F. D. Maurice

The Unity of the New Testament

A Synopsis of the First Three Gospels and of the Epistles of St. James, St. Jude, St. Peter, and St. Paul, with a Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews

First published
1854
This text
First American edition. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1879.
Length
205,000 words, about 15 hours' reading

Begin reading Modern English Listen

Maurice’s conviction here is that the Gospels and Epistles, so often read as fragments or set against one another, share one continuous purpose. He looks beneath both the critics who divide the books, such as Strauss, and the harmonists who defend them, finding that both have already conceded that the first three Gospels give us a teacher of Nazareth while His divinity is the contribution of John and Paul.

He calls his method a Synopsis rather than a commentary: not a hunt for isolated lessons, but patient attention to how each Gospel and Epistle serves the design of the book it belongs to, and how all those designs converge on a single Living Person, from the first line of Matthew to the last page of Hebrews both Son of God and King of Men.

Contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Extract from the Author’s Preface
  3. Contents
  4. Lecture I
    1. Part I
      1. The Preaching of John
      2. The Baptism of Christ
      3. The Temptation
      4. The Preaching of Jesus
      5. Calling of the Disciples
      6. The Miracles
      7. Publicans and Pharisees. The New and Old Garment
      8. The Appointment of the Apostles
      9. The Sabbath-Day
      10. The Parables
      11. Herod Hearing of Christ
      12. The Sign from Heaven
      13. The Leaven of the Sects
      14. Peter’s Confession
      15. Taking Up the Cross
      16. The Transfiguration
      17. The Epileptic Boy
      18. Prophecy of the Passion
      19. The Greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven
      20. Divorce
      21. Blessing the Little Children
      22. The Temptations of the Rich Man
      23. The Temptation of the Poor Man
      24. The Going Up to Jerusalem
      25. The Descent from the Mount of Olives
      26. Jesus Going into the Temple
      27. The Baptism of John
      28. Paying Tribute to Cæsar
      29. The Sadducees and the Resurrection
      30. What Think Ye of Christ?
      31. The Prophecy of the Last Days
      32. The Passover
      33. The Betrayal
      34. The Feast
      35. The Lord’s Supper
      36. The Warning to Peter
      37. The Agony
      38. The Betrayal and Apprehension. The Sanhedrim. Peter’s Denial
      39. Christ the King. The Arraignment Before Pilate
      40. The Crucifixion
      41. The Burial
      42. The Resurrection
    2. Part II. Differences of the Evangelists
      1. St. Matthew
        1. Chapter I
        2. Chapter II
        3. Chapter III. IV
        4. Chapters V. VI. VII
        5. Chapter VIII
        6. Chapter IX
        7. Chapter X
        8. Chapter XI
        9. Chapter XII
        10. Chapter XIII
        11. Chapters XIV. XV. XVI
        12. Chapter XVI
        13. Chapter XVIII
        14. Chapters XIX. XX
        15. Chapters XXI. XXII
        16. Chapter XXIII
        17. Chapters XXIV. XXV
        18. Chapters XXVI. XXVII. XXVIII
      2. St. Mark
      3. St. Luke
        1. Chapter I
        2. Chapter II
        3. Chapter III
        4. Chapter IV
        5. Chapter V
        6. Chapter VI
        7. Chapters VII. VIII
        8. Chapter IX
        9. Chapter X
        10. Chapter XI
        11. Chapter XII
        12. Chapter XIII
        13. Chapter XIV
        14. Chapter XV
        15. Chapter XVI
        16. Chapter XVII
        17. Chapter XVIII
        18. Chapter XIX
        19. Chapters XX. XXI. XXII. XXIII
        20. Chapter XXIV
  5. Lecture II. Acts of the Apostles, Epistles of St. James, St. Peter and St. Paul
    1. Acts of the Apostles
    2. St. James
    3. St. Jude
    4. St. Peter. First Epistle
    5. St. Peter. Second Epistle
    6. St. Paul
      1. I. The Epistle to the Romans
        1. Chapter I
        2. Chapter II
        3. Chapter III
        4. Chapter IV
        5. Chapter V
        6. Chapter VI
        7. Chapter VII
        8. Chapter VIII
        9. Chapter IX
        10. Chapter X
        11. Chapter XI
        12. Chapter XII
        13. Chapter XIII
        14. Chapter XIV
        15. Chapters XV. and XVI
      2. The First Epistle to the Corinthians
        1. Chapter II
        2. Chapter III
        3. Chapter IV
        4. Chapter V
        5. Chapter VI
        6. Chapter VII
        7. Chapters VIII. IX. and X
        8. Chapter XI
        9. Chapters XII. XIII. XIV
        10. Chapter XIII
        11. Chapter XIV
        12. Chapter XV
        13. Chapter XVI
      3. Second Epistle to the Corinthians
      4. Epistle to the Galatians
      5. Epistle to the Ephesians
      6. Epistle to the Philippians
      7. Epistle to the Colossians
      8. The First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians
      9. The Pastoral Epistles
        1. First Epistle to Timothy
        2. Second Epistle to Timothy
        3. Epistle to Titus
      10. The Epistle to Philemon
    7. Conclusion
  6. The Epistle to the Hebrews
    1. Lecture I. How the New Testament Fulfils the Old
    2. Lecture II. The Divine Education of the Jews
    3. Lecture III. The Filial Dispensation
  7. Appendix

About this digital edition

How the text was made, and the printer's errors corrected

The original book

The Unity of the New Testament by Frederick Denison Maurice.

This edition

Produced 2026-08-05 from a page scan of the printed book, as part of a project to make F. D. Maurice’s works freely available in every useful digital form. The guiding principle throughout was fidelity to the printed text: Maurice’s own spelling, capitalization, punctuation, ligatures, and typography rule, except where a printing error was identified and deliberately emended (each such change is listed below).

How this text was made

The transcription pipeline combines automated tools, AI models, and page-by-page human review:

  • OCR and conversion. The scan was OCRed (ocrmypdf/Tesseract) and converted to structured text (marker), then cleaned by a language model (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) working chunk by chunk.
  • Human review of every machine change. Every word the cleanup model altered was reviewed against an image of the printed line. Footnotes were verified against the printed page and renumbered uniformly.
  • Quotation marks were normalized to the printer’s own conventions and validated by a nesting checker; every remaining irregularity was inspected against the page image. The final text has fully paired quotation marks.
  • Italics were restored (the OCR text layer records none) by a vision model (claude-sonnet-5) cross-checked against a deterministic measurement of letterform slant on the page images, with per-word statistical calibration derived from the book itself. Every page was then reviewed by a human editor against the print. This edition carries 433 italic spans.
  • Small capitals and ligatures (æ, œ) are reproduced as printed.
  • A whole-book audit (claude-sonnet-5) checked structure, headings, footnotes, and Greek; its findings were reviewed by a human editor against the print before any were applied.

The text contains 14 footnotes and 39 small-caps renderings of the print.

Emendations

Places where this edition deliberately differs from the printed book, each a correction of an apparent printing error, verified against the page image:

  • p. 40: ‘men’ → ‘man’
  • p. 40: ‘men’ → ‘man’
  • p. 42: ‘fisherman,’ → ‘fishermen.’
  • p. 42: ‘fisherman,’ → ‘fishermen.’
  • p. 50: ‘the’ → ‘they’
  • p. 50: ‘the’ → ‘they’
  • p. 53: ‘ψυχὴ’ → ‘ψυχή’
  • p. 78: ‘saying. 1’ → ‘saying, I’
  • p. 78: ‘saying. 1’ → ‘saying, I’
  • p. 87: ‘the’ → ‘be’
  • p. 87: ‘the’ → ‘be’
  • p. 90: ‘profits’ → ‘prophets’
  • p. 90: ‘profits’ → ‘prophets’
  • p. 95: ‘γενεα’ → ‘γενεά’
  • p. 178: ‘Magalene,’ → ‘Magdalene,’
  • p. 178: ‘Magalene,’ → ‘Magdalene,’
  • p. 231: ‘Cavalry,’ → ‘Calvary,’
  • p. 231: ‘Cavalry,’ → ‘Calvary,’
  • p. 246: ‘γνώσις’ → ‘γνῶσις’
  • p. 247: ‘trafficing’ → ‘trafficking’
  • p. 247: ‘trafficing’ → ‘trafficking’
  • p. 256: ‘Habbakuk,’ → ‘Habakkuk,’
  • p. 256: ‘Habbakuk,’ → ‘Habakkuk,’
  • p. 275: ‘tiel-tree’ → ‘teil-tree’
  • p. 275: ‘tiel-tree’ → ‘teil-tree’
  • p. 281: ‘cencerning’ → ‘concerning’
  • p. 281: ‘cencerning’ → ‘concerning’
  • p. 284: ‘he’ → ‘be’
  • p. 284: ‘he’ → ‘be’
  • p. 289: ‘santification,’ → ‘sanctification,’
  • p. 289: ‘santification,’ → ‘sanctification,’
  • p. 296: ‘exision’ → ‘excision’
  • p. 296: ‘exision’ → ‘excision’
  • p. 298: ‘sagaity!’ → ‘sagacity!’
  • p. 298: ‘sagaity!’ → ‘sagacity!’
  • p. 300: ‘charaeter.’ → ‘character.’
  • p. 300: ‘charaeter.’ → ‘character.’
  • p. 302: ‘sympathethic’ → ‘sympathetic’
  • p. 302: ‘sympathethic’ → ‘sympathetic’
  • p. 329: ‘afterwards οἱ τοῦ in his presence Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ παρουσίᾳ, αὐτοῦ.’ → ‘afterwards those who are of Christ in his presence, οἱ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ παρουσίᾳ αὐτοῦ.’
  • p. 330: ‘Hummanity,’ → ‘Humanity,’
  • p. 330: ‘Hummanity,’ → ‘Humanity,’
  • p. 331: ‘ἑπὲρ’ → ‘ὑπέρ’
  • p. 353: ‘bore’ → ‘borne’
  • p. 353: ‘bore’ → ‘borne’
  • p. 370: ‘illusion’ → ‘allusion’
  • p. 370: ‘illusion’ → ‘allusion’
  • p. 430: ‘aud’ → ‘and’
  • p. 430: ‘aud’ → ‘and’
  • p. 433: ‘Sadduces’ → ‘Sadducees’
  • p. 433: ‘Sadduces’ → ‘Sadducees’
  • p. 438: ‘circumsision.’ → ‘circumcision.’
  • p. 438: ‘circumsision.’ → ‘circumcision.’
  • p. 449: ‘θεὸς’ → ‘θεός’
  • p. 463: ‘reason’ → ‘reasons’
  • p. 463: ‘reason’ → ‘reasons’
  • p. 470: ‘mystry’ → ‘mystery’
  • p. 470: ‘mystry’ → ‘mystery’
  • p. 509: ‘devout’ → ‘devoutly’
  • p. 509: ‘devout’ → ‘devoutly’
  • p. 524: ‘slighest’ → ‘slightest’
  • p. 524: ‘slighest’ → ‘slightest’
  • p. 528: ‘councils’ → ‘counsels’
  • p. 528: ‘councils’ → ‘counsels’
  • p. 542: ‘peices,’ → ‘pieces,’
  • p. 542: ‘alienam.’ → ‘alienum.’
  • p. 542: ‘peices,’ → ‘pieces,’
  • p. 542: ‘alienam.’ → ‘alienum.’
  • p. ?: ‘(no mark printed)’ → ‘“’
  • p. ?: ‘(no mark printed)’ → ‘“’
  • p. ?: ‘(no mark printed)’ → ‘“’
  • p. ?: ‘(no mark printed)’ → ‘“’
  • p. ?: ‘(no mark printed)’ → ‘“’

Printer’s oddities that are not errors were left exactly as printed (including inconsistent proper-name spellings and the original’s own numbering gaps).