There is little to learn from the order in which the books of the New Testament are presented in the Bibles we have today. There is no evidence that there is an inspired order. And there is little understanding to be gained from a chronological order—even if we could be certain of it. Why?

There are two reasons in particular. The four gospels are intended each to stand alone as independent witnesses. They do not depend on one another to tell the story. Therefore, while their dates may be of importance to scholars, they offer us little regarding meaning. And when folks like us sit down to read the Bible, our primary question is, What does it mean?

The rest of the books, mainly epistles, are incidental. That is to say they arose out of local and temporal necessity—they were provoked by events. If, for example, the Corinthian church had not been such a pain in the neck, or if Paul had been present in Corinth when the problems arose, the letters would probably never have been written. So each of the books of the New Testament has its own story to tell, its own testimony to offer. But that raises another question, commonly called the Synoptic Problem.

The New Testament is really an amazing set of documents. It is only logical to ask how it got written in the first place. We have already talked about how it was transmitted to us, how they were copied, how the texts were scattered all over the Middle East, and how textual critics study them to try to find out what the original text really looked like. But we left open the question of its original composition until now.

One of the best ways of getting at this is to take a look at what things looked like—what was happening—in the earliest days of the Christian church. Jesus Christ had died, been buried, rose from the dead, and appeared to his disciples. One can forget that there was about 40 days that he was with them after his resurrection from the dead. He had a lot to tell them in that period of time.

The person who really gives us the most complete picture of this, I think, is Luke, with what he sets down in a book that was an intended to be a continuation of his account in the Gospel of Luke, and written for a gentleman called Theophilus. Let’s begin by taking a look at the first chapters of that treatise: the Book of Acts.

The New Testament is really a miracle in every way. We now know that most of the books that form our New Testament were written in a short period between AD 50 and the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. I often ponder why this is so. It gives the impression that, in the earliest years of the Christian faith, a lot of them expected Christ to come back in their own lifetime. If so, what’s the point of writing things down if there wouldn’t be anyone there to read it? At some point, however, they realized that would not be the case and recorded what they had witnessed for posterity

But, in the process of copying these accounts, several manuscript traditions with slight variations of wording, spelling, grammar, etc. were created. How could simply copying a few pages of text (text which the copyist believed was worth copying correctly) cause these discrepancies? Let me give you a few illustrations of these differences, their causes, and how scholars deal with them. We will then see that, while it is a lot of work, it is not particularly difficult to pull together a good, clean text to translate from.

But why did God allow it to be done this way? In my opinion, it was done to maintain the independence of the witnesses. Because you can’t start out with a belief that the Bible is trustworthy based on nothing but faith. You may be able to do that, but the Bible has to stand examination by those who don’t have faith and can come to have faith because they read it. These folks need evidence that the Bible is not merely the contrivance of a group of men. So, we are provided with a set of witnesses. We are provided with their testimony, and we have to decide if we believe them or not.

What did the First Christians believe about the Old Testament? I might as well have asked what they believed about the Bible because, as the faith developed, the Old Testament was all the written word they had. Jesus himself laid the groundwork for a uniquely Christian understanding of the Scriptures.

Consider, for example, one fundamental difference between Pharisees and Sadducees. The Pharisees believed that God gave the law to Moses in two forms: oral and written. That is, that Moses got the written law (including the Ten Commandments) and then he got the Oral Law to go with it. This Oral Law was passed on to Joshua who received it and passed it on to the next generation, who in turn, received it and passed it on. Thus they believed that what they received from the earlier generation of Rabbis was what God told Moses on Sinai. The record of the oral law today is found in the Talmud.

The Sadducees believed no such thing. They believed that the written law was the only law that carried divine authority. I think Moses comes down on that side of the issue, because he said plainly that he wrote down everything God told him. You may wonder where this expression, Oral Law came from, for it is not found in the New Testament, nor the Old, for that matter. The New Testament writers knew about it, of course, but declined to refer to it in those terms. Rather, they called it the traditions of the elders. Let's look at several instances where these traditions were challenged.

When you think about it, it is a logical question. Why didn’t Jesus write his own book? For that matter, why didn’t an angel hand the prophets a golden plate with prophecies written by the hand of God himself? (The Ten Commandments, after all, were written with the finger of God on tables of stone—God can write.)

There is no reason why Jesus could not have written his story, so we are left to ponder why he did not. There is a reason, and it turns out to be of profound importance in dealing with that collection of books we call the New Testament.

In the first place, biblical law places great importance on witnesses. Just as in our constitution, no man could be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. And that due process included witnesses to the cause of action against a man. No man could be deprived of his life for murder without at least two witnesses to the crime. Then there is a very practical reason why Jesus did not write his own book, and he stated it in his own words. We’ll find them in John, chapter 5.

It is of some interest that the New Testament church soldiered on for some 20 years before anyone wrote down anything that has remained for us to look at. (The fact that transitory papyrus was often used as a writing medium certainly didn’t help.)

So, looking at your Bible, what is your best guess as to which of the New Testament books was written first? Matthew, perhaps? (It is the first one listed, after all.) No. As odd as it seems, the first of all the New Testament documents that we have is Paul’s letter to the Galatians, written 20 years after Christ’s resurrection.

It is hard to explain exactly why this was so. One reason may have been the early Christians’ expectation of the imminent return of Christ. (I think we can safely conclude that none of them imagined that they would be read 2,000 years into the future.) And so the first Gospel to be written wouldn’t appear for another 10 years after Paul’s letters to the Galatians and the Thessalonians. You can place all four of the Gospels between AD 60 and 70. And if we look at what was occurring during this period, we may begin to understand why they were finally written down.

When you sit down to read the New Testament, you encounter a strange cast of characters. I say strange—but only strange to us. The New Testament writers didn’t bother to explain, because all these characters were well known to their initial audience.

If I may digress, it is important to keep in mind that the New Testament was written with contemporary readers in mind. They were either writing letters or recording their testimony for people they knew, to a people they understood, and in a language they could all use to communicate.

There is no reason to think that the men who wrote those books were thinking about readers in another language—2,000 years later. This poses a difficulty, but it is hardly insurmountable. It just requires a little attention. For example, your have these folks called Pharisees who seem to play such a large role in opposition to Jesus. Who are these people, and what did they stand for? What about the Sadducees? To really understand the events of the New Testament, you need to understand the religious and political environment in which they took place.

Imagine that you are in a room, all by yourself. No one else is there. No one else is supposed to be there. You are in the process of carrying out a rather simple task, but one that requires you to pay attention to what you are doing. All you have to do is carefully replenish the incense burning on a small altar.

Then, with no fanfare, no warning, no noise, there is suddenly a man standing there just to the right of that small altar. One minute he isn’t there, and the next minute he is. All of us know what it is like to have someone creep up one us when we didn’t know they were there. It can make you nearly jump out of your skin.

That is precisely where a man named Zechariah found himself one day. He was a priest. He was in the temple alone. No one else should have been anywhere near, but suddenly there was a man standing there. The book says he was startled and gripped with fear. I would certainly think so. And what is especially remarkable about this particular event is that nothing like this had happened in the past 400 years.