Reading the New Testament in the order it was written
January 2025 – January 2026
In January 2025 the book club set out to read the entire New Testament together over the course of the year. The group began with the Gospel of Mark so everyone would know the story of Jesus’ ministry. Then they read the rest roughly in the order it was written: the oldest passages Paul quotes, then Galatians, James, 1 Thessalonians, the Corinthian letters, Philippians, Philemon and Romans. Along the way, the earliest arguments among Jesus’ followers came alive. As Ellis put it, the club isn’t studying the New Testament: “We’re celebrating it together.”
After a summer break, the club picked the series back up in November 2025 with some of the shorter, later letters: 2 Thessalonians, the three letters of John, and 2 Peter. Ellis paired each book with the Bible Project's overview video, while flagging where he disagreed with it, and kept asking when each letter was written and what was happening in the church at the time. Along the way, a study of early Christian "Gnostic" ideas led him to a challenging conclusion: in John's churches, the deeper problem was not wrong belief but a failure of charity.
Missing: No emails were found between May 8 and November 7, 2025. The May 4 wrap-up mentions a follow-up Romans meeting on May 11; whether it happened, and what was discussed, is not recorded.
Weeks with no meeting:
The first meeting opened with a quick round of introductions, then turned to the first half of the Gospel of Mark.
Mark was the first Gospel narrative to be published. It was likely written between 65 and 70 AD by a member of the Apostle Peter’s church in Rome, after Peter was martyred in 64 AD.
The early reading plan: the rest of Mark, then the oldest passages in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 15 and Philippians 2), then Galatians.
Someone asked what makes a book club that reads the Bible different from a Bible study. Ellis’s answer after this first meeting: how each of us approaches Scripture is “between us and God.” When we come together, we share what excited us, confused us, gave us insight or made us wonder. “We’re not studying the New Testament. We’re celebrating it together.” He also stressed that this is a no-commitment club: come when you can, no excuses needed.
Missing: No separate pregame email; the curriculum comes from the “Coming Up This Week” section of the Week 1 wrap-up. (An earlier schedule listed this reading as “Mark 7–18,” evidently a typo.)
This week the group read the second half of the Gospel of Mark. Ellis reminded everyone that the readings matter more than the meetings. The invitation was to read the whole New Testament together during 2025.
The oldest and most reliable manuscripts of Mark end in the middle of a sentence, at 16:8. The women flee the empty tomb trembling and bewildered, saying nothing to anyone, “They were afraid because —”
Ellis set himself a goal for this meeting: to speak less and to encourage everyone else to speak more, because “what you have to say is important for all of us.”
Mark isn’t the earliest book in the New Testament, but the club read it first so everyone would know the basic story of Jesus’ earthly ministry before moving on.
Missing: The pregame email is brief. It lists the readings and Ellis’s planned introduction but poses no discussion questions.
Having finished Mark, the group turned to the oldest texts in the New Testament. Both passages appear in Paul’s letters, but in each case Paul is quoting an earlier source that existed before he wrote. No one knows exactly how old they are, only that they come before him.
Before turning to the text, Ellis planned to give a short talk on how the different perspectives on Jesus developed between about 33 and 50 AD.
As always, everyone was welcome whether or not they had finished the reading.
Ellis called this “exactly the kind of meeting I’ve been hoping for”: everyone contributed, and the group left with new knowledge and good questions.
Galatians gives us Paul’s side of the “Big Argument” among Christ-followers in the decades after the crucifixion: can non-Jews follow Jesus?
How could anyone study Galatians in one week? “We can’t,” Ellis wrote. That’s why this is a book club and not a Bible study. Half the benefit is in reading the book. The other half is getting together to share what we liked, what we didn’t, and what confused us, and to pray together. The goal isn’t to become experts but to read some Scripture, have some fun, and grow closer to God and to one another.
The discussion was robust, and it left Ellis with a question he’d never asked before: how does Paul’s understanding of the Kingdom of God differ from what we find in the Gospels?
Missing: The pregame email is short: it frames one big question but offers little background or further questions.
After a week off, the club returned to read James. The letter reflects the perspective of the church in Jerusalem.
James was written during the same conflict seen in Galatians: some believed you had to follow the Torah to follow Jesus, and others thought it was optional. We are usually taught that James and Paul led the opposing sides.
Ellis shared how much he was enjoying reading the books in the order they were written: “This conversation among Jesus’ earliest followers is so rich, and the origin story of the Church is coming alive for me in a way it never has before.” He also called James itself “amazing.”
Reading Galatians and James back to back shone a bright light on the most important conflict in the early church: who can follow Jesus, and what that life looks like. A surprise was how much James, the brother of Jesus, came into focus as a person: “How hard must it be to find out your little half-brother is the long-awaited Messiah!” The conflict was later settled at the first church council in Jerusalem (Acts 15), which agreed that Gentiles need not follow Torah to follow Jesus.
Missing: No wrap-up email found for this session, so there is no record of the discussion. The meeting date is inferred: the pregame went out on Friday, February 21, for “Sunday.”
This week tried a new format so the group could talk more and Ellis less. He put his own notes in the email and invited each person to answer one question (or pass): What caught your attention? What confused you? Name one way this reading could change how we operate in the world. He also suggested the Bible Project’s short video overview, with caveats: it treats Acts as more historically reliable than he does, and he disagrees with its reading of porneia.
After the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) ruled that Gentiles needn’t follow Torah, Paul set out on his second missionary journey, planting churches in Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens and Corinth. 1 Thessalonians is the first letter written after that decision, and unlike the earlier readings it answers questions sent by new believers. Paul sent Timothy to check on the Thessalonians and wrote this letter in response to his good report.
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Missing: An announcement on March 2 described this reading as 1 Corinthians 1–6; the pregame itself says chapters 1–7.
Ellis calls 1 Corinthians one of the most important books in the Bible, “but not because of what it may or may not say about homosexuality.” Still, this reading holds the first “clobber verse,” one used to condemn homosexuality, so he took it on first.
Questions: Does God say “No” to some things? Does God frown on how we treat our own bodies, and which ways? Remember 6:19–20: “You are not your own… honor God with your bodies.” Ellis went on record that he believes God says “No” to some things, including self-mutilation, suicide and anal sex regardless of gender. He acknowledges he could be wrong and tries not to judge those who read differently. And, borrowing from Karl Barth, “God’s ‘Yes’ is bigger than God’s ‘No.’”
The biggest question of the evening was “Does God say ‘No’ to some things?”, and Ellis was surprised by the variety of opinions in the group. No one had questions about the content of the letter itself, but people asked about Paul’s authority and whether he was being condescending.
Ellis feels strongly that part of being Christian is agreeing that Christ says “No” to some things and that his judgment reflects God’s. We follow Jesus because he has authority, as Mark showed. Christ endorses the Ten Commandments and says no to burdening the poor, to judging others, and to swearing oaths. Since Christ says “No,” God says “No.” That still leaves open questions: Did Jesus really say it? Who decides if I disobeyed? What are the consequences, and how do we make it right? And, Ellis repeated, “God’s ‘Yes’ is always bigger than God’s ‘No.’ God gets the last word and it is ‘Yes.’”
Paul says he is feeding the Corinthians “spiritual baby food.” Ellis noted many precedents for teachings held back until people are ready: Jesus taught his disciples privately, some say Kabbalah isn’t for those under 30, and yogic traditions pass some teachings only orally. The Gnostics later claimed secret teachings and were condemned. The Protestant “Scripture alone” holds that private revelations can’t contradict Scripture or be necessary for salvation.
Missing: No pregame email: Ellis wrote one but forgot to send it. The emails never label this “Week 8”; the number is inferred from the sequence (Week 7 wrap-up, then Week 9 pregame), and the reading comes from the Week 7 wrap-up.
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A lively discussion of the second half of 1 Corinthians covered five big topics.
Ellis called Philippians a “4-chapter blockbuster.” The group had already looked at one of its treasures, the Christ Hymn in chapter 2. It also holds a beloved promise (“my God will fully satisfy every need of yours,” 4:19) and one of the most misused verses in the New Testament (4:13). He recommended the Bible Project video for its summary of the letter’s content, while disagreeing with “almost everything else it says.”
Most scholars agree that Philippians contains pieces of four different letters, so any claim to a single through-line is dubious. Where and when Paul wrote it is debated. Ellis’s best guess is that most of it was written while Paul was in prison in Ephesus, midway through his third missionary journey.
To open the meeting, Ellis planned to ask everyone to point to the passage in Philippians they found most useful for daily living.
Ellis said this “may have been the best one we’ve ever had.” The group focused on how to apply Philippians to daily life, and everyone brought something good to the table.
For Paul, life in this world is no picnic: jail, shipwrecks, stonings. He expects Christians to suffer too. Ellis noted the connection with Buddhism’s first noble truth, “life is suffering.” Yet joy is our birthright, and it can be found in this life even while suffering. Three things make that joy possible:
This is how Paul can have joy whether he has little or much: “I can do all of this through him who strengthens me.” Ellis added that modern psychology warns against “killing” the ego, since we need it to survive. The key is to let the ego be a tool of our true self rather than our ruler, and he thinks Paul would agree.
Being “in Christ” is like trading a Roman passport for a heavenly one. You still live in the Roman world, but as a tourist: you obey the local laws without pledging allegiance to its head of state.
Paul faces Hamlet’s question, “to be or not to be,” and reaches the same conclusion for the opposite reason. Hamlet chooses life because he fears what comes after death. Paul knows what awaits him and longs to “depart and be with Christ,” yet stays and keeps striving because that is what God has called him to do.
Philemon is the shortest book in the New Testament, and a controversial one. Ellis noted that he understands it differently than the Bible Project video on the letter.
At the end of his second journey, Paul started a church in Ephesus. A member of that church went on to plant a church in nearby Colossae. Philemon belonged to that church, and he owned a slave named Onesimus.
On his third journey Paul returned to Ephesus and landed in jail, where he also wrote 1 Corinthians and Philippians. Meanwhile Onesimus ran away and sought out Paul. In the ancient world, a slave might go to one of his master’s friends to mediate on his behalf. Onesimus served Paul for a while and became a follower of Christ. Eventually Paul decided he was benefiting from Philemon’s property. Yet returning a runaway slave violated Jewish law: “You shall not return to their owners slaves who have escaped to you” (Deuteronomy 23:15–16).
It’s a small, controversial book, and the group got right into it.
Missing: Wrap-up email in the source misnumbers some favorite-verse references; corrected here (3:2–3 and 4:8–10).
Everyone was asked to read all of 2 Corinthians. It wasn’t yet settled whether the group would spend one week or two on it. That depended on whether they wanted to discuss the content and how it applies to life, or also sort out the pieces of the letter to trace Paul’s relationship with the Corinthian church.
The Philemon discussion raised a question for Ellis as a pastoral theologian: does more accurate scholarship mean more faithfulness? It is faithful to hold Paul up as a model disciple. His encounter with the risen Christ changed his whole life, he worked tirelessly and kept going through hardship, and his writings are “generally amazing.” But a careful, scholarly reading of Philemon doesn’t show Paul at his best. Ellis doesn’t know when it is more faithful to teach Paul as a hero and when to explore the real, complicated person.
The same tension runs through 2 Corinthians. The classic reading treats it as a single letter showing Paul as a model of reconciliation, discipleship, Christian values, covenant theology, stewardship, and how to spot false spiritual leaders. That’s the view in the Bible Project video. But leading scholars agree it isn’t one letter. It probably combines text from about four letters written at different times for different purposes. The Corinthians may never have re-embraced Paul, and much of it may be Paul cutting his losses and saving face. There is also a subplot about how the Corinthians misread his first letter through their pagan background.
Ellis values a community that mixes every kind of person. He believes the Spirit does its best work in groups of old and young, Catholics and Protestants, “Nones and Dones.” He invited honest feedback on what works for the group, including “your attempts at textual criticism bore me to tears.”
To open the meeting, everyone was invited to share a favorite verse from the book.
Ellis called it “one for the ages.” The group was honest about the Apostle Paul and the nature of the text while still affirming its immense value and transforming power. “It felt a lot like worship to me.”
Everyone shared a favorite verse, and together they made a collection worth keeping in your back pocket:
You can approach any text from three directions. Standing in front of it asks how it applies to our lives today. Being in it looks at what the words say. Standing behind it asks how it came to be: the author, setting and culture. The group spent most of the evening behind the text. The evidence suggests 2 Corinthians is at least three separate writings that someone later stitched together, though not everyone agrees. Ellis hoped to spend the next week in the text itself.
Missing: No pregame email for this second week on 2 Corinthians, and no email labels this session’s reading. The date (April 13) is inferred from the wrap-up, sent Saturday, April 19, which describes “last Sunday’s book club.”
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The group finished its reflections on the Paul we meet in 2 Corinthians, the letter (or combination of letters) that gives the most insight into him as a person. Above all, Paul is a man who has had a religious experience. Most of the evening went to the two verses where he describes it (12:2–4): a person “caught up to the third heaven… into paradise” who “heard things that are not to be told.”
The group noted that this has all the marks of a mystical experience as William James describes them in The Varieties of Religious Experience:
The first matters most. Paul’s Greek speaks of “inexpressible matters,” and he is doing his best with human words. We can’t judge the “truth” of anyone’s mystical experience, but we can look at how it changed their life. Paul’s life was turned upside down. In worldly terms he went “from the penthouse to the outhouse,” perhaps the most demonstrable fact in the New Testament. This experience is the source of Paul’s authority, and the churches he founded, the Scripture he left and the lives it has touched all bear witness to it. No one knows what his “thorn in the flesh” was. Others have claimed such experiences, from St. Bernadette and Joan of Arc to Martin Luther King Jr. and Oral Roberts, and Ellis acknowledged it is tricky territory. He recommended Tanya Luhrmann’s TED talk “When God Talks Back.”
“In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself… and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (5:19). Paul’s main ministry was reconciling Jews and Gentiles, but in this letter he is also trying to reconcile the Corinthian church to himself, a case where the medium is the message. Ellis added his own conviction: in a deeply divided world, the Church is the only body with any hope of bringing reconciliation to our country. He doesn’t know how, but he urged everyone to pray and to try to be instruments of God’s peace.
Missing: The emails stop numbering sessions after Week 12; this is numbered 13 by sequence.
Ellis called Romans the most intimidating book in the Bible. He took comfort that the group’s goal is to read the New Testament in community, not to unlock all its secrets: “Read and enjoy.” Two things help: knowing the historical context, and having a broad understanding of how the Christ-event puts us in right relationship with God (atonement).
Two facts are known. Emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome, probably around 49 AD, because of disturbances “at the instigation of Chrestus.” After he died in 54 AD, they were allowed back. Historians have woven a story from this. A church founded by Jewish Christ-followers became, for a time, entirely Gentile. Then the Jewish members returned, and imagine the tension when you come home to find someone has “stolen your pew,” multiplied a million times. Paul’s goal is to explain the Spirit-filled community in a way that honors Jesus’ Hebrew roots while making clear that Jewishness isn’t required. Romans is his masterwork in reconciling Jews and Greeks.
Paul offers several analogies for how the Christ-event works, and later theologians fought over which one is the only correct one, causing exactly the divisions Paul wanted to avoid. Ellis treats the Christ-event as a mystery, a “black box”: before it, humans couldn’t be reconciled to God, and after it, they can. Rather than asking which analogy is correct, he asks how each one helps and where it breaks down. (Why would the God who outlawed child sacrifice sacrifice his child? “Wrong question!” That pushes the analogy too far.) Some analogies to start with:
“This way of thinking makes some people crazy. It makes me glad.”
Ellis began his wrap-up by insisting on two things he wanted everyone to learn, because he sensed they hadn’t quite sunk in.
Most of the evening was spent on Paul’s claim that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” are plain from creation. Paul later implies that nature also shows what is sinful and what the penalty is. Ellis finds the first claim defensible and the later ones suspect. In his view nature doesn’t teach right and wrong; for that we depend on God’s special revelation in the Torah and the Law of Christ.
One member offered a convincing counter-argument from 2:14–16, where Gentiles without the Law “do by nature what the law requires” because it is “written on their hearts.” On this view, knowledge of right and wrong lives in the human conscience, and human nature is part of “nature,” or general revelation. If that is what Paul meant, his argument is much stronger. Whether moral understanding is universal or relative to culture has been argued for centuries, and the group didn’t expect to settle it.
Missing: This is the last session in the January–May date range; the wrap-up mentions a follow-up Romans session the next Sunday, which falls outside this set of emails.
Ellis began with the Good News as Protestants usually understand it, which he called “pretty straightforward”:
Beyond that, other people’s salvation is between them and God. Curious people still ask questions, which Ellis considers largely academic. What is Christ’s relationship to Judaism? What if I stop pledging allegiance to King Jesus? Why does that allegiance guarantee glory? Was Jesus always King, or did he earn it? Can a human live without falling to temptation? Romans tries to answer these. Its answers can be confusing and even contradictory, and that’s okay, because they don’t affect our relationship with God as long as we are living in the Good News.
Someone who hasn’t yet pledged allegiance may need answers to these questions to move forward. Ellis believes in “attraction rather than promotion.” The best evangelism is living like a Christian and being ready “to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15). Others use Romans more assertively, as in “The Roman Road,” which the group might look at so people know it. But the focus stays on reading the New Testament, not learning to convert people. Ellis also noted that in Roman Catholic teaching, the Good News has more to do with the Church and the sacraments.
Romans also offers practical advice: live in community, don’t think more highly of yourself than you ought, and don’t cause your neighbor to stumble.
The discussion focused on two themes in the second half of Romans: election, and Paul’s picture of the human person. Afterward Ellis wrote frankly that the first “isn’t that important” and that everything he said about the second “was wrong. Whoops.”
Paul writes that those God predestined he also called, justified and glorified (8:30), and in chapter 9 that we shouldn’t judge God. It isn’t clear whether Paul means individuals or groups. It is clear he thinks God knows what he is doing. Ellis’s conclusion: a person’s relationship with God is between them and God, and Christians should spend less time arguing about others’ salvation and more time living as Christ wants.
On Sunday the group started from the idea that Paul sees humans as two things, body and soul. Most experts say this is wrong. Paul thought like a Jew, and for Jews a human is a single, unified being. Ellis now sees this as one more analogy for the Christ-event. Outside Christ we are divided and disordered; in Christ our warring parts are reconciled, just as Jews and Gentiles are, and humanity and God.
Most Christians live as a battleground between these forces. Christ promises that at the end of time our minds will be fully oriented to the Spirit, our vulnerability to sin will be gone, and we will live eternally. Ellis called this “a great analogy,” alongside others such as being bought out of slavery to sin, and hoped to list all of Paul’s analogies at the next meeting.
Missing: No wrap-up email, so we have no record of the discussion. The meeting date comes from the pregame email (sent Friday, Nov. 7) saying 'See you on Sunday.'
Ellis called 2 Thessalonians "one of the most challenging books in the Bible." Read on its own, it has some harsh verses, especially "those who don't work shouldn't eat" (3:10). Many Christians have used that line to justify cutting people off, including the elderly and others who can't work, and Ellis doubted that's what the writer meant.
Ellis thought the group had already "beaten the 'persevere in suffering' horse to death" and pointed to two passages he called "the juiciest":
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Missing: There's no record of what was actually said at the meeting. The summary comes from Ellis's follow-up essay about 1–3 John. The meeting itself is confirmed by a short same-day email.
The group covered all three letters of John over two sessions. Ellis recommended the Bible Project's single video on all three.
Five days after this meeting, Ellis sent a follow-up essay with a provocative title: "Wealthy Christians who don't provide for poor Christians are anti-christs." He sent it unpolished so he could hear the group's reactions.
After weeks studying Gnosticism, he concluded that the real problem in John's churches "was not esoteric teachings about the nature of Christ. It was a basic lack of charity." The false teaching only gave people an excuse not to love as Christ loved. His best guess: wealthy members grew tired of poor members asking for help, took up a theology that didn't require them to help, and finally walked out. He traced three beliefs behind that behavior:
Ellis admitted that this reading convicts him personally, and suggested that may be exactly why it's rarely taught.
Missing: The only email on the meeting day says 'Yes, book club is meeting tonight' and has no body, so the meeting happened but nothing records what was discussed. The Gnosticism topic comes from the plan announced on Nov. 13, and the group probably followed it, but no email confirms that.
The plan for this session was to look at the theological differences behind the split in John's churches, especially the early heresies we now group under the name "Gnosticism." Ellis said he found them fascinating and was brushing up on them for this discussion.
He sent out an outline of the ideas that eventually fed into Gnostic belief systems. By then he was "increasingly convinced that heretical behavior is far worse than heretical beliefs," but still found the history intriguing.
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Missing: No wrap-up email. The date comes from the pregame email (sent Friday, Dec. 12), which says 'This Sunday is 2nd Peter.' The same email suggested starting a conversation about whether, and how, to continue the book club in 2026.
Ellis thought the Bible Project video was "pretty good" but disagreed with parts of it.
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Missing: Uncertain. The only source is a short Jan. 21, 2026 post called 'Worship With Christians Anonymous,' which names 1 Timothy as 'This Week's Text' but includes no material on it. It describes the group differently than the book club emails did, as a non-denominational spiritual community holding 'religious ceremonies' to learn scripture, pray, and share honestly about the institutional church. That may be the start of a new format for 2026 rather than part of this series. If the gathering happened, it was most likely on Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, but no email confirms the date. There are no emails at all between Dec. 21, 2025 and Jan. 21, 2026, so we don't know whether any meetings were held in early January or whether the Revelation read-aloud was rescheduled.
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