This book provides a comprehensive overview of all the NT books, and is aimed at the lay-person who wants to get to know the bible better. It “attempts to make the most important book in the world accessible to ordinary people without becoming light and fluffy” (13)! It is not a commentary on the whole of the NT, but rather sets out the historical background, the flow of each book, followed by an outline which is effectively a very detailed account of the structure of each book.

As well as taking the reader through the NT, it has dozens of excellent ‘information boxes’, each of which seeks to provide information which readers would not always notice when simply reading the biblical text. These include ‘Correlation of the Pauline Epistles with the Book of Acts’ and ‘Correlations between Ephesians and Colossians’, but also extra-biblical material such as Josephus’ accounts of the death of Herod the Great and of the life of Jesus.

The strength of the book is that it goes through the whole of the NT and provides a lot of help in understanding the flow of each paragraph and book. While readers will require commentaries on individual books for more detail on individual verses and phrases, this book is very useful for what it sets out to do.