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Bible Studies Understanding Scripture
Understanding the New Testament
Four gospels, a history, a stack of letters, and one apocalypse. What each is doing, and why the differences matter.
Twenty-seven documents written across perhaps fifty years: four gospels, one history, a stack of letters to real congregations, and one apocalypse. Knowing which you are holding changes everything.
What you’ll explore
- 01 Why there are four gospels rather than one
- 02 What a gospel is as a piece of writing
- 03 Acts: the church spreading outward
- 04 Letters to real congregations with real problems
- 05 Paul, and reading him fairly
- 06 Revelation: genre before meaning
- 07 Reading the New Testament alongside the Old
Why there are four gospels rather than one
Read Matthew 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-38; John 1:1-5
Matthew traces Jesus to Abraham through a Jewish royal line; Luke traces him back to Adam; John begins before creation. The differences are the point — four portraits for four audiences. Where they diverge on detail, the church has generally preferred keeping all four to smoothing them into one.
What a gospel is as a piece of writing
Mark calls his work "the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ", and John says outright that he selected material so that readers may believe. These are ancient biographies with a purpose, arranged thematically as often as chronologically. Selective is not the same as unreliable, and both writers tell you they are selecting.
Acts: the church spreading outward
The programme is announced in the first chapter — Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, the ends of the earth — and the book follows it. Acts is the bridge without which the letters have no setting. Read it once straight through and the rest of the New Testament acquires a map.
Letters to real congregations with real problems
Read 1 Corinthians 5:1; Philemon 1:8-16
Paul writes about a specific scandal in Corinth and about one runaway slave by name in Philemon. These are occasional documents — we are reading somebody else’s mail, and often only one side of it. That is why context does so much work in interpreting them.
Paul, and reading him fairly
Read Romans 3:21-26; Galatians 2:15-16
Justification by faith apart from works of the law is the centre of his argument, and Christians agree on that far more than the popular caricature suggests. What "works of the law" meant in his first-century setting is actively debated among scholars. His hardest passages are hard partly because they are compressed argument, not doctrine set out in order.
Revelation: genre before meaning
It calls itself an apocalypse and a prophecy, sent as a letter to seven named churches in Asia Minor. Apocalyptic writing works by symbol and number, and the first readers were under pressure. Christians read the book in several long-standing ways — as future, as first-century, as a symbolic account of the whole church age — and treating one as simply what it says is not straight with the reader.
Reading the New Testament alongside the Old
Read Matthew 5:17; Hebrews 1:1-2
Jesus says he came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfil them. Hebrews opens by saying God spoke long ago by the prophets and in these last days by a Son. The New Testament quotes the Old constantly and assumes you know it; reading them apart makes both harder.
Questions to sit with
- Which gospel do you know best? Which have you never read alone?
- Have you read Acts straight through?
- Which reading of Revelation were you taught, and did you know there were others?
Every passage in this study
Go deeper
Where this connects
This study sits inside a larger story. Read the passages above in their own books, and follow the thread back through Scripture as a whole.