Pivot For MMXXVI

It Is Written

A few years ago, I shifted from writing mainly theological and political commentary to mainly translating New Testament passages. In doing so, I’ve followed the lectionary pretty exclusively. Lately I’ve been thinking about reorienting slightly; I decided to take the plunge with the new liturgical year, MMXXVI (2026), which begins at sunset on 29^th November, 2025.

What I mean to do now is a straightforward translation of the whole New Testament, start to finish. There are parts of the New Testament which we never hear in the liturgy: if we take both Sunday and daily Mass readings into account, we miss about 10% of the Gospels, and nearly half of the rest. Moreover, because we hear these texts piecemeal and almost never read the entirety of a book, the structure of most books of Scripture remains obscure to a majority of people. (The situation is far worse with respect to the Old Testament, of which we read only about an eighth, but I am nowhere close to being able to produce even a passably competent rendering of anything from Hebrew, so I can’t do much about that.)

An 18th-c. Persian astrolabe; photo by Andrew
Dunn, used via a CC BY-SA 2.0 license (source).

St. Jerome famously said that “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” My aim in offering translations here has always been, and still is, to make the text as it was to its original audience more available to Catholics today; to my mind, that should mean the whole book. It probably wouldn’t be reasonable to expect the Mass readings alone to serve this purpose anyway—which is where Bible studies come in handy.

This reorientation will follow an idea I discussed a few months ago—a redesign of the New Testament, following a precedent suggested by the structure of the Hebrew Bible. If you’re interested in the background, you can find the discussion of that idea in my series “Are Our Bibles in the Wrong Order?” (at these links, in four parts). If you’re just interested in the practical results, here’s what my proposed New Testament redesign would look like (color-coded based on my personal opinion of their authorship—I reach a total of ten authors and twelve authorships); :

Gospel of John
Gospel of Matthew
Gospel of Mark
Gospel of Luke
Acts of the Apostles
I^st Letter of Peter
II^nd Letter of Peter
Letter of Jude
Letter of James
I^st Letter of John
II^nd Letter of John
III^rd Letter of John
Letter to the Romans
I^st Letter to the Corinthians
II^nd Letter to the Corinthians
Letter to the Galatians
Letter to the Ephesians
Letter to the Philippians
Letter to the Colossians
I^st Letter to the Thessalonians
II^nd Letter to the Thessalonias
I^st Letter to Timothy
II^nd Letter to Timothy
Letter to Titus
Letter to Philemon
Letter to the Hebrews
Apocalypse of Jesus Christ¹

The colors² indicate authorships as listed below. The list is in alphabetical order by author, excepting the last three entries, which are special cases; all, including the last three, have the number or numbers of the books from the list above set in parentheses after the name.
…Emerald: St. James the Less the Apostle³ (9)
…Carbuncle: St. John the Apostle (27)
…Amethyst: St. John the Elder (11-12)
…Gold: St. Jude Thaddæus the Apostle³ (8)
…Beryl: St. Luke the Evangelist (4-5)
…Chrysolite: St. Mark the Evangelist (3)
…Jasper: St. Matthew the Apostle³ (2)
…Sapphire: St. Paul the Apostle (13-25)
…Sardonyx: St. Peter the Apostle (6)
…Jacinth: collaboration between SS. John and John (1, 10)
…Carnelian: collaboration between SS. Jude and Peter (7)
…Pearl⁴: authorship known only to God (26)

Extra Credit: A Synopsis of Why I Thus Remixed the New Testament

The epistles have been re-sorted according to the precedence generally given to the apostles who wrote them—an example of my personal taste. There are two essential structural changes in this arrangement of the New Testament:

moving John to the beginning of the Gospels; and
moving Hebrews to the end of the epistles.

These changes genuinely reshape the New Testament along the lines on which the Hebrew Bible was planned. In parallel to the Law-Prophets-Writings of the Hebrew Bible, we have a New Testament of Gospels-Epistles-Apocalypse.⁵

Moving John places it in apposition with Genesis: both now occur at the beginning of their respective Testaments, as is naturally suggested by the prologue to John. This move has secondary benefits as well. Luke and Acts are now next to each other, which smooths out the transition between the Gospels and Acts, showing how the latter belongs with the former; additionally, John and Revelation—which share certain crucial motifs and focuses, regardless of authorship—now bookend the whole New Testament.

An illumination (1047) of the Lamb among the
cherubim and the twenty-four elders by Facundus
of Castile, for a copy of Beatus of Liébana’s
commentary on the Apocalypse.

As for Hebrews, placing it last among the epistles seems fitting in a couple of ways. For one thing, it is the only truly and completely anonymous epistle; all the others, genuine or not, at least claim to be by so-and-so. Only Hebrews is without father or mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning salutation nor ending signature. But the chief reason to place it at the end is, it forms a natural bridge between the other epistles and the book of Revelation. This is thanks to its intimate concern with the heavenly Temple—the very place in which Revelation is set. Which brings us back to Revelation and John, for John is the most “templar” of the Gospels. It records Jesus visiting the Temple the highest number of times, pays the most attention to the Judaic liturgy, associates the Temple with “the body of Christ” the most blatantly.

Didn’t You Say Something About
“Practical Results” a Minute Ago?

This arrangement of the New Testament brings out a theological concept inherent in it, one already adumbrated in the Hebrew Bible. The covenant God forges through Moses with Israel revolves around a terrestrial temple. The covenant God forges through Jesus with the Church revolves likewise around a temple—but this latter professes to be the celestial original, the divine archetype of the Mosaic ectype. The whole plot of Scripture is traceable in templar terms. The presence of God, once manifest in Eden, withdraws from mankind. Then It descends upon the Tabernacle; much later, It consents to transfer Itself to Solomon’s Temple, but ultimately withdraws from there, and only ambiguously returns in the Second Temple. That presence then reappears uniquely in the person of Christ; It extends from him to his Church; and finally It flows out from there to a new creation.

Adoración del Nombre de Dios [Worship of the
Name of God] (1772), by Francisco José de Goya
y Lucientes.

I’m planning to try and keep to my once-a-week posting schedule, generally on Thursdays (though I’ll sometimes need to go with a Wednesday or a Friday instead—for example, this coming Christmas and New Year’s Day are Thursdays). So, on Thursday, 4th December, I’ll—hopefully—be starting things off with a general introduction to the Gospel of John, followed on the 11th by a translation of and commentary on its prologue (John 1:1-18). If you’d like to support me in doing this work, my foremost need is naturally prayer. I’d also be grateful for any consideration you can give me via Patreon.

Footnotes

¹For more on why this is in fact a more correct name than “the Apocalypse of John,” check out the second paragraph of this post.
²Is naming the colors after precious metals and gemstones from the Bible ludicrously pretentious? Yes. So come back here and stop me, why don’tcha.
³Interestingly, in different places, all three of these saints are called “sons of Alphæus.” There is a theory that Alphæus and Clopas were the same person (both names are thought to be Greek adaptions of the Aramaic Chalfai); if this is correct, and the theory that “Mary of Clopas” was the sister of the Theotokos is also correct, then the extended Holy Family played a fairly prominent role in the primitive Church—an idea reputedly set forth in the (now lost) Gospel of the Hebrews.
⁴If you think this color can’t be that of a pearl, think again.
⁵Indeed, correspondences go further. The Hebrew Bible features a twofold division of its Prophets into Former (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) and Latter (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve or Minor Prophets); likewise, the epistles as I have listed them show a clear demarcation between those (reputedly) written by members of the Twelve Apostles, and those written by others (Paul and the anonymous author of Hebrews). To be clear, I’m not claiming a one-to-one correspondence between the books of the Old and New Testaments on my schema—this is in fact mathematically impossibly, since they have different numbers of books! Though that said, I am tickled by the fact that, if you follow my list of the New Testament and the list of books in the Hebrew Bible, the three Johannine epistles come in the same numerical slots as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.