The NT in 60 seconds

After a period when it seemed that God had stopped speaking to his people, Jesus was born. The story of the New Testament is a combination of two stories: 1) the story of Jesus and 2) the Story of the Christian Church. The story of Jesus is told four times, with slight variations in the four gospels, but it basically goes like this: the Virgin Mary gets pregnant via the Holy Spirit and has Jesus in Bethlehem and Shepherds and Angels celebrate it. Wisemen from the East come to worship Jesus too. When Jesus is thirty John the Baptist, baptizes him and the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus and God says “This is my son.” For three years Jesus goes around with his twelve disciples preaching about “the Kingdom of God”, healing people, and casting out demons. Because he’s such a rebel, the Jewish religious authorities get Pilate to crucify him. Three days later, Jesus rises from the dead, and his disciples remember that he’d foretold all of that. Jesus tells them to go make disciples all over the world, but first to go wait for the Spirit in Jerusalem. That’s where the story of the Christian Church begins. While the disciples were praying and waiting on Pentecost, fire and wind rush into the room and they start praising God in foreign languages. Which the people around hear, and are amazed at, so thousands become Christians. Persecution breaks out in Jerusalem, so they all flee, spreading the message wherever they go. One of the chief persecutors was a zealous Jew named Saul. He supervised the stoning of the disciple Stephen. On his way to persecute more, Jesus appears to Saul, now called Paul, and he becomes a Christian missionary. He preaches to Non-Jews (Gentiles) all over the Mediterranean, and writes letters (epistles) to the churches he started. Other Christians, like Peter and John and James also write letters to encourage Christians during persecution as well as to help them understand how they ought to live. John has a vision, written in Revelation, in which he sees the Jesus give victory and life to the Church in the End. The story ends with the Christians waiting for Jesus to return and right all wrongs. (We’re still waiting...)