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New Testament Books

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The first four books of the New Testament are called the Gospels. Four men, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were inspired by the Holy Spirit to write down the life of Jesus. Each man had different reasons for writing and different people they were writing to so their books didn’t all have to be identical; just accurate. Many more people wrote about Jesus, but only these four testimonies made it into the canon of the New Testament. As John MacArthur’s Study Bible explains, only these four books were necessary to form “a complete testimony about Jesus Christ.” The first book of the New Testament, The Gospel According to Matthew, was probably written between 50-70 A.D. Matthew wrote it to a predominantly Jewish audience and his goal was to “demonstrate that Jesus is the Jewish-nation’s long-awaited Messiah” (MacArthur). He introduces his book as “the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ” (Matthew 1:1), then he quotes the Old Testament’s …show more content…

The authors didn’t sit down and write these books together; they each wrote at different times and places, yet they share many of the same stories. Even the different stories that are shared don’t contradict anything in the other books, amazingly. This is why they’re called the “synoptic gospels,” as ‘synoptic’ means ‘seen together’ or ‘sharing a common point of view’. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, these testimonies of Christ accurately portray the events of His life, death, and resurrection. Every concrete fact we know about Jesus is in these gospels. Everything we need to know about His lineage, birth, early life, later ministry (including His miracles and teachings), crucifixion, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension, etc, has been covered in these books. If we have all the tangible facts of Jesus in these three books, then, why would there need to be a fourth

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