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The Four Gospels, One Story
Where Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John agree and disagree on order — and what that tells us.
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About & methodology
Prepared by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D.

This tool lays the four Gospels side by side so you can see, at a glance, how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each ordered the story of Jesus — and where they diverge. Most scholars treat Mark as the earliest Gospel and the shared backbone Matthew and Luke built on; Q refers to sayings material Matthew and Luke share but Mark and John don't have.

Click any pericope (a self-contained episode or teaching unit) to see everywhere it appears across the four accounts, marked with pins and amber lines. Step through a single Gospel's full sequence with the gospel pills and Prev/Next controls, or collapse the detail panels to see just the shape of each Gospel's structure.

Pericope divisions and ordering follow standard synopses used in Gospels scholarship. This is a study aid, not a substitute for the biblical text itself.

Taylor Halverson is a scholar of scripture and a teacher of learners — an entrepreneurship professor in the BYU Marriott School of Business who spends his working life helping people find and act on the best ideas and tools available to them.

He is the author and editor of more than fifty books and nearly a thousand articles and blog posts, and a builder of scripture study resources: the ScripturePlus app with Scripture Central, whose scripture YouTube channel he co-hosted to more than fifty million views, and BYU's Virtual Scripture Group, whose team spent more than five years reconstructing New Testament Jerusalem in three dimensions. This map belongs to that same body of work — tools made so that ordinary readers can see what specialists see.

He leads tours to Israel and the Middle East, China, India, Central America, Europe, and the national parks of the American West, where he unfolds how geology, geography, civilization, and scriptural texts created our beautiful present day.

Academic training
Ph.D.
Judaism & Christianity in Antiquity — Indiana University
Ph.D.
Instructional Systems Technology — Indiana University
M.A.
Biblical Studies — Yale University
B.A.
Ancient Near Eastern Studies — Brigham Young University

Two doctorates in two separate fields — the ancient world, and the design of learning. Both of them are in this tool.

Elsewhere
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# Sign Discourse Festival
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7 signs is a fairly standard scholarly count (though "walking on water" as a sign is disputed). There's no equivalent fixed count of "discourses" the way Matthew has five — some discourses simply cover more than one sign (Bethesda/Official's Son share one; Feeding/Walking share another), and Tabernacles has teaching with no sign attached.
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Glossary
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Before you read on — where do you think Luke moves the Nazareth story?
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