This is the first blog post I’m writing here on RTNT, and I want to start out by talking about the New Testament as a whole.

First, I want to explain why I believe that reading the New Testament is so important. It all centers on the person of Jesus, who is the most important and influential human being to ever walk the face of the earth. He is of course the central “character” in the New Testament, and it is primarily within the books in this most cherished collection of writings that we can come to know him.

The New Testament procliams that Jesus is the Christ — the long awaited Messiah of the Jewish people. This simple fact often gets overlooked due to it being so familiar. And in fact, this is one of the main reasons I’m providing these “readings” in the way that I am — to present the New Testament in a different way than most have ever read it before. By reading it straight from the original language it was written in, I’m hoping to strip away some of that familiarity, in hopes of bypassing the natural inclination of our minds to gloss over anything that is overly familiar.

This brings me to the second thing I want to talk about, which is the “how” or the methodology I’m following. As I mention on the About page, my intention is to present these readings in a casual format — starting from the Greek and offering simple translations that will highlight some of those aspects of the New Testament that can only be seen in the original language.

The main point of this method is that I want it to be accessible to everyone, regardless of people’s knowledge of Greek. For those who have no knowledge of Greek, I want them to see it and hear it in a way that will enhance their personal reading with a broader perspective than what they can get by simply reading a translation. On the other hand, for those who do know Greek, or who are actively learning Greek, I want these readings to imspire them — to encourage them to press forward toward acquiring and ever more fluent experience of reading live texts.

There’s so much more that I could write here, but I want to end this by sharing my personal motivation for doing these readings. The ultimate goal is to point people toward the real Jesus, who stands in stark contrast to the watered down “Jesus” most people are familiar with in modern culture.

The writings in the New Testament show us a real man who really lived in the first century during the early years of the Roman Empire. And he really was an itinerant preacher and teacher — a rabbi — who taught about the Kingdom of God, calling people to repentance and salvation through following himself.

By opening up the New Testament in this somewhat new and different way, my prayer is that people will see the real Jesus of Nazareth, be inspired to want to know him better, and that they will reach out to him in faith in their own lives. If these readings inspire a single person to draw closer to the Lord, or turn their lives around and begin following him, then my prayers will have been answered.

— Richard Ewald