Matthew, Mark, Luke, ...

Yes, we’ve all memorised the order of at least some of the ‘books’ in our Bibles. But did you know that the order of the books is merely tradition, and is not fixed in our Bibles. Remember that Martin Luther wanted to move the letter commonly (and wrongly) called ‘James’ (which he nicknamed ‘The epistle / letter of straw’) nearer to the end of the Bible (for theological reasons).

Even concerning the Hebrew scriptures, the average Bible reader isn’t aware that not only do English Bibles present what we call the ‘Old Testament’ books in a different order to most Jewish Hebrew publications, we even break the writings into a different number of ‘books’: the Tanaⱪ contains 24 ‘books’¹ compared to our ‘Old Testament’ which traditionally contains 39 ‘books’.

So why do we have ‘books’ like 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel (and which the Jewish publications combine)? Well, it’s because there was a limit to the size of a scroll. Look at the beginning of Exodus: Genesis finished with the death and embalming of Joseph after making his relatives promise to carry his body out of Egypt. Exodus begins by listing those relatives, then goes on to talk about the next Pharaoh after Joseph’s death. Since we no longer need to worry about the size and weight of the scrolls, there’s no longer any reason other than tradition as to why Genesis couldn’t just run on into Exodus (and the same with Exodus/Leviticus, Leviticus/Numbers, and Numbers/Deuteronomy)—ending up with a single ‘book’ of ‘Moses’.

The forthcoming, radical, new Open English Translation places John / Yohan and Mark before Matthew in most editions. This has the beauty of:

1. The ‘Old Testament’ begins with “In the beginning, God created ...” and the ‘New Testament’ begins with “In the beginning was the message ...”—a beautiful symmetry, and

2. Luke’s two narratives then appear following each other: Luke then Acts.

The OET is not afraid to break with tradition if:

1. We can make improvements to the text or layout, and

2. We can provoke readers to think more about how our Bibles come to us.

Robert Hunt, May 2023