Introduction

The New Testament opens with four accounts of Jesus’s life followed by a narrative about the growth and expansion of a small circle of Jesus’s followers westward from Jerusalem to other cities in the Roman empire and ultimately to Rome. At one level these are simple, straightforward stories about the founding and spread of a new faith. Yet a closer reading reveals narratives that are complex and puzzling. Countless modern readers find this true not only of the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles but the entire New Testament.