Evolution of the Word: Reading the New Testament in the Order It Was Written

Everyone knows the New Testament begins with the Gospel of Matthew, but how many people know it was actually one of the later books to be written -- it was not even the first Gospel! By re-ordering the New Testament books in the sequence of when they were written, Borg provides a wonderful tutorial of how the core ideas of Christianity took shape and developed over time. With introductions and sidebars to each of the books of the Bible, as well as a survey of what we can know about the oral accounts of Jesus that were passed around before the first book was written, Borg reveals how a radical and primative apocalyptic Jewish faith slowly became more comfortable with the world, less Jewish, and more preoccupied with maintaining power and control. Beginning with Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonicans, we discover afresh the the disproportionate influence of the great apostle to the Gentiles as the first to codify early Christian beliefs into written form. From Paul's authentic letters and the first dramatic telling of Jesus's story in Mark, we see how an anti-imperial movement started a religious revolution. But we also witness how the next generation of writers slowly began to erode the movement's radicalism.
Readers will rediscover documents they thought they knew well by seeing them in an all-new setting. Borg's THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORD promises to change how we think about this historic work.