Welcome, ladies and germs.

I mean, ladies and gentlemen.

I heard Tim Ferriss say ladies and germs.

We won't say that.

Ladies and gentlemen, our creator has created.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the podcast Jesus Smart X. I'm Brian Del Turco and in this episode, episode 353, I'm talking with Frank Viola about his new book, It's Titanic.

It's Earth shaking.

It will change your life.

I committed to Frank that I'm going to read this book through three times over the balance of my lifetime.

You'll see what I mean about that.

I'm going to correlate it with my New Testament.

Reading his new book, the Untold Story of the New Testament Church, will uncover the real storyline.

There's nothing like this book out there.

That's what scholars are saying.

But this is a very accessible read.

The real storyline behind the epistles in the New Testament, Paul's writings, Peter, James, John, Acts as well, Luke and the early church.

A fresh perspective that can really change the way that you read scripture and really help you.

I feel I'm big on this.

To find and discover your personal storyline under God within the greater storyline of Jesus and the kingdom.

I'd like to encourage you if you didn't hear the previous episode, episode 352, we explored high impact prayer and how small groups of believers, we call it a micro ecclesia, can really shift outcomes.

Before we dive in, I want to invite you to subscribe to my newsletter, the Smart Edit.

You can go to jesussmart.com sign up right there.

It's an opportunity to hopefully elevate your faith.

Live smart, make an impact.

It's free weekly, just five minutes to grow and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Let's get started.

Okay.

Welcome to the podcast.

Today I have Frank Viola with us, I'm pleased to say, talking about a new project that you're going to want to hear about for your own storyline with Walking with Jesus and the Kingdom.

Frank, how are you today?

Thanks for coming on.

I appreciate it.

How's it going?

It's going well.

I always like coming on your show, Brian, so thanks for having me on again.

And I'm very excited to talk about the new book.

Yes, I. I have my own copy here, Frank.

I've been using it.

I've gotten back into a dumbbell routine.

I've been using it for curls, you know.

All right.

I've been seeing bicep developments just by curling this book for reps.

I want you to know, listener, that this is a book over 600 pages, right, Frank?

Yeah, it is, it is.

But someone just texted me, a Christian, said, your book is big, but it's deceptive because it's.

It's very easy to read and it's a fast read.

So that's what I want to say.

I don't want.

Yeah, yeah.

You're experiencing that too, huh?

Yeah, it's very accessible read.

It's not an intimidating read at all.

And it's beautifully designed and laid out, and it's kind of breezy in that sense, you know, takes you through the book.

The book is called the Untold Story of the New Testament Church, Revised and Expanded by Frank Viola.

It is big.

It's heavily researched.

This is substantive.

Frank, it's an amazing amount of work you've put into this.

This book offers a fresh way of reading the New Testament, placing the letters within their historical and their cultural context.

Frank, what inspired you to take on this project?

Because I'm telling you, you had to have some massive inspiration to complete it and present the early church's story in this unique way.

Yeah.

And.

And the main goal was not just to give people a history lesson.

That.

That wasn't the goal at all.

It's to open up and unlock the New Testament, especially the Epistles, the letters of Paul, James, Peter, John, et cetera.

And what inspired it was way back, many, many moons ago, when I became a believer.

I was 16 when I met the Lord and really met him, let me put it that way.

I came across a little book.

I was hungry and thirsty.

I wanted to learn everything I could about the faith, about Christ, about the Bible.

And I came across a little book.

I don't remember how I got it.

I don't remember the name of it.

I don't remember the author, but I do remember it had a white cover.

And what it did was it showed you in the narrative of the Book of Acts where Paul was when he wrote his various letters.

Okay.

So that was the first exposure I had to anything that came close to blending together the story we have in Acts with the Epistles.

And I was riveted by it.

It was amazing to me.

So as I began to read and grow, I. I came across a number of scholars, one of which was the main influence on my life.

FF Bruce.

And FF Bruce did amazing work on the New Testament.

He even was one of the first writers, authors who put together a chronological Bible of.

Of Paul's letters in chronological order.

Okay.

And I was amazed by that.

And in 1998, various things happened in my life and various people I had met that pushed me a little further down this road.

And I constructed the entire New Testament in its chronological order based on the available data that I had at the time.

Okay.

The books and the works of scholarship, et cetera.

Right.

But not only did I put it in chronological order, but I filled in the details as best I could.

You know, what was going on in history at the time.

Interesting.

But the New Testament story unfolds.

So I did that, and I began to deliver messages on this topic.

And how old were you?

I was in my early 30s.

Oh, okay.

All right.

I was in my early 30s.

I was 33 when.

When this research began.

And so that was my early stab at it.

And I have been studying this through the years.

I've been putting it together, adding to it, revising it, you know, And I'm just talking about in my head.

And so that was a published book at the time.

Well, that was not a published book.

It was.

It was messages I delivered.

I see.

To a small group of Christians.

Okay.

And.

But what you have now is the complete, updated, accurate, fully documented, fully sourced result of all of that study, which takes us back to 1998.

But that's what inspired it.

And I'll tell you what, the book solves a problem.

You know, my ministry.

My ministry really is geared towards solving common problems that God's people have.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I have had the problems in my own life.

And when I discover a solution that works for me, that's when I come out with a book.

All right.

Or a message or an article that's an authentic and.

Well, exactly.

And all of my books are like that.

They solved a problem in my own life.

The same with my articles.

On my blog, frankvola.org there's a thousand articles, plus, they're.

They're the result of finding solutions in my own life to problems I had, which represents thousands of other Christians and the problems they have.

And so I'm just passing it on.

But here's a problem.

Here's a problem we have, okay?

The problem we Christians have, and I had this problem for years.

We don't really understand the New Testament.

Okay.

Now I'm underlining the word really.

If I were to give you a history book that covered the history from, let's say, the 6th century B.C.

all the way to the 20th century A.D. okay.

But all the chapters were out of order.

Right.

And it told a story.

What?

You really wouldn't really fully understand the history because everything is a chaotic Mess.

And that's what happens when we come to the New Testament.

We come to the New Testament looking at it as a whole.

The 27 books of the New Testament are not arranged chronologically.

The book of Acts is a highly condensed and abridged narrative.

And Luke, the author of Acts, leaves a massive amount of detail out of his story.

And he does that intentionally because he's highlighting certain points.

Well, we find the rest of it in the epistles, Paul's epistles, epistles of the other writers, Epistles, letters.

Right?

Yeah, the letters.

Right, the letters.

The letters of Paul, James, Peter, John.

And it's all out of chronological order.

All right.

The other thing is we have versified the New Testament which came in the 1500s.

So now all of these letters, they were, you know, if I wrote you a letter, I wouldn't number each sentence.

Yeah, I wouldn't number each sentence.

Right.

But we do that just so we can locate things.

But now we're conditioned to read the New Testament through chapters and verses.

Okay, that's true.

And it's not chronological.

So this creates a massive hurdle.

And we don't even understand it because we've all been conditioned to come to the New Testament through the lens of chapter and verses out of its chronological sequence.

And so we can interpret what the New Testament letters are saying any way we want.

And that's why we have 40,000 plus denominations in the Protestant Christian world.

Now, if you put it all together chronologically, but not just chronologically, you take what's in the epistles that Luke leaves out of his story and you blend it together and then you reconstruct it.

Now you have a model really of what really happened and what those letters that Paul and James and Peter and John were, were actually saying, what, what they were trying to communicate.

Because you have the context.

That's really the big game here, the context.

And so this is the first book.

And I can say this now confidently, because it's been out for a while enough where thousands of people are reading it, scholars are reading it, professors of New Testament are reading it.

I'm getting emails from seminary graduates, pastors.

Plus it's been endorsed by 20 preemine New Testament scholars.

So what I'm about to say is not blowing bubbles.

This is the fact, but this is the first book that has ever put the, that has ever put the entire story from Pentecost to Patmos together, chronologically, filling in all the details, and that cites scholars and historians to give support to the narrative.

This is the first book ever to do it.

That's amazing, because in the world of, like, New Testament literature and scholarship is very robust and huge, you know, a lot of scholarship, but it is.

It is.

Yeah.

Well, what you have, you have a massive number of books on the book of Acts, interpreting the Book of Acts, and you have a massive amount of.

Of books.

A massive amount of books on New Testament history.

Then you have a massive amount of books on the various letters, you know, the book of Galatians, sure, tons of commentaries, the book of First Thessalonians, scores of commentaries.

But you don't have anything that puts it all together seamlessly.

See, that.

That's.

That's the unique contribution of this particular book.

Now, there are only two books that attempted to do it, and they're not documented much.

There's.

There's hardly any sourcing in them at all.

One of them is a book in the 1970s by Donald Guthrie.

He was.

I think he was the first to do it.

And it's.

It's a good book, but it leaves an awful lot out and it's.

It's out of date.

It's, you know, the scholarship is outdated, etc.

And it does not have the detail say that.

That my book does.

And also a book, a very tiny, small book by Paul Barnett.

And I'll talk about him later, because I just got an email from him today.

He's one of the endorsers of the book.

He has told me three different times there is no book like this.

And he, in fact, wrote that in his endorsement.

And he's a guy that tried to do this, but he did it in a kind of a small way.

It' very small paperback, so it's not detailed.

But those are the only two books I know that have attempted this.

Okay.

But this particular work is the first that's put it all together in detail and that has used sources and citations with the most updated scholarship and history that we have available.

And this, and this.

You know, I just see this as a personal note.

I just see this as vital that we see the unfolding storyline, you know, of.

Of.

Of the kingdom.

Really.

When you say Pentecostal Patmos, you're saying Pentecost at the beginning of Acts and then Patmos John, right, in Revelation.

That's right, yeah.

That's the whole.

The whole balance of the New Testament outside of the Gospels.

We need to appreciate the storyline of.

Of the kingdom from that generation.

1.

And then we'll come to this in our interview, I think, Frank, but we need to see our own personal Storyline.

Right.

As an extension of that or as somehow, you know, fitting into that.

And frankly, listener, my friends, we need everybody to show up with everything they've got right now.

Okay?

We need as many people as possible to be as fully developed as possible as a disciple of Christ.

And.

And this is a great resource.

So, Frank, scholars will disagree, as you've already alluded to, on the chronology of the New Testament.

Right.

Places and in some places, events.

Okay, can you give an example of one where there is wide disagreement?

Sure.

Well, there's.

Let me back up and say there's wide disagree.

Excuse me.

There is wide agreement on much of the chronology, especially nowadays as New Testament studies and historical studies have progressed.

There's wide agreement among evangelical scholars on much of it.

However, there are some places where there's disagreement.

So I'll give you an example.

Per your question, someone wrote me recently and asked me about the letter of James and where I placed the letter of James.

And so what I basically told him was that scholars disagree on the date in which it was penned.

There's less certainty about James than there is most of the other epistles.

James is a very difficult one to nail down.

So there's no way to prove a date.

But the quote, unquote, letters from James that are mentioned in the Book of Galatians, that the agitators, the Judaizers claimed were, were not the equivalent of the Epistle of James that we have in our New Testament.

Those were letters of commendation, not the Epistle of James.

This person who wrote me kind of confused the two.

Okay.

That would not fit the narrative is there's nothing about the Judaizers and what they had alleged in that letter, the letter of James.

Now, to my mind, it makes more sense to me that the scholars who have said Galatians was written first out of every surviving epistle we have, and that James was written afterwards, and he was reacting to what some were falsely saying about Paul's Gospel, especially in chapter two, that Paul's Gospel leads to license liberty libertarianism.

Okay.

Libertinism.

Libertinism.

You know, you can.

You're under grace, so you can sin.

Do anything you want.

Yeah.

I believe those scholars are correct.

And if anyone wants to drill deep into this, they can read the sources that I cite in the footnotes.

That's what the footnotes are for.

It's for someone like this person who wrote me and said, where.

Where are you getting this from?

Or why do you believe that James was written after Galatians?

Well, you just had to Push your head down half an inch and you see the footnotes and you see all the scholars that I cite.

Okay?

Yeah.

And.

And even if James wrote his Epistle before Paul wrote Galatians, let's just say that's true, because there are some scholars who hold that it does not practically affect my narrative at all.

Okay?

It doesn't practically affect my narrative at all.

Craig Keener, for example, he wrote the Forward.

The greatest New Testament scholar in the world, really, he believes that Galatians was written after the Jerusalem Council.

Okay.

While NT Wright and others believe it was written before the Council of Jerusalem.

All right.

But either option does not affect the narrative.

Now, on that one, I hold to the same view that N.T.

wright does and others.

But it doesn't affect the narrative if you say the Jerusalem Council took place first.

So a lot of these things where scholars disagree, and again, it's not a massive amount, but there are points where you have these conflicting ideas and opinions among the scholarly world.

None of it affects the narrative.

So we still get the benefit from understanding the story, or as I call it, the untold story, the untold narrative, the.

You know, there's something in education, like with curriculum called scoping and sequencing.

Have you ever heard of this phrase?

No.

No, sir.

It's like in curricular development, scope.

So really, I can see where you've, in effect, you've, you've done some of this scoping and sequencing, the scope of the narrative.

I mean, the Bible.

What does the word Bible mean?

It means book, right.

Actually, Bible, I think it means book.

And could we say, Frank, that the Bible is actually sort of a library or collection?

It is.

It's a library of books.

Yeah, 66 books.

66.

So you have 27 New Testament.

So you're taking those 27 books, or at least Acts, to Revelation.

Right.

And.

And you're, you're, you're sequencing it chronologically, you know, as it unfolded.

That's right.

And I also have sections, I have chapters on the Gospels that puts it all together.

Okay.

But it's not exhaustive and it's not as detailed as the other parts because I'm really trying to tell the story of the first century believers when the, when the letters were written.

And so the prelude to that is Jesus in Nazareth and Jesus in Galilee.

And so there are several chapters that do tell his story chronologically, but it's brief.

Okay.

And not only that, but I even begin before Jesus Christ comes on the scene, going back to eternity past, because that's when the story really starts John Chapter 1, opens.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.

And the Word was God.

Yes.

And there's a lot of the backstory of what happened before creation in John 17 and other passages.

So that's really where it starts.

And that's where it ends, too.

Eternity future.

So what the book does is it.

It brings you into eternity past, puts all of the scriptures together that we have about what happened before eternity, what was God up to, and what provoked creation and what provoked him sending his Son into the earth, and what provoked the birth of the ecclesia, the assembly, the church, and so forth.

And so, yeah, it's a.

It's a.

A narrative on the kingdom of God from beginning to end.

And the kingdom began before eternity because we're told in Matthew 25, the kingdom that God had prepared before the foundation of the world.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

This is like ultimate scoping and sequencing.

Okay.

Yes, it is.

And we need to see ourselves in the script, don't we?

I mean, humans are instinctively story wired for story and narrative.

We need to see ourselves in the script.

Or we could become what, Frank?

We could become deceived.

Right.

We could become erroneous in our doctrine.

We could make mistakes in our lifestyle or ministries.

This is very important.

So did you hit a wall when you wrote this book?

What was the most challenging part of writing and, you know, either in the research or in actually compiling the material?

Yeah, well, of course, the research goes back to 1998, but it took me three years to actually sit down and write the book that you're holding in your hands right now virtually every day.

So it was a heavy lift, for sure.

And the main challenge, Brian, was balancing scholarly accuracy with reader accessibility.

Accessibility.

Accessibility, yeah.

So my main goal was to present complex historical and cultural information in a way that's understandable, easy to read, and applicable for every Christian reader.

Including.

Including high school students.

Yeah.

And so I'm.

I'm getting mail from people who are college students as well as people in their 70s who typically read fiction books.

Typically, it's.

It's women who are writing me in that.

In that age bracket, and they're telling me it's easy to read.

The other thing that was very hard was the sourcing.

Sourcing.

Citing my sources.

Citing my sources was not easy.

There are over 2,400 footnotes.

Some of those footnotes extend pretty long.

They're lengthy.

You can think of this book as over 1000 books distilled into one captivating drama.

Wow.

Because that's what you have the research and over a thousand books.

That's not counting the scholarly journals.

Right.

If you add those, then the number rises.

So, yeah, that's what it is.

And that's what you need to do in order to create a, an accurate, plausible narrative of what happened 2,000 years ago.

And we have a lot of the information in the New Testament itself.

But, you know, the New Testament writers, including Acts, were not trying to capture everything that happened in history.

So that's where you go to the historians and you fill in the gaps and it, it brings it all to life in 3D.

And it's, it becomes a.

Not just a read, but it becomes an adventure that opens up the New Testament in some powerful ways.

I just received a message from another Christian leader, and he was just saying how he had never seen so many things.

He's.

He's been reading the New Testament for years, teaching it.

Sure.

He had never seen so many things that he did not know about the New Testament story.

You know, the epistles, the Book of Acts, the statements of Paul that are mysterious.

And by the way, I'll just say this.

Anyone that has two neurons in a synapse and is on and is honest, will admit that understanding the New Testament, and I mean all of it is not easy.

You know, there are things that Paul says that are mysterious.

That's why scholars have 10,000 different opinions on what he was saying in a given passage.

Yeah.

Now, that's not true for every word of the New Testament.

You know, there are parts of it that are easy to understand, but a lot of it is mysterious.

But when you put the whole story together, it opens it up in ways that, well, most Christians have never dreamed.

And, and that's what happened to me, Brian.

See, all of this research, I did this work myself putting the whole narrative together.

Right.

That's what happened to me.

It created a revolution in my own life, understanding the New Testament.

And, you know, that's hugely important.

I mean, if.

If we evangelical Christians, and I know that's a clay word, it's.

It's used many different ways.

But by evangelical, I mean you believe that the Bible is inspired.

You believe that Jesus is the Messiah, is the true son of God.

He died for our sins.

He rose again from the dead.

He's still alive.

All right?

He's the way to salvation.

If you believe those tenets and you believe that Scripture is the written word of God, Christ is the living word, Jesus is the living word, but the Scriptures are the inspired written word of God, then it's hugely important that we understand it properly.

Right.

Because if you misunderstand the Bible, you are going to misinterpret it and misapply it.

Yeah, all right.

And that's downstream from that, that's problems.

You know, that's problematic, you know, on a personal level, on a societal level, on a, on a church, collective, corporate level, you know, so, so what this book really is seeking to do is to hand God's people a key.

Now I didn't invent the key, right.

You know, it's not my invention.

I didn't sit in a room and dream up, you know, what happened in the first century.

What is the New Testament really saying?

What's the story really about?

I rely on many scholars, 20 preeminent scholars had endorsed the book glowingly, basically approving the work that I had done, showing that this really does open up the New Testament.

It unlocks it in a fresh and powerful way.

So really what I'm trying to do with this book is offer a fresh reading which will surprise, which will be a surprise to many long term Bible readers.

But which, but which meshes with the most up to date scholarship and the New Testament and first century church history.

Wow.

What a multifaceted, valuable work.

Radical means to get back to the root.

That's literally what the word means from the Latin.

So there's, you know, to get back to like century one Christ following.

Right.

Get back to the root of it in our time, with our lifetimes is one of the most, maybe the most valuable thing we can can do.

I see myself reading this book over a lifetime, you know, several times, Frank.

And correlating it with just my New Testament reading and layering it in, building it in just.

I think it's going to help me a lot.

So basically I know this to be true.

We read the Scriptures in a fragmented way.

You know, we do that because of the versification, as you say, the chapters, the numbers of the verses, as well as the fact that the Bible is actually a collection of writings.

And you know, we need to think hard about how this all integrates together.

So we've been doing this and, but your book, I can see where it helps the bigger picture of what God was doing in that century one Christ following.

So that's pretty valuable, right?

It's pretty valuable, yeah.

It's tremendously valuable because again, we're reading the New Testament in its present order, which is not chronological, it's not sequential.

Paul didn't write Romans after the book of Acts.

That was not his first letter.

And I go into how the New Testament letters were arranged and why they were arranged that way in the book.

But I'll give you an example to your, to your point.

I don't create anything using Legos.

I, I don't use Legos, but I have a friend who uses Legos.

He's into it with his, with his children.

Okay.

Yeah.

And you can find a dinosaur LEGO set.

All right?

They sell those.

And I saw one, it was 600 pieces.

Now, I want you to imagine that in order to create this 600 piece dinosaur LEGO set, and when you put all the pieces together, all 600, you have this dinosaur.

I want you to imagine that there are two boxes that you have to buy to assemble that dinosaur.

One box has 400 pieces, the other box has 200.

Now the box that has 400 pieces, that is analogous to the Book of Acts that Luke wrote.

Okay?

Now if you take all 400 pieces of that dinosaur box and you put all the pieces together, you're going to be missing the tail of the dinosaur, you're going to be missing the jaw of the dinosaur, you're going to be missing his two arms, you're going to be missing part of the torso.

You won't be able to figure out that that's a dinosaur.

You need to get the other box which has the rest of the pieces, the 200, and that is the epistles.

Those are analogous to the letters of Paul, James, John, Peter, Hebrews, Jude, etc.

Right?

Yeah, yeah.

Now when you put.

Those are the things that Luke leaves out of the Book of Acts.

But if you have that second box and you put those pieces together with the 400, then you have the complete dinosaur.

It's clear as a bell.

You could see it, you know what it is.

You can recognize it.

It's all there.

And that's exactly what happens when we try to read the New Testament in the order it's in through the lens of chapters and verses.

It's like having these Lego pieces all scattered about.

And if we just read the Book of Acts to really understand what happened, we're just reading.

We're just trying to put together a dinosaur with 400 pieces.

We need the other 200 pieces because it's a 600 piece Lego set.

Brian, thanks for listening to episode 353 with Frank Viola on the podcast Jesus Smart X. I hope this conversation with Frank gave you a new perspective on the unfolding story of the kingdom as recorded in the New Testament.

As we read, this is fundamental stuff, basic stuff.

It's putting in the reps, layering it in, building into your renewed mind and into your spirit.

The story of the New Covenant, the story of the Kingdom.

It will serve you well in life.

Don't miss part two.

Coming soon, we'll complete this conversation.

We'll go a little bit deeper into his research and how understanding the early church can really help us to transform our walk with Christ.

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