Movement 1 of 4

Born into an occupied province

Matthew 1 - 2, Luke 1 - 2

Two of the four accounts open with the birth, and both of them make a point of how ordinary and how badly-timed it is: a teenage mother, a small town, and a client king who responds by killing children.

Judea in this period is governed by Rome through local arrangements. Herod holds his throne at Rome's discretion, and holds it nervously. That is the political weather the accounts open in.

Matthew begins with a genealogy, which is easy to skip and worth not skipping. It includes four women, at least three of them foreigners, and several men whose entries in the Old Testament are disgraceful. The family line is being presented honestly.

Luke begins with two pregnancies nobody expected and a song, sung by a young woman from a village of a few hundred people, about God pulling rulers off their thrones and lifting up the poor.

Then almost thirty years pass that the Gospels barely mention. There is one story about a twelve-year-old, and after that nothing until he is about thirty.

Movement 2 of 4

Three years, and a claim nobody expected

Matthew 4 - 20, Mark, Luke 4 - 19, John 1 - 11

He teaches, heals, and eats with the wrong people for about three years - and steadily makes claims about himself that his hearers understood far better than most modern readers do.

The public ministry lasts roughly three years and stays mostly within a day's walk of one lake. The teaching is memorable and often uncomfortable, and much of it is delivered as stories that do not explain themselves.

The pattern that gets him in trouble is not the miracles. It is that he forgives sins directly, works on the Sabbath deliberately, and eats with people the religious establishment had ruled out. Each of those is a claim about his own authority, and his audience heard it that way.

The Old Testament had built several separate expectations - a prophet like Moses, a permanent priest, a king in David's line, a servant who suffers, a figure who arrives with the clouds. They were never combined. The Gospels apply all of them to the same man.

Movement 3 of 4

The week everything turns on

Matthew 21 - 27, Mark 11 - 15, Luke 19 - 23, John 12 - 19

The final week takes up roughly a third of all four accounts. He is welcomed into Jerusalem by a crowd, arrested within days, tried overnight, and executed by the Roman authorities as a political threat.

He arrives at Passover, the festival commemorating the exodus, in a city swollen with pilgrims. Within a day he disrupts the temple's commercial operation, which is the point at which the leadership decides he cannot be left alone.

The last meal he eats is a Passover meal. He takes the bread and the cup that had meant one thing for fourteen centuries and says they now mean something else, referring to his own death, before it has happened.

The trial is conducted at night, irregularly, and the charge that sticks with Pilate is political rather than religious: this man claims to be a king. Crucifixion was Rome's penalty for sedition and it was designed to be public.

All four accounts slow down here and give the detail they withhold elsewhere. Whatever they are, they are not trying to make this part easier to read.

Movement 4 of 4

Alive, and the reason there is anything after this

Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20 - 21

On the third day the tomb is empty, and over the following weeks a number of people say they saw him, ate with him, and spoke with him. Everything in the rest of the New Testament rests on that claim.

The first witnesses in all four accounts are women, whose testimony carried little formal weight at the time. If these were invented, that is a strange way to invent them.

The accounts do not agree on every detail of that morning and they do not try to. What they agree on is the tomb, the appearances, and the fact that people who had gone into hiding came back out.

The claim is specific and it is physical. Not that his teaching lived on, and not that they felt his presence, but that he was dead and then was not. Paul, writing about twenty years later, lists the people who saw him and notes that most of them are still alive and can be asked.

Everything in the next part of the story is a consequence of that claim being made by people who were in a position to know whether it was true.