Author: Rich Gorecki

This year-long journey through The MANual, my NIV Bible for Men, brings us to the most important set of books in the Christian Bible: The Gospels. In this post, I introduce you to the first four books of the New Testament that followed a time period after the Old Testament called the “400 years of silence.”  Its “Good News” The word Gospel comes from the Greek word ευαγγέλια (pronounced evangélia) which means “good news”. The Gospels are the written accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament. The Greek was later rendered into Latin as “evangelium” for use in the Vulgate, the late-4th-century Latin translation that became the Catholic Church’s official Latin Bible which is still used today in the Latin Church. In Old English, the Greek was translated as “gōdspel” (gōd “good” + spel “news”) and retained as “gospel” in many

My year-long journey through the Bible now leads us to a 400-year period between the Prophets and the New Testament called the Intertestamental Period. I’m deviating from using The MANual for this post since my New Living Testament (NLT) Life Application Bible does a great job explaining this time period.  So first, here’s a brief refresher of the Old Testament to help us understand the need for a new covenant with God described in the New Testament.  About the Old Testament As you read in some prior posts during this journey, the Christian Bible’s Old Testament is broken down into four main sections:  The Books of Moses (5 books from Genesis through Deuteronomy),  The History of Israel (12 books from Joshua through Esther) The Books of Poetry (5 books from Job through the Song of Solomon), and  The Prophets (17 books but read below for more).  The books of the