The New Testament divides into four groups. The four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, narrate the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. The Acts of the Apostles continues Luke's account into the spread of the movement from Jerusalem to Rome. Twenty-one letters follow, thirteen bearing Paul's name, one anonymous (Hebrews), and seven attributed to James, Peter, John and Jude and known as the catholic or general epistles. Revelation closes the collection with an apocalypse addressed to seven churches in Asia Minor.
Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the synoptic gospels because their material can be set out in parallel columns and read together; they share wording, order and episodes to a degree that requires a literary explanation. John stands apart: different structure, different chronology, a ministry centred on Jerusalem rather than Galilee, and long discourses in place of short sayings and parables.
The whole was written in Koine Greek, the common language of the eastern Mediterranean, though Jesus and his first followers spoke Aramaic and the gospels preserve occasional Aramaic words. The letters are the earliest layer and are not general essays but occasional writing, answers to disputes in specific congregations about food, sex, money, status, worship and the standing of gentile converts, from which doctrine was afterwards drawn. Read in canonical order the collection begins with a life of Jesus; read in order of composition it begins in the middle of an argument in a Greek city about what his death and resurrection meant.