In this powerful episode of the Kingdom Reformation Podcast, Glenn Bleakney sits down with best-selling author and teacher Frank Viola to uncover the hidden narrative of the New Testament Church.

Frank shares the inspiration behind his revised and expanded book, The Untold Story of the New Testament Church—a groundbreaking work that weaves together the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles in chronological order.

Discover how understanding the historical and cultural context of the first-century world brings Scripture to life, clears up common misinterpretations, and reveals the explosive reality of the Kingdom of God.

👉 Resources Mentioned:

• Frank’s full catalog & podcast: https://frankviola.org
• Book site with free sampler: https://theuntoldstory.net
• Kingdom Reformation: https://kingdomreformation.org

Don’t just read the New Testament—experience it in its true chronological flow.

Welcome to the Kingdom Reformation Podcast with Glenn Blakeney.

Here, the fire of revival ignites hearts and fuels a supernatural move of God throughout the nations of the earth.

Join us each week for prophetic insights.

Apostolic teaching, and powerful conversations that will.

Equip you to live fully awakened in your Kingdom purpose.

This is more than a podcast, it's a movement.

Learn more about us by visiting kingdomreformation.org now let's dive into today's episode.

Hey, Frank.

Welcome to the Kingdom Reformation show and we're just honored to have you on the show today.

My honor, my privilege, Glenn.

I appreciate it.

And for those who may not be familiar with your work, could you just briefly introduce yourself and share which of your books you consider most significant?

Sure.

First, I would say to your listen, listening audience that I'm a follower and servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Second, I'm someone who writes books and speaks in conferences for hungry and thirsty Christians who loved Jesus.

They love Jesus, but they know in their bones there must be more to the Christian faith, to Jesus Christ, to the Bible, and to church.

And regarding my background, I've been part of every denomination and every movement you can name, from the Pentecostals to the Charismatics, all of their flavors, as well as most evangelical denominations and camps.

And while I have learned valuable things from all of them, they all left me saying, there's got to be more than this.

And that's what my books, my articles and my podcasts are all about.

Now, to your question.

I've written over 20 books to date, and they can be divided up into light and shade.

Light are books containing the element of the sublime.

And I would put God's favorite place on earth and from eternity to here in that category.

Shade are books containing a prophetic edge that challenges the status quo.

The book I'm most known for is called Insurgents Reclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom.

That would be one of those prophetic edge books.

That book has been called the new touchstone on the kingdom of God and what it does.

It unveils in detail the explosive, titanic, groundbreaking, earth shattering gospel of the kingdom that Jesus preached, that the 12 preached, that Philip preached and Paul of Tarsus preached.

I also have a podcast, a free podcast that supplements that book.

It's called the Insurgents podcast and I have conversation partners on it.

And we have been discussing every reference to the Kingdom of God in the New Testament in chronological order, and that is a task that's never been done before.

Your Listeners, if they're interested, they can check out my entire book catalog and the podcast archive@frank viola.org and all of my work.

Glenn.

What it does, it takes God's people into what I call the deeper Christian life.

Yeah, yeah, very good.

And love your book on the kingdom.

Okay, so you've got a new release.

It's called the Untold Story of the New Testament Church.

And this is a revised and expanded version.

So what's this book about, Frank?

And why should every serious hungry believer really consider reading it?

I appreciate the question very much.

This book is very close to my heart.

The great scholar F.F.

bruce famously said that reading the New Testament letters is like hearing one end of a phone conversation.

What my book does is it reconstructs the other end so readers can understand virtually every word of the New Testament letters.

And so what the book does is it seamlessly weaves the narrative of Acts with the epistles, providing a free flowing story from Matthew to Revelation, but in chronological order and filling in all the details from our best knowledge of first century history.

And so while the book is nonfiction, readers are saying it reads like a motion picture on paper.

And that was my goal.

I wanted to give God's people a cinematic experience of what the New Testament story is all about chronologically.

And so what it does really practically is it offers a solution that most Christians don't realize they have.

I know I had it for many years, and that is we know verses in the New Testament.

We're very good with verses, but not the story.

And without the story, we cannot fully understand any of the 21 letters of the New Testament.

And by story, I don't mean just the book of Acts, because Luke abridges his narrative, you have to go to the epistles to find all the little details that are there to blend it together with the historian Acts to get that free flowing, full orbed chronological narrative.

And let me insert a word here directly to your charismatic and Pentecostal listeners.

The Charismatic Movement.

I grew up in the Pentecostal Church and then from there I moved to the Charismatic movement.

That's my background, so I know it very well.

And we live in an era where Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians regularly face criticism for emphasizing an experiential faith without solid biblical understanding.

And that criticism is often valid.

Now I'm speaking in general here, but charismatics for the most part are very strong on emotion, but weak in understanding the Scriptures.

And so in my book, the Untold Story of the New Testament Church Revised and Expanded, and for Your listeners.

This is the one with the white cover and the elegant brushstrokes on the borders.

That's the version.

My book solves that problem because what it does is it gives God's people a key that unlocks the New Testament and addresses a longstanding need within the charismatic community for a strong, accurate understanding of the Scriptures.

Dr. Craig Keener is the world's leading scholar in New Testament background, and he's also a charismatic, by the way, very strong charisma.

He's written a lot of books that defend the gifts of the Spirit and miracles.

Well, he wrote the forward, and I was blessed that he did this.

He wrote the forward to my book, and it's peerless.

And so, consequently, if a Christian wants to really understand God's work, particularly in the New Testament, in a fresh and accurate way that will even electrify them, they absolutely should get a copy.

And that statement is based on hundreds of testimonials from Christians and all different tribes, movements and denominations.

And the book just came out just a few months ago.

So it's new, it's fresh, people are still reading it.

I'm getting testimonials continuously.

But I very much appreciate the question in this interview because I'm very excited about this book.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, well done.

It's.

It's really a valuable resource to be able to understand the New Testament in context like that.

And chronologically, you know, obviously just reading verses, isolating even chapters, can actually lead to misinterpreting or misapplying Scripture.

And can you give us maybe just a couple of examples of maybe some verses or passages that are commonly taken out of context because we just don't understand, you know, the bigger story.

Right, right.

Well, I'll give you a few.

I could multiply many examples, but we'll be here for hours.

I'll give you a few here.

Philippians 4:19.

This is very well known.

But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.

All right, now, if you back up to verse 15, you find out some of what was happening and why Paul said that Paul was commending the church in Philippi for giving him money when he was in need while he was on the road.

And he credits their generous giving to their spiritual account.

He actually says that that's why he promises them that God will supply their needs.

It's because they had generously given to him when he was on the road in Thessalonica, et cetera.

Philippi was very generous.

Epaphroditus came to him in Rome.

He was in prison at the time and gave him a small fortune.

And this aligns with what Jesus taught in Luke 6, Give and it shall be given to you.

Matthew 6.

The Lord promised, seek the kingdom of God first, and everything you need will be added.

So Paul echoes those statements in his letters and he does so here.

And so consequently, the financial provision of God is conditioned upon the generous giving of his people to the poor and to support his work.

And the verses preceding Philippians 4:19 make that crystal clear.

Another example is what Paul tells Timothy in second Timothy 4:5.

He tells Timothy to do the work of an evangelist.

And I've heard pastors and preachers put that on all of God's people saying, look here, the word of God says you need to be an evangelist.

You have to preach to lost souls.

Paul told Timothy to do the work of an evangelist.

Well, that's a completely misrepresented.

That's a complete misreading of that text.

Timothy was an extra local apostolic worker, which means he traveled.

He preached the Gospel.

All right, there's your evangelism.

And he raised up churches.

So his ministry was one of evangelism, teaching, shepherding and church planting.

That's the work of all apostolic workers.

Consequently, it's a cardinal mistake to lift that verse out of its historical and literary context and make it a universal law for all of God's people.

All right, Paul made plain that not all Christians are apostolic workers, not all are prophets, not all are teachers.

Etc, you can find that in 1st Corinthians 12.

And if Ephesians 4 makes the same point.

So not every Christian is called to be an evangelist or to do the work of an evangelist.

Another example is Paul's thorn in the flesh in Second Corinthians chapter 12.

And I think your listeners will find this fascinating.

It was.

It hit me like a thunderclap when I put the whole story together, from Pentecost to Patmos.

This became so clear.

When you see the whole panoramic story of the New Testament Church, you discover that Paul's thorn in the flesh was a man, a human being motivated by Satan.

And that man was the leader of what Paul calls in Galatians, the circumcision party.

Scholars call them the Jerusalem based counter mission.

And what this man did, and his little group of followers, they dogged Paul's steps.

Whenever he traveled to plant the church that would go visit that church, they would rip Paul to shreds.

They did it to the Galatian churches.

They did it in Corinth.

They did it in Thessalonica.

They later did it in Philippi, and they were basically maligning Paul to try to put the Gentiles under the law of Moses.

Now, this becomes very evident when you put the whole story together.

And what I've done in my book is I have a large section of.

It's a gray box, and it makes an airtight case for this interpretation.

And the Greek text and the scholarship backs it up.

But you only get this kind of insight when you see the whole story of the New Testament church unfold chronologically, and it is unmistakable.

And there are other examples I can give you, but those are just.

Those are just two or three.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that alone is worth reading the book.

Yeah.

Just to find out that the thorn in the flesh.

I'm intrigued.

My interest is piqued.

I'm definitely going to be taking a deep dive into that.

Okay, let's talk about the cultural background of the first century and how that enhances our interpretation of the New Testament.

Can you share a specific New Testament passage that takes on more profound meaning when viewed through its historical and cultural lens?

Sure, sure.

It's kind of like trying to understand TikTok or Instagram trends without knowing anything about social media or Internet culture.

All right.

It's a totally different world.

And so people in the first century had totally different ideas about honor, family, politics, social rules.

Consequently, when we read the New Testament with our modern eyes, we miss a whole lot of what the original readers would have instantly understood.

I'll give you two examples.

Okay.

Why were the disciples astonished by Jesus?

Comment about the rich?

In Matthew 19, Mark 10, and Luke 18, Jesus said, It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom.

And when the disciples heard it, they were.

They were astonished because they said, who can be saved?

And Jesus answered, with man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.

All right, two things.

First, there is an old myth that alleged that the eye of the needle referred to a small gate in Jerusalem's city wall through which a camel could not pass unless it was stooped and had its baggage removed.

That is historically false.

Biblical scholars have thoroughly debunked it.

Jesus was speaking about a literal eye of a literal needle.

In other words, it's humanly impossible for the rich to enter the kingdom.

Second, the disciples were shocked because Jesus statement saying, they were shocked by his statement because they said, who then can be saved?

Now why did they respond like that?

Well, I recently heard a very famous prosperity preacher say that the 12 disciples were astonished because they all were wealthy men.

And so they were saying, well, gosh, who can be saved?

We're all wealthy, Jesus.

And you're saying we can't enter the kingdom, but that's patently false.

Also, the 12 disciples were not wealthy men.

They were mostly working class individuals, including fishermen.

Peter, Andrew, James and John were fishermen.

You had a tax collector.

Matthew and the others had typical trades of 1st century Galilee.

So they all relied on the support and hospital hospitality of others as they traveled and ministered.

That's clear from the New Testament.

And the women, Actually Jesus had women followers and they were the ones who supported Jesus and the 12.

Well, anyway, their astonished question, who then can be saved?

Did not stem from personal wealth.

They were astonished because wealth was widely viewed as a sign of God's blessing and favor in their cultural context.

The common Jewish belief at the time was that wealth was an evidence that God approved of you and that wealthy people were favored by God and more likely to be saved than other people.

So when Jesus said it would be extremely difficult for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven, their response was, shucks, if the wealthy can't make it, then who can?

And then Jesus, he replied by saying, well, with God all things are possible.

So that's one example.

Another example is going the extra mile.

You remember when Jesus said, if someone forces you to go one mile, go two miles at Matthew 5, verse 41.

Well, he was not giving advice about being nice.

At the time.

Roman soldiers could legally force Jewish people to carry their heavy equipment for exactly one mile, no more, no less.

And that was super humiliating for Judeans living under Roman rule.

So by suggesting that they voluntarily carry it a second mile, what Jesus was doing is he was teaching them a clever way to flip the situation.

The soldier would be confused and suddenly the Jewish person wasn't being forced anymore.

They were voluntarily choosing to help.

And it was a peaceful way to stand up to unjust treatment without fighting it or giving up.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's powerful.

Wow.

Thanks.

Okay.

Hey, so let's talk a little bit about, you know, what seems as contradiction in the Gospels or the book of Acts.

So how does understanding the ancient biographical writings help us reconcile these seeming contradictions?

Sure.

Well, ancient Biographies were written very differently than modern biographies.

And the Gospels were all in the genre of ancient biography.

And so they were written with very different expectations.

They did not keep to chronological precision that we have today.

They were more concerned with capturing the character and essential teachings of whoever they were writing about.

And so that's why very often in an ancient biography, they skipped over the person's childhood.

So the fact that we don't know much about Jesus childhood except Luke mentions of an incident is an example of ancient biography.

So they were not writing modern biographies.

They were really theological biographies that emphasized different aspects of Jesus ministry for different audiences.

And so the contradictions resolve when you understand that, because they're not meant to be chronological.

The same with Luke's volume that we call the Book of Acts.

Sometimes Luke breaks with his chronology.

A good example of this is found in Herod's death and Peter's vision of the sheep coming down from heaven with unclean animals.

What Luke does is he reverses those in the chronology.

He also condenses the story in Acts profoundly, so much so that sometimes one verse will span a period of months.

The early part of Acts 15 is an example.

And so what I've done in this book, Glenn, is I've understanding all of this and that Luke compresses his narrative.

I've taken all the bits of information that we have in the Epistles where Paul will talk about a situation that Luke leaves out, and I'll blend it together and make it a chronological, cohesive story with all the details filled in.

It really brings the New Testament into 3D, and you understand things that were obscure before.

That's what it did for me.

And so consequently, I'm passing it on to others.

And by the way, this is much more.

My book is much more than a chronological Bible.

All a chronological Bible does is it reorders the current books that we have in the New Testament.

It does.

Does it with the Old Testament too.

What my book does is way beyond that because it fills in the details.

For example, Luke in the Book of Acts will only spend less than 10 verses talking about Paul's time in Thessalonica when he planted the church there.

Well, Paul gives a tremendous amount of detail.

If you read 1st and 2nd Thessalonians carefully, he talks about what he said to them, what he did, what he taught, the things that happened when he was there.

So what I do in the book is I take that information and I blend it together with what Luke tells us in Acts chapter 17.

And then you get a bigger Picture.

And then you get to meet some of the people who were in Thessalonica, in that church.

Jason, Aristarchus, Secundus, Demas, et cetera.

And so you feel like you, you, you know these people, right?

You know who Paul's writing to.

So, yeah, it's, it's really a wonderful experiment.

And, you know, the book is helping so many people make the New Testament come alive.

And again, we cannot apply God's Word accurately.

God's word is one of the main methods by which the Holy Spirit transforms us, but it will not and it cannot transform us if we don't accurately understand it.

And so that's one of the great benefits of this book.

It really is a transforming work in that respect.

Yep.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

Excellent.

Thank you.

One of the things that fascinates me is the whole aspect or of the imperial cult in that time in the Roman world.

And so how does this backdrop know understanding what was happening with Caesar and the imperial cult under really help us understand the countercultural nature of, you know, the early Christians and their worship?

Yeah, well, I'll lead by saying that the main theme that runs throughout the book from the very beginning to the very end, from Pentecost to Patmos, but even before time, because I start out before creation, when God created, you know, John 1:1, the word was before creation, the Word was with God, and, and through the word creation came into existence.

I, I begin with the theme that is described in Matthew 25, that God had a kingdom before the foundation of the earth.

Yeah.

So the kingdom of God is eternal.

It happened.

It was in existence before God said, let, let there be light.

Right.

There was an eternal kingdom.

So what my book does is it traces, has an underlying narrative as it goes through the whole book from Matthew to Revelation, the kingdom of God as undergirding theme.

And then when you get to Jesus and the apostles and Paul, you have them proclaiming the gosp of the kingdom.

And then all the way at the very end, when you get to the book of Revelation, you have the consummation of that kingdom coming in its fullness on earth.

Well, this is important because when the Christians began to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom, they were saying that Jesus of Nazareth was this Lord's true Lord and king.

And that was a politically dangerous claim because it directly challenged Caesar's authority.

Caesar was Lord and king.

They called him Lord Caesar.

And so when the Christians were saying that Jesus is Lord, they were saying Caesar is not.

And that was a subversive statement.

They were also saying that Kratos, the God of power, was not Lord.

They were also saying that Plutos, the God of wealth, was not Lord.

They were also saying that Aphrodite, the God of lust, was not Lord.

Instead, Jesus of Nazareth is this world's true Lord and king.

And that proclamation was a poke in the eye to all the pagan gods and the people who worshiped them.

And for this reason, riots broke out virtually everywhere.

Paul of Tarsus proclaimed the Gospel of the kingdom.

And by the way, Glenn, as I'm sure you know, those three gods, Kratos, Plutos, Aphrodite, power, wealth, and lust, are still with us today.

And those who truly surrender to Jesus as Lord and announce him as this world's true king, this world's true king receive opposition as well, both from the pagan world and.

And the religious world.

Just like Jesus received opposition from the religious world and the pagan world, and the early Christians received opposition from the pagan world and the religious world.

The same drama plays out today when Jesus Christ is received as Lord, this world's true Lord surrendered as such, and that message is proclaimed.

Wow.

That's powerful, Frank.

Thank you.

Wow.

Okay.

And now you've got me that.

I want to take a definite deep dive into that, because understanding that today and what you said about the lordship of Jesus Christ is really critical in how we live and how we overcome.

That's.

That's powerful.

Okay, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about archeology in the Bible.

So how has recent archaeological evidence enhanced or confirmed even our understanding of the New Testament narrative?

Yeah, well, archaeological discoveries are fascinating, and they have repeatedly confirmed Luke's accuracy as a historian.

Luke, of course, wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts.

For instance, the discovery of the Gallio inscription at Delphi helps us date Paul's ministry in Corinth and that everything Luke said about it is true, is historically accurate.

There's a lot of this sort of thing embedded in the book.

And I consulted two of the most esteemed Christian archaeologists in the world when I was researching for this book, when writing it, and I cite them in different places.

So people who are really interested in the archaeological aspect, there's a lot of that woven into the story.

Okay.

Yeah.

I remember years ago in seminary reading a book about the historicity of the Gospel of Luke.

That was a long time ago.

Not sure if it was I, Howard Marshall or not, but that was.

That was very helpful.

So that's powerful.

And, yeah, we have a faith that is.

Even the things in archaeological discoveries are attesting to the veracity of it.

So that's, that's awesome.

Hey, this question right now is really interesting because I live in a place, you know, I'm very close to Asia in Australia.

And we see this rampant, particularly in parts of Asia with the honor shame culture.

And as, as believers, you know, for us to, we, we hear frequently people saying, well, there's no, there's no shame when you come to Jesus.

But the Mediterranean honor shame worldview shaped much of ancient society, didn't it?

And how did this influence Jesus interactions with people and even Paul's approach to ministry?

Yeah, there's, there's a lot of this in the New Testament.

And when we get behind the eyes of first century people, we understand a lot of things in the New Testament that we would ordinarily miss.

So Jesus will start with him.

He consistently challenged the honor shame system while he was working within it.

So when he ate with the tax collectors and the sinners, he was deliberately reversing the, the normal honor codes.

Deliberately.

When he had that conversation with a Samaritan woman, well, that was a shameful thing for a, A, he was talking to a woman privately, which you did not do as a, as a Jewish person.

Right.

Secondly, she was a Samaritan.

You did not talk to a Samaritan if you were a Jewish man.

You went out of your way to avoid Samaria if you were traveling.

And it goes right to it intentionally.

Right.

And the very fact that he's doing this, the disciples were marveling when they found him talking to this woman alone.

Wow.

Then he, then he goes to their city and he eats their food and uses their utensils.

That's another.

No, no.

And this is what gave the Pharisees and the Sadducees apoplexy, because he was just ripping to shreds the Jewish standards, the human traditions that they had erected and the honor shame system that was so woven into the culture.

The same thing happens when you read the New Testament carefully.

And I bring a lot of this out in the book.

But, you know, there were so many radical statements about God's kingdom breaking into the world in unexpected ways.

And Paul, Paul himself often challenged the honor shame system in, in the culture.

The idea of the holy kiss, we read that numerous times in the epistles, you know, greet one another with a holy kiss.

Well, that was a radical thing because in the first century, you only would show affection to people who are of the same status as you were.

So if you were a rich person, you would never kiss a person who was, you know, part of the poor class or in poverty.

Well, in the first century, you had well to do people in the churches.

You had Jews in the churches, you had Gentiles in the churches who historically hated each other with a passion.

And you, you had poor people in the first century churches.

You had slaves in the first century churches, you had slave owners in the first century churches.

And here they are living together as family, calling each other brother and sister and giving one another a holy kiss, regardless of their status in society.

All right, so all of this was radical.

All of it was subversive.

And this is why the Christians were not understood.

They were maligned, they were misunderstood.

And, and really, they were attacked unjustly on the basis of some of the things they did.

For example, the fact that they called each other brother and sister.

It's very common.

Got them tagged with being incestuous.

They were committing.

They were committing incest.

That's what the pagan neighbors were saying.

The fact that they said that the.

The bread and the wine as they commemorated the Lord's Supper, was the actual body and bread of the actual body and blood of Jesus.

They said they were cannibals.

That was the rumor that was going around.

Right.

So.

So a lot of this is.

Is in the book.

I bring it out and, and your readers, they'll.

They'll read things in the New Testament that they've read a hundred times, and they'll say, oh, my goodness, I never saw that before.

I never understood that before.

Now that takes on a whole new meaning.

And that's what it did for me as I was researching for this book.

And so it's exciting when.

When God's people get new insight into the.

The New Testament letters.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Wow.

Okay, so let's talk about the ancient letter writing conventions to help us better understand the structure and content, specifically of Paul's epistles.

Can you unpack that?

Yeah, yeah, briefly.

Paul used standard letter writing conventions, but he adapted them for his own purposes.

So, for example, if you go through his letters, you will find that in virtually all of them, he has a Thanksgiving section in the beginning.

Okay.

Where he.

He thanks God for them.

He greets them in the Lord.

That's a conventional pattern of first century writing, but he would expand it to include specific spiritual content and theological content.

Well, what's interesting is that when you get to the book of Galatians, Paul is really upset.

I mean, he wrote that letter in white heat.

Okay.

And he skips the Thanksgiving section.

He doesn't.

He doesn't do his normal greeting and Thanksgiving, he goes right to the juggler about what's bothering him.

Right.

And it's a, it's, it's a corrective letter.

So that gives you a little bit of insight into, hey, where's the Thanksgiving section, Paul?

Well, I'm upset.

So that's an example.

But yeah, he pretty much followed the conventions, but he adapted them to his own spiritual purposes.

Okay, that's interesting.

Yeah.

Right.

Let's talk about the 1st century Jewish expectations of the coming of Messiah, what Messiah would be like, you know, and how that differs from what many Christians today assume.

Yes.

So first century Jewish people were expecting a spiritual savior.

Actually, they were not expecting a spiritual savior.

Let me correct it.

They were not expecting a spiritual savior who would die for their sin radar at all.

They were expecting a savior who would be a military leader who would overthrow Rome and restore Israel's independence.

And this is very clear from the couple on the road to Emmaus.

Remember, Jesus was talking to them.

They said, we put all of our hopes in the Jesus basket.

We thought he was the one who would redeem Israel.

Simeon and Anna, in the very beginning of Luke, they talk about the restoration of Israel.

And even when Jesus was in his resurrected state and he met with his disciples in the very beginning of Acts, chapter one, is this going to be the time when you're going to restore Israel?

So that was still on their minds even after the resurrection.

And this helps us understand why his ministry was so controversial.

Controversial.

And why his disciples struggled with his predictions about his death.

Every time he would talk about the Son of Man is going to die and he will be raised again the third day, it just did not compute.

Right.

Their, their, their hard wiring in their brain couldn't handle it, so they didn't understand it.

And when he was crucified, they had all checked out.

You know, Peter goes back to fishing.

The other disciples follow him doing it.

They go back to their old occupation.

They don't know what to do with themselves, even though they saw him, still didn't compute.

And so what ended up happening was when he died, I mean, it was very hard for them to get over the fact that cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.

Right.

That was in the fabric of the law of Moses.

You know, if you were put to death, especially by the pagans, you were cursed by God.

And so what Paul does in his letters.

And eventually the Spirit began to teach the 12.

And, and when Jesus met with them and before he ascended, he was there.

He was with them for 40 days.

He explained that all the promises of the prophets were fulfilled, but not in the way they expected, not in the way they thought, and Israel would be restored, but not in the way they envisioned.

And so when Paul talks about the death of Jesus, boy, he.

He brings in the entire cosmos.

He talks about what the death of Jesus did and that it destroyed the power of sin.

It destroyed Satan's authority, it destroyed the world system that Satan runs.

I mean, it totally liberated the universe.

It wasn't just forgiveness of the sins of human beings.

That was a part of it.

It was much bigger, much greater.

And so that's one of the things that you find out when you read the story chronologically with all the details filled in.

Their expectations were so very different.

And Jesus came in a way that.

Well, frankly, he came in a way that made it easy for people to reject him because he did not come in the way that they expected.

And I think there's a lesson for us today, Glenn, that Jesus will often come to us in a way that makes it easy for us to reject Him.

Maybe he'll come to us through a person who is of a totally different theological mindset and has a totally different doctrinal understanding.

Right.

But he'll come to us through such people.

Right.

So if you're a charismatic, Jesus may come to you and may even speak to you through a person that doesn't even believe in the gifts of the Spirit and vice versa.

If you're someone who is a cessationist and you believe that, you know the Bible is the Holy Spirit, as God doesn't do miracles anymore, Jesus may come to you through a charismatic or a Pentecostal and speak to you through them.

Jesus comes to us in ways that make it easy for us to reject him.

Because our expectations very often and our understandings very often make Jesus too small and our Christ is much larger, and that's a running narrative all throughout the New Testament story, is that people made Christ their understanding of Christ too small.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I think it was the Puritans that used to say that our bias is bribe our discernment.

And yeah, that's, that's true.

To this day, you still see that happening.

And we miss out on what the Lord wants to do and what he's saying often, or he speaks to us, as you said, from a person or different.

Different set of circumstances than what we would have anticipated.

So that's powerful.

Let's talk about the inspiration of you writing this book.

What compelled you to write a book that weaves together the gospels, Acts, and the epistles chronologically, while obviously, you know, bringing out the deep cultural and historical backgrounds in all of this.

Well, Glenn, the simple answer is, I write the book that I want to read, but that doesn't exist.

And so, as a young Christian, I wanted to really understand God's Word.

I was one of these young believers that was on fire for Christ.

I wanted to know everything about Him.

I wanted to know him deeply.

I wanted to understand His Word.

And so I was a hungry and thirsty Christian.

And I wanted to know where in the drama of the Book of Acts.

I was in my teens at the time.

And I remember I came to the Lord fully when I was 16.

And so I was 17, 18.

I remember reading the Book of Acts, and I was asking myself, where in this narrative did Paul write his letters?

Where did James write his letter?

Where did Peter write his letter?

And I wasn't aware that the letters are not arranged chronologically.

I didn't know that.

But I wanted to know, in the narrative of Acts, right, where did Paul write Galatians, for example?

Where did he write Thessalonians, et cetera?

And so I began to study this out, and as I did, it opened up an entire new universe for me.

And I realized that I had been misunderstanding and misinterpreting much of the New Testament.

And I also realized that countless other Christians had as well, including pastors and teachers, because we know chapters and verses.

Okay.

Yes, they're great.

They're great for locating a text.

Right.

If I want to share a.

A text of a.

A letter that Paul wrote with you, I can say, you know, Romans 8, verse 5, for example.

But they're horrible for understanding the story and for understanding what was really happening.

And so we're conditioned to read the New Testament through fragmented sentences.

And then we're also taught.

And teachers, give us this example.

Bible teachers, pastors, preachers, et cetera, were taught to look at the New Testament topically.

And so we take verses out of some letters or some books of the Bible, and then we paste them together with others, and then we build doctrines and theologies.

Well, the problem with that is when we lift a verse out of its context, we lose its full meaning.

And this is why, you know, charismatic systematic theology, Reform systematic theology, Arminian systematic theology, Lutheran systematic theology, Baptist systematic theology, they all differ from one another and they contradict one another, even though they're based on the same Bible.

It's because we don't know the story, the narrative.

When you see the story in the narrative historically and chronologically, it hems you in to an accurate understanding of the word of God.

And so this is what it did for me.

It revolutionized my understanding of the New Testament, of God's Word.

And as such, the book, I had it reviewed before I published it by many, many different scholars, some of the best in the world.

Craig Keener being one of the major ones who wrote the forward, as I said earlier.

But the book has been endorsed by 20 esteemed scholars and all of them high voltage scholars.

And a number of them have said no other book exists like it.

And that's why I wrote it.

It's a key that unlocks the New Testament.

But here's the thing.

Even though there's scholarship embedded in it, it's very easy to read.

You know, I have teens reading the book, teenagers now, Christians, saying they're loving it.

It's opening up the Bible to them.

I'm, I'm having, I'm receiving emails from women in their 70s that only read fiction.

Okay.

And they're reading the book and they're loving it.

And it's it.

One person said it was jaw dropping, right?

So I wrote it in a way that anybody can understand it, whether a teenager, whether an elderly person, whether they're a scholar, a pastor, a Bible study leader, or just some, any Christian that wants to understand God's word.

And so the result of this work, as you see the first century church, chronologically, as it's told in the New Testament, but put together sequentially, when you see the entire narrative unfold before your eyes, the result is that it opens up all the books of the New Testament with stunning clarity.

And it also electrifies Christians by giving them a new New Testament, if I can use that phrase.

And as I said before, God's.

But one of God's chief means for transforming us, or in transforming us is, is through His Word, his written word.

The written word points to the living word.

But it's not going to transform us, Glenn, if we don't understand it or we misinterpret it, or we misapply it.

And so that's exactly why I wrote the book that was the inspiration behind it.

Yeah, brilliant.

Thank you.

So my guest is Frank Viola, and we're talking about his book, the Untold Story of the New Testament Church, the Revised and expanded version.

And we want to encourage everyone to check out that book, Frank, if they go to theuntoldstory.net the untold story.net what will they find there on that page?

Yes, the untoldstory.net they need to wait for it to redirect.

All right.

And for some reason it doesn't redirect.

Use a different browser.

It'll redirect.

Eventually.

They will see all 20 endorsements by those esteemed scholars.

They will get a free 44 page sampler of the book so they can test drive it.

They'll see the best places to order it.

For most people, it's Amazon in the United States, it's Amazon in Australia, it's Amazon.

Or anywhere you're listening that has an Amazon.

That's really the best, best place.

It will also have many interviews that I've done on the book where I address questions that are different than the ones you've asked.

You've asked excellent questions.

I address other questions that people have had about the content.

And so if they go there, they will also see in the menu because that'll take you to my website, theuntoldstory.net you'll also see the two free podcasts.

If you listen to podcasts, I have a Thursday unfiltered email list.

My YouTube channel is on that site also.

And they can also find me on Substack.

Substack is actually how you and I met.

Glenn.

Substack.

Yeah, I'm on there also.

Yes.

Great content too, by the way.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, that's, that's awesome.

Well, hey, frankviola.orguts and that's what theuntoldstory.net redirects to that URL.

Yes.

And yeah, check it out everybody.

The book is amazing.

There's nothing like it.

It will deeply impact your life as you read the New Testament in the context of how it actually unfolded the events of that time.

Grab a copy of the book on Amazon.

And Frank, thank you so much for being my guest and looking forward to reading the book myself.

I've started it, but I'm going to be completing it now.

I'm deeply inspired by this interview.

Thanks.

Praise the Lord.

Thank you so much.

Bless you.

Hey everyone, Glenn Blakeney here.

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