This project arose out of a desire by the editor to read the New Testament through in the order that the books were originally written. Unable to find such an edition, he created one himself using the World English Bible—an up to date and modern English translation that has been released into the public domain. The original preface to the whole World English Bible has been included in this New Testament edition for those who wish to know more about the translation.

While this project may be a good occasion for a kind of study Bible with maps and timelines of important events, we have chosen instead to produce a rather spare edition designed for continuous reading. Supplementing this reading with other material will be beneficial, but the editor’s original interest was to simply read the books in the order of their composition within a few sittings in order to get a feel for the development of the inspired canon in history. This edition is designed to facilitate that. In service of this purpose, chapter breaks have been minimized. Chapter numbers have been included as superscripts before each verse number. This makes chapters easy to find, but chapter breaks easy to miss.

Dating the New Testament documents is a not an easy task and scholars have debated the dates of most the New Testament books for as long as there has been New Testament scholarship. The dates are estimates. The date ranges given in this edition were procured by combining the dates given by various evangelical scholars and sources. Perhaps the most dominant source was Crossway’s 2008 ESV Study Bible.

The New Testament books are arranged by their earliest possible date of composition. There are significant and important debates surrounding the dating of a number of the New Testament books. For example, the theology of the book of Revelation may vary greatly depending on whether it was written before or after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and while Mark is commonly believed to be the earliest gospel, some scholars believe that Matthew predated Mark in some form. The editor chose to go with the majority views in these cases.