The Bible For Dummies

The next book in the bible stands by itself and it is the book of Acts or Acts of the Apostles. The gospels began with Christ’s birth and ended with his resurrection and the book of Acts begins with the resurrection of Christ and chronicles the life of the early church. The author is the same Luke who wrote the third gospel, and again it was written to his friend Theophilus. The first chapter tells how Christ ascended to heaven and how the apostles chose someone to replace the traitor Judas Iscariot.

It’s in Acts that we read about the first Christian Martyr a young man named Stephen and we read about the conversion of a prominent Jewish teacher by the name of Saul who was renamed Paul and became the greatest teacher of Christianity. It was through Paul that the message of Jesus spread throughout the ancient world.

The book of Luke and the Acts account for one fourth of the New Testament.

The next section of books was written by the Paul who we read about in the book of Acts. They are known as epistles which does not mean the wives of the apostles instead it’s a fancy word for letters. Specifically these are called the Pauline Epistles or letters of Paul and they include: Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon. Some scholars feel that there isn’t enough evidence of Paul’s authorship to include the book of Hebrews in this group and have suggested that it might have been written by Barnabas, Apollos or possibly Luke. But because tradition ascribed it to Paul we’ll leave it here.

Understand that these books were originally letters to specific churches dealing with specific issues, it’s like we are opening someone else’s mail and reading it. We have to keep in mind that the first people who read these letters had inside knowledge that we don’t have about what was happening in their particular situation. However God in his infinite wisdom chose to preserve these specific letters for the entire church so even though they were intended for a specific audience they are for us today as well.

It’s in Romans we discover the wages of sin is death, but he gift of God is eternal life, we find the attributes of love listed from 1 Corinthians 13, we discover the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5, and we are told that we can do everything through the power of Christ in Philippians. In Ephesians we are reminded that we are saved by grace through faith, and in Hebrews we read about God’s hall of fame of faith.

If you are every frantically flipping through the New Testament looking for books keep in mind all of the books that start with T are clumped together.

There are seven other letters in the New Testament that were written by others and these are often referred to as the General Epistles these include the books of James, 1 & 2 Peter, 1, 2 & 3 John and the book of Jude. These were written for the same reason as the letters of Paul were written, to encourage and instruct local churches. These letters were written by two of Jesus’ brothers James and Jude as well as the apostles Peter and John. The book of James is my favourite epistle although Martin Luther referred to it as: An epistle of Straw. It was written to warn believers about slander, favouritism, pride, the misuse of wealth and a lack of patience. This may have been the first New Testament book written.