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The Life of Jesus (Abridged)

What we know of Jesus' life comes almost exclusively from the four "gospels" of the Christian New Testament. Each is of interest on its own, and a great deal of scholarship has examined them in close detail and compared them carefully with each other.

This section is aimed at students with little or no familiarity with the story of Jesus in order to provide a general familiarity with his life as the four gospels collectively represent it. The files linked to this page extract brief ospel passages, arranged to present events roughly in chronological order. I have added titles describing the content, using terms often used in titles of western paintings of these subjects.

The translation here in most cases is from The New American Bible, the full text of which is available on-line (link). (Caution: There is more than one translation with this name.) From Shakespeare's time through the middle of the XXth century, the dominant English translation was the "King James Version." Although now largely displaced as a teaching text, the King James Version (KJV) is therefore the "classic" English rendering, from which schoolchildren formerly memorized passages, and which gave birth to countless hymns, allusions, quotations, book titles, proverbs, or turns of phrase in English.

The selection of extracts here largely follows Eleonore Beck 1997 Dio parolas al siaj infanoj: bibliaj tekstoj Estella, Navarra (Spain): Editorial Verbo Divino.