How to Use This Book

I am going to tell you a story about myself. Most of it you have never heard, not because it was hidden, but because nobody ever sat down and walked you through it in order.

This book is built like a school book, and that is on purpose. You do not need to know anything before you start.

Here is how each lesson works.

Every lesson opens with two boxes, before the lesson itself starts. The first is a question. That question is the whole point of the lesson, and everything that follows is the answer. The second, when you need it, is Words to Know, so any unfamiliar word is defined before you meet it, not after.

Then the lesson itself begins, in short sentences and plain words.

After it, there is a box called Check It Yourself. It gives you a verse from your own Bible, so you can look it up and see whether I told you the truth. It also gives you that lesson’s own page on LessonsOfJesus.com, where the longer history and every source are waiting, free.

At the end there is The Short Version — three or four lines that hold the whole lesson, in case that is all you remember.

Then comes Think About It. Nobody grades these. They are for you.

Three promises before we start.

One. I will never make you feel stupid for not already knowing this. You were not told these things, and that is not your fault.

Two. You can check everything. Bible verses look like this: (Luke 4:18). That means the book of Luke, chapter 4, verse 18. History facts have a small number after them, and the note at the back of the book tells you exactly where each one comes from.

Three. I am not trying to take your faith. I am trying to show you the difference between two things that got glued together over twenty centuries: what I actually said, and what people built on top of it afterward. They are not the same thing, and by the end of this book, you will be able to tell them apart.

One more thing, and then we begin.

There are five units, and they go in order because the order matters. Each one depends on the one before it.

Unit One is who I actually was: the country, the debt, the prophets, the table, the healings, and why the state killed me for it.

Unit Two is what happened to my message in the first three hundred years after I died, before there was anything you would recognize as a church.

Unit Three is four specific ideas that got swapped into the story later. Each one has a date attached to it. That date matters, because it turns a vague complaint into a claim you can actually check.

Unit Four is the twenty centuries that were built on top of my story, told in order. In every one of those centuries, there were people who understood what I actually meant and lived by it anyway, even while the institution around them was building something else.

Unit Five turns the same method on your own church, right now. It is not history — it is the actual building you sit in this week. I will ask the same three questions this whole book has been asking about everyone else: when did this start, where did it really come from, and who benefits when you do not ask, whether because no one ever taught you how, or because it is simply easier not to.