotes the prophet Joel and the Psalms, and he proclaims that God raised Jesus from the dead. Acts says about three thousand people were baptized that day. Many churches celebrate Pentecost each year, fifty days after Easter. Some call it the birthday of the church.

Acts then describes the first community in Jerusalem. Its members met daily in the Temple courts, broke bread in their homes, prayed and shared their goods so that no one was in need. Each leader was an apostle, a word meaning one who is sent. At this stage every follower was Jewish. The group did not see itself as a new religion. It saw itself as Jews who believed that Israel’s Messiah had come. The question of outsiders was still ahead.

Acts introduces Paul under his Hebrew name, Saul. He first appears at the stoning of Stephen, whom Christians honor as the first martyr, holding the cloaks of the men who threw the stones. In his own letters Paul calls himself a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin and a Pharisee, zealous for the law. He was born in Tarsus, a city in what is now southern Turkey. Acts adds that he was a Roman citizen. He also used the Roman name Paul, and Acts calls him Saul, who is also called Paul.

Paul says plainly that he persecuted the church. Then something changed. Acts, chapter 9, tells the story. Saul is traveling to Damascus with letters to arrest followers of Jesus. A light from heaven flashes around him. He falls to the ground and hears a voice asking why he persecutes him. The voice says it is Jesus. Saul rises blind and is led into the city. Three days later a follower named Ananias lays hands on him. His sight returns, and he is baptized.

Christians call this Paul’s conversion, a turning to a new faith. Some scholars prefer the word call. In Galatians, chapter 1, Paul describes the event the way the prophets described their calling. He says God revealed his Son to him so that he might preach among the Gentiles, the non-Jewish peoples. Paul never stopped seeing himself as a Jew. What changed was his belief about Jesus and about who belonged to God’s people.

Acts tells the Damascus story three times, in chapters 9, 22 and 26, with small differences in detail. That repetition shows how important the author thought it was. Paul’s own account in Galatians is shorter. He adds that he went to Arabia, returned to Damascus, and waited three years before visiting Peter in Jerusalem. Comparing the two accounts practices a skill from this course: the same event, told by two writers for two purposes.

Acts describes Paul setting out from Antioch in Syria, a large city where, Acts says, the followers were first called Christians. Scholars often divide his travels into three trips, plus a final voyage to Rome. Each trip is called a missionary journey. He went to Cyprus and the cities of what is now Turkey. Then he crossed into Greece: Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens and Corinth, where he stayed a year and a half. Later he spent more than two years in Ephesus. He usually worked with partners such as Barnabas, Silas and Timothy.

Acts shows a pattern. Paul goes first to the local synagogue and speaks to Jews and to Gentiles who attended it. Some accept his message and some reject it. Then he teaches in homes and public places. He supported himself by making tents, so he would not be a burden. Small communities formed and met in homes. When Paul moved on, he stayed in touch through visits, co-workers and letters.

As Gentiles joined, a hard question arose. Did a Gentile man have to be circumcised and keep the whole Torah to belong? The ritual of circumcision was the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17. Some Jewish believers said yes. Paul and Barnabas said no. According to Acts, chapter 15, the apostles and elders met in Jerusalem around 49 CE to decide. Scholars call this meeting the Council of Jerusalem. Peter spoke, and James, the leader of the Jerusalem church, gave the decision.

The council decided that Gentile believers did not need to be circumcised. It asked them to avoid a few things: food offered to idols, blood, the meat of strangled animals and sexual immorality. That choice opened the movement to the wider Roman world. It did not settle every argument, as Paul’s letter to the Galatians shows. Acts ends with Paul arrested in Jerusalem, appealing to the emperor and sent to Rome. Early Christian tradition holds that he was executed there under Nero in the 60s.

Open any of Paul’s letters and look at the first lines. They follow the pattern of Greek letters of the time. First comes the sender: Paul, sometimes with a co-worker such as Timothy. Then come the readers: the church of God at Corinth, or the churches of Galatia. Then a greeting. Where a Greek letter said greetings, Paul says grace to you and peace. A thanksgiving usually follows, then the main body, then advice, travel plans and personal greetings at the end.

The New Testament contains thirteen letters that bear Paul’s name. The Greek word for letter gives us epistle, the older English name for them. Most scholars agree Paul wrote seven: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, First Thessalonians and Philemon. The other six are debated. Many scholars think followers wrote some of them in his name after his death, a common practice in the ancient world. Many Christians hold that Paul wrote all thirteen. First Thessalonians, from about 50 CE, is probably the oldest surviving Christian writing.

Paul did not usually write with his own hand. He dictated to a scribe, a trained writer. In Romans 16 the scribe, Tertius, adds his own greeting. At the end of Galatians, Paul takes the pen himself and points out the large letters of his own handwriting. Trusted co-workers carried the letters by road and ship. Then they read them aloud to the gathered community.

Those communities were house churches. There were no church buildings yet. Believers met in the homes of members who had room, such as Prisca and Aquila, a couple Paul names more than once. A letter was read to everyone at once, enslaved and free, women and men. That is why reading Paul is like hearing one side of a phone call. He answers questions and problems that we must reconstruct from his replies.

Galatians is Paul’s angriest letter. He skips the usual thanksgiving. Teachers had come to Galatia, in what is now central Turkey, telling Gentile believers they must be circumcised. Paul answers that a person is put right with God not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. He even describes confronting Peter at Antioch for pulling away from meals with Gentile believers. For Paul, shared tables showed that Jews and Gentiles now belonged to one family.

Romans, written about 57 CE to a church Paul had not yet visited, lays out the argument more calmly. It is his longest letter. He argues that all people, Jew and Gentile, have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. God’s answer, he says, is grace, a gift that cannot be earned. The Greek word he uses for being put right with God is usually translated justification. It is received through faith, which for Paul means trust and loyalty, not only agreement with ideas.

These chapters changed later history. In 386 Augustine, a teacher from North Africa, read a verse from Romans 13 in a garden in Milan and turned to Christianity. In the 1500s the German monk Martin Luther read Romans and Galatians as teaching justification by faith alone, a key idea of the Protestant Reformation. In 1738 John Wesley, who founded Methodism, felt his heart strangely warmed while hearing Luther’s preface to Romans read in London.

Christians do not all read these letters the same way. Catholic and Orthodox teaching holds that faith works together with love and the life of the church. It points to the Letter of James, which says that faith without works is dead. Protestants have read James as describing faith that shows itself in action. Since the late twentieth century, many scholars have argued that Paul’s main concern was whether Gentiles could belong without becoming Jews. That view is called the New Perspective on Paul.

Corinth’s church had many problems, and First Corinthians takes them one at a time. Members quarreled over leaders. Some treated the Lord’s Supper as an ordinary dinner party, where the wealthy ate first and the poor went hungry. Paul answers by repeating what he says he received. On the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread and said, this is my body. Written around 54 CE, this is the oldest surviving account of the Last Supper, older than any Gospel.

In chapter 12 Paul uses a picture that Greek and Roman writers used for a city: a body. He applies it to the church, which he calls the body of Christ. The foot cannot say it does not belong because it is not a hand. The eye cannot tell the hand it is not needed. Each member has a different gift, such as teaching, healing or helping. The weaker parts, Paul says, deserve special honor.

Chapter 13 follows, and it is one of the most read passages in the Bible. Paul says that speaking in tongues, prophecy and even giving everything away are worth nothing without love. Love is patient and kind. It is not jealous, boastful or rude. The Greek word is agape, a self-giving love. The King James Version translates it as charity, which in 1611 could mean love in this full sense. Modern translations say love. The chapter is often read at weddings, though Paul wrote it to a quarreling congregation.

Other chapters deal with marriage, with meat that had been sacrificed to Greek gods and then sold in the market, and with order in worship. Chapter 15 contains the early summary of the resurrection belief that you met in the last chapter. First Corinthians shows how Paul’s theology grew out of practical questions. He rarely wrote abstract theology for its own sake. He wrote to help a real community live together.

The last book of the New Testament begins with a man named John on Patmos, a small island off the coast of what is now Turkey. He says he was there because of his witness to Jesus. He sees visions and writes them down for seven churches in the Roman province of Asia, including Ephesus and Smyrna. Many scholars date the book to about 95 CE, near the end of the emperor Domitian’s reign. Christians have long debated whether this John was the apostle or another John.

The book belongs to a genre scholars call apocalyptic, from the Greek apokalypsis, meaning unveiling or revealing. Apocalyptic writing uses dreams, angels, strange beasts and numbers to reveal a hidden meaning in history. The book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible is an earlier example. Several other Jewish apocalypses were written in the same centuries. First readers knew how to read the images, the way we read a political cartoon.

Revelation is dense with symbols. A lamb that was slain stands for Christ. Seven is a number of completeness. A beast rises from the sea, and a woman called Babylon rides on a beast. Many scholars read Babylon as a code name for Rome, the empire that ruled and at times persecuted Christians. The book ends with a new heaven and a new earth, and a new Jerusalem where God lives with people and wipes away every tear.

Christians have read Revelation in several ways. Some read it mainly as a message to churches under pressure in John’s own time. Some read it as a forecast of events still to come at the end of history. Many read it as a symbolic picture of the struggle between good and evil in every age. Its place in the Bible was debated for centuries, especially in the East. Eastern Orthodox churches still do not include it among the readings at their main Sunday service.

In 367 CE Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, sent his yearly Easter letter to the churches under his care. In it he listed the books to be read as scripture. His list of twenty-seven New Testament books is the earliest known list that matches today’s exactly. By then Christians had been reading many of these writings for nearly three hundred years. The list recorded a long process more than it started one.

A canon is an official list of sacred books. The word comes from a Greek word for a measuring rod or rule. In the second century a teacher named Marcion, active in Rome around 140, rejected the Hebrew Bible. He accepted only an edited Luke and ten of Paul’s letters. Other church leaders rejected his short list. Around 180 the bishop Irenaeus defended exactly four Gospels. Debates like these pushed churches to say clearly which books they held in common.

Scholars describe three main tests that early Christians used. Was a book connected to an apostle or to someone close to one? Was it widely read in worship across many churches? Did it agree with what the churches already taught? The four Gospels and Paul’s letters were accepted early. Hebrews, James, Second Peter, Jude and Revelation were disputed for longer. Other popular writings, such as the Shepherd of Hermas, were read in some churches but finally left out.

Early Christians also favored a newer kind of book. Instead of scrolls, they copied their texts in the codex, a book of pages bound along one edge, like books today. A codex could hold all four Gospels or all of Paul’s letters in one volume. Church councils in North Africa, at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397, affirmed the same twenty-seven books. Almost all churches today accept this New Testament.

Stand in a Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran or Anglican service on a Sunday and you will likely hear the congregation speak together words like these: I believe, or we believe, in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. These are the opening words of the Nicene Creed. A creed, from the Latin credo, meaning I believe, is a summary of faith that believers say together. The earliest creeds grew out of the questions asked of new members at baptism.

The Nicene Creed came out of a crisis. Around 318 a priest in Alexandria named Arius taught that the Son of God was created by the Father and so was not fully God. Others, including the young Athanasius, argued that the Son was fully divine. In 325 the emperor Constantine, who had ended the persecution of Christians, called bishops to the city of Nicaea to settle the matter. The council declared the Son to be of one substance with the Father. A council at Constantinople in 381 expanded the creed.

The creeds state the doctrine of the Trinity: one God in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The word Trinity does not appear in the Bible. Christian thinkers developed it to describe what they believed the scriptures taught. In the West, the shorter Apostles’ Creed, which grew from an early baptismal creed used in Rome, is also widely used. Most Christians today accept the Nicene teaching. A few groups that identify as Christian, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints, do not.

The creeds also show how Christians read the whole Bible as one story. God creates. The Son becomes human, suffers under Pontius Pilate, rises and will come again. The Spirit gives life. A single phrase later divided East and West. Western churches added a line saying the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Eastern churches objected, and the dispute became one cause of the split between them in 1054.

In First Corinthians 5, Paul writes that Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. He takes a practice from Exodus, the lamb whose blood marked Israelite doors, and reads it as pointing to Jesus. This way of reading is called typology. A person or event in the earlier scriptures is seen as a type, a pattern or foreshadowing, of Christ. Early Christian writers used typology often. Adam, Isaac and Jonah were all read as types.

For this reason Christians call the Hebrew scriptures the Old Testament. Testament means covenant. The name draws on the prophet Jeremiah, who spoke of a new covenant, and on New Testament passages that quote him. Christians hold that the two testaments form one Bible, with the New as the key to the Old. The Gospels often say that something happened to fulfill what the prophets said. Christians read Isaiah 53, about a servant who suffers for others, as a picture of Jesus.

Jews read the same books differently, as a complete scripture, the Tanakh, not as the older part of something else. Jewish interpreters have often read the suffering servant of Isaiah as the people of Israel. Jewish tradition does not hold that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies about the Messiah. The two traditions share a text and read it through different lenses: Christians through the New Testament, Jews through the rabbis and the Talmud. For this reason, many scholars say Hebrew Bible when describing the shared books.

This difference had real consequences. For many centuries some Christians taught that the church had simply replaced Israel as God’s people, a view scholars call supersessionism. That teaching fed hostility toward Jews. After the Holocaust, many churches reexamined it. In 1965 the Catholic Church’s document Nostra Aetate stated that Jews as a people should not be blamed for the death of Jesus. It also affirmed the bond between Christians and Jews. Many Protestant churches have issued similar statements.

On Chicago’s Near North Side, Holy Name Cathedral is the seat of the Catholic archbishop. In the Ukrainian Village neighborhood, Holy Trinity Cathedral, designed by the architect Louis Sullivan, serves an Orthodox congregation. Across the city stand Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Pentecostal churches. All of them read the New Testament that this chapter has traced. They differ over authority, worship and how to read those texts.

The Catholic Church, led by the bishop of Rome, the pope, is the largest branch, with more than a billion members. The Orthodox churches, strongest in Greece, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, are a family of self-governing churches led by patriarchs and bishops. East and West had grown apart for centuries over language, customs and the authority of the pope. In 1054 leaders in Rome and Constantinople excommunicated each other. That event is often called the Great Schism, though the break hardened slowly.

In 1517 a German monk, Martin Luther, published ninety-five theses criticizing the sale of indulgences, grants said to lessen punishment for sin. His protest grew into the Reformation. Protestants taught that scripture alone is the final authority and that people are justified by grace through faith alone. The movement soon divided into many churches: Lutheran, Reformed and Presbyterian, Anglican, Baptist, and later Methodist and Pentecostal. The Catholic Church answered with its own reforms at the Council of Trent, which met between 1545 and 1563.

The branches read the same New Testament but differ in emphasis. Catholics and Orthodox give great weight to tradition and to sacraments such as baptism and the Eucharist. Orthodox worship centers on the Divine Liturgy and on icons, painted images of Christ and the saints. Most Protestant churches stress preaching and personal Bible reading. Their Bibles differ too. Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments include several books, such as Tobit and the Maccabees, that most Protestants call the Apocrypha. In 1965 Rome and Constantinople lifted their excommunications of 1054.