The Unity of the New Testament

Contents

The one-line summaries are guides drafted with the help of AI, not Maurice’s words.

1. Extract from the Author’s Preface

   Maurice seeks the one design binding the Gospels and Epistles around a single living Person, against the view that the first three Gospels show a merely human teacher to whom John and Paul added divinity.

2. Lecture I

   John’s baptism makes Israel confess its need of repentance, which Christ’s own baptism fulfils, and his victory over temptation and calling of the first disciples show the obedient Son already acting as King.

3. The Miracles — Herod Hearing of Christ

   Christ’s miracles, his meals with tax collectors and his lordship of the sabbath reveal one King establishing his kingdom over body and spirit, against both demonic corruption and Pharisaic legalism.

4. The Sign from Heaven — The Temptations of the Rich Man

   Christ refuses the Pharisees a sign, shows his glory at the Transfiguration framed by his coming suffering, and answers the disciples’ quarrel over greatness by making kingship a matter of service.

5. The Temptation of the Poor Man — What Think Ye of Christ?

   Whether facing the rich young ruler, entering Jerusalem, cleansing the temple or answering the Sadducees on the resurrection, Christ presses the same question on everyone: what do we think of him?

6. The Prophecy of the Last Days — The Feast

   Christ’s prophecy of the temple’s fall and the end of the age means what it says: the Son of Man’s coming is a real judgment, fulfilled in Jerusalem’s fall and the rise of Christendom.

7. The Lord’s Supper — The Resurrection

   The Passover meal, Gethsemane, the trials before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, the cross and the resurrection form one revelation of the Son of God and Son of Man, whose kingship is confirmed through suffering.

8. Part II. Differences of the Evangelists

   The Evangelists share one governing idea, Christ as Son of God, but each casts it through the Apostle who shaped him: Matthew as Israel’s fulfilment, Mark as Christ’s person, Luke as a universal kingdom.

9. St. Matthew

   From genealogy to resurrection, Matthew shows fulfilment as the unveiling of God’s Fatherhood in Israel’s history, the Church founded on confessing Jesus as Son of God, and that Fatherhood opened to all nations.

10. St. Mark

    Mark is no abridger of Matthew but an independent witness to Christ as King, leaving out genealogy, nativity and the Sermon on the Mount to show his power over spirits, sabbath and nature.

11. St. Luke

    Writing for Gentiles, Luke presents Christ as the Desire of all nations rather than only the Son of David, his parables exposing covetousness and exclusiveness to unveil a law of love no privilege can contain.

12. Lecture II. Acts of the Apostles, Epistles of St. James, St. Peter and St. Paul

    Acts carries Luke’s Gospel on as a universal kingdom spreads from the Jews to the Gentiles, James grounds faith in active trust, and Jude’s warning shows a church already sliding toward apostasy.

13. St. Peter. First Epistle — St. Peter. Second Epistle

    Peter’s first letter shows scattered, persecuted Israel built into a fellowship on Christ the living cornerstone, and his second answers the abuse of gospel freedom by grounding knowledge in righteousness.

14. St. Paul

    Paul’s conversion was the inward revelation of God’s Son in him, the source of every good thought, which drives his mission to the Gentiles and grounds Romans in righteousness received by faith.

15. I. The Epistle to the Romans

    Romans shows righteousness revealed in Christ and received by faith, sonship to God as spiritual rather than a matter of birth, and boasting giving way to humble, self-sacrificing love since all stand on mercy.

16. The First Epistle to the Corinthians

    Paul answers Corinth’s factions by preaching Christ crucified as the one foundation no teacher may divide, the Church as a body bound by love, and resurrection as the whole person’s transformation in Christ.

17. Second Epistle to the Corinthians

    Christ, not doctrine, binds Jew and Gentile together, and Paul’s weakness and near-despair become the ground of an apostleship in which Christ’s power appears through frailty.

18. Epistle to the Galatians

    Against Judaizers who would bring the Galatians under circumcision, Paul defends a gospel received from God, in which promise and Law alike aim at sonship in Christ, and liberty means serving in love.

19. Epistle to the Ephesians

    God chose humanity in Christ before the Fall and before time, and Christ, the cornerstone, has already broken down the wall between Jew and Gentile to make one body.

20. Epistle to the Philippians — Epistle to the Colossians

    Philippians turns imprisonment and rivalry into shared joy through the hymn of Christ’s self-emptying, and Colossians answers the hunger for hidden knowledge and angelic mediators with Christ as head of creation and Church.

21. The First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians

    Paul writes to the persecuted Thessalonians of Christ’s appearing as a drama already under way, of death as sleep before reunion, and of the man of sin as self-exaltation opposed to Christ’s self-abasing lordship.

22. The Pastoral Epistles

    In the Pastoral Epistles Church order grows organically rather than as a fixed constitution, false teachers put law in place of gospel, and true overseers are known by ordinary household and civic virtues.

23. The Epistle to Philemon

    By sending back the runaway slave Onesimus as a brother, Paul strikes at the root of slavery without a legal command, condemning any system that denies Christ’s Spirit dwells in every person.

24. Conclusion

    Who wrote Hebrews matters less than seeing how the Gospels and Epistles testify to one Son of God and Son of Man, Paul’s unity resting on Christ’s resurrection, which justifies Man himself.

25. The Epistle to the Hebrews

    Hebrews completes Paul’s vision of Christ as true Man by unfolding the doctrine of sacrifice, as a national, legal order gives way to a universal, spiritual one in God’s final word through the Son.

26. Lecture II. The Divine Education of the Jews

    Hebrews reads Israel’s history as a divine education in which kingship, prophecy, priesthood, sabbath and sacrifice each carry an idea left unsatisfied until fulfilled in a Son fully divine and human.

27. Lecture III. The Filial Dispensation

    Christ fulfils rather than abolishes the old institutions that all peoples dimly felt pointed to an unseen government, and his ascension ends angelic mediation, while any institution set up as his substitute breeds idolatry.

28. Appendix

    Surveying his wider work, Maurice names What is Revelation? and its Sequel, written against Hamilton’s doctrine of the Unknowable, as the writings he most wished to last.