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later, and Luke a few years after that—though some think it may have been as late as the early second century. John was likely written between A.D. 90 and 100. Interestingly, each Gospel is more fantastical than the last as Jesus gets kicked upstairs from Mark’s gifted country healer to John’s cosmic savior. You can choose your favorite Jesus.
    Copyright laws were not in force in those days and it’s a good thing, because a lot of the material in the Gospels is borrowed. Mark leans heavily on the Old Testament. Ideas like a voice crying in the wilderness, the raising of the dead, and details of the crucifixion scene—including Jesus’ final words—are all taken from the Greek-language Septuagint.
    The authors of Matthew and Luke then built their Gospels on Mark. They polished it up, slanted their rewrites toward their preferred audiences, and added material from something called the Q document —a theoretical collection of wise sayings that scholars think once existed. No Q document survives today, but it seems clear that Matthew and Luke took their cues from Mark and Q.
    The Gospel of John appears to be written independent of the other Gospels, which is why its stories and timeline disagree most often with the first three. When someone proudly says they believe in “every word of the Bible,” they are claiming the impossible. The Bible doesn’t agree with itself. We’ll get to all that.
    Following the four Gospels is The Acts of the Apostles . Written by the author of Luke, it purports to document the post-resurrection work of Jesus and his apostles, as well as the history of the early Church. Scholars, however, rarely bet the farm on how credible this “history” actually is.
    The second section of the New Testament is a series of letters—epistles—seven of them attributed to a restless evangelist named Paul. He produced them starting around A.D. 50, a generation before the Gospel of Mark was written. But they’re presented in the Bible after the Gospels because they cover the two decades immediately following Jesus’ life story, when Paul made a traveling nuisance of himself across half the Roman Empire.
    While he trekked through Greece and Rome, Paul sent his epistles to the early churches back east in order to hash out various issues. In so doing, he established the foundations of Christian theology, turning a faith aimed at local Jews into an international religion. He also managed to throw in a lot of puritanical ideas about sex, for which we are eternally grateful. Though he never claimed to have met the earthly Jesus, he wrote with great authority because he believed he was in communication with the resurrected Christ. Paul was a piece of work.
    The Pauline epistles include Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians , and Philemon. These are followed by more letters by other authors, though some of them are traditionally attributed to Paul.
    The Bible’s final book, The Revelation to John , almost didn’t make it into the Scripture because it’s so damned weird and depicts a more militant Jesus than the four Gospels do. It was written by a very angry man named John living on the Greek island of Patmos around A.D. 95. It’s a cosmic drama of war between Jesus and the devil at the End of Time, concluding with the establishment of God’s eternal kingdom on earth. This is summer blockbuster stuff and people still write reviews about it when they’re not using pages from it to wallpaper their bomb shelters.
    Scraps of Scripture
     
    There is no definitive edition of the New Testament. Each church has its own preferred version, and each is assembled from selected scraps of ancient manuscripts from many different places. And all of these scraps are copies of copies of copies of the originals. When editors decide to publish a new Bible edition, they rummage through these copies, cherry pick which manuscripts they like best, and then translate them the way they see fit. This