New Testament - Intro

I can’t believe that I’ve finished with the Doctrine and Covenants. Honestly, working through the Book of Mormon felt like it took years, but with the Doctrine and Covenants I feel like I just started it a few month ago, when in fact it has been a year and a half. The study of the Book of Mormon changed my life, I don’t know if I can say that studying the D&C changed my life to the same extent, but I was a different person when I started that adventure than when I launched in the D&C. I have to be honest, I wasn’t super excited to start into the New Testament because I don’t really get it, and I love the Old Testament, and because I felt like “Jesus the Christ” by Elder James E. Talmage was so incredible that I wouldn’t be able to get anything out of the first section than I already had by listening to it four times. After doing more research and starting on my study, I’m SO excited to get started on this portion of the scriptures for several reasons. First is because, yes, “Jesus the Christ” is incredible and we will be pulling from it quite a bit, but there are a lot of topics that I want to discuss that aren’t covered in “Jesus the Christ” (JTC from now on.) Second is that there are so many incredible resources that have so many interesting and profitable lessons that I’ve always wondered. Third is that the New Testament (NT from now on) is the only knowledge of Jesus that the rest of the Christian world has so any conversations or understandings that anyone of any other Christian religion has will be based on teachings found in this small section of the scriptures. This is significant when having a doctrinal discussion with someone of another faith and they pull out the New Testament scriptures to emphasize their point, and I’ve been on the receiving end of that enough times to know that I need to have my stuff, I need to be able to say “in that context he was speaking to so and so who believed this certain idea and the word blah blah blah is translated from Greek which indicates that what this verse is actually saying is this…” There are so many different writing styles in the NT, and there have been so many translations and “editing” done with these scriptures in particular that it can be pretty scattered. For instance, I always thought that the books of the NT were in relative chronological order like the Book of Mormon, but imagine my surprise when I learned that the first four books, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not chronological at all, but right on top of each other, and with different accounts of different things. Some start off with Jesus’s lineage to Abraham, some start when he’s a grown man, some cover his family, some cover his travels and teachings. This is why Jesus the Christ is such a significant resource, because he goes chronologically and pulls from all books of the NT, Book of Mormon, and even historical sources from the time. The fourth reason that I’m finally excited is that I’ve never studied past the first four gospels. I’m a linear thinker so I need to understand how people go from one point to the next and without that kind of road map and timeline I really get overwhelmed and usually give up. I guess that’s an interesting commentary on my ability to be persistent. I feel that with the IM and other resources I’m going to be able to follow the apostles through their journeys spreading the gospel and how the apostasy came about and the after math.

I’m going to do things a little bit differently than I’ve done it in the past. Where I’ve gone sequentially, book by book, chapter by chapter previously, I’m going to try to go chronologically, like in JTC, topic by topic through the first four books. Some of the topics that I want to cover, perhaps in this order, are:

• Jesus’s lineage through Mary and Joseph
• Mary and Joseph as people and their family and children
• The annunciation
• Zacharias and Elizabeth
• The Nativity
• Jesus being presented at the Temple
• Jesus as a boy
• John the Baptist
• The Savior’s ministry
• The Atonement
• The Resurrection
• The ministry of the apostles
• The apostasy

I was going to start with the lineage part today but I’ve actually found quite a bit of information, and this was quite a bit longer than I thought it would be and I have a lot of more things that I want to research so I’m just going to end it here. I just want to finish by saying that I’m really excited to start the study of the New Testament and know more about the world of the Savior and His life and the scriptures that the rest of the Christian world hold so near and dear to their hearts.