Most of us inherited our understanding of the Bible from someone else. This tool exists for the people who started wondering — quietly, honestly — whether there might be more to see.
For a long time, like most people who grew up in or around church, I read the Bible through a particular lens without realising it was a lens at all. The translations I used, the preachers I heard, the theological frameworks I inherited — they all shaped what I saw in the text. And because everyone around me saw the same thing, it felt like the text itself.
It wasn't until I started researching my own books — really digging into the original Greek, reading what first-century writers actually meant by the words they used — that I began to see the gap. The gap between what the text says, and what centuries of translation and tradition have taught us it says.
That gap is sometimes small. Sometimes it's enormous. And in almost every case, it's invisible to someone reading only in English.
The Bible wasn't written in the language of your tradition. It was written in the language of fishermen, tax collectors, and occupied people — and the words they used meant something specific, in a specific world.
This is the conviction at the centre of everything FirstCenturyLens does: you should be able to see what the text actually says — not just what your tradition says it says.
That's not an attack on tradition. Every theological tradition — evangelical, universalist, Catholic, progressive — contains serious, thoughtful people who have wrestled with these texts in good faith. But every tradition also has blind spots. Every tradition has inherited readings it doesn't always examine. And most ordinary readers — people in the pew, people who've left the pew, people who've never been near a pew — are never given the tools to look underneath.
FirstCenturyLens is for those people. Not academics. Not theologians. Just people who are curious enough to ask: what did it actually say?
FirstCenturyLens grew directly out of the research I did while writing my books. Again and again I'd land on a verse — Matthew 25:46, Romans 5:12, 1 Corinthians 6:9 — and find that the English translation was carrying far more interpretive weight than most readers realised. The Greek was genuinely ambiguous. Or it pointed somewhere different to where the translation pointed. Or the key term had a rich non-biblical history that completely changed the conversation.
I found myself wishing there was a single place where someone could look up any of those verses and see — clearly, fairly, without an agenda — what the Greek actually offered and what the different traditions made of it.
There wasn't. So I built one.
The goal was never to push a particular theological conclusion. It was to give people the information they need to think for themselves. FirstCenturyLens shows you what four different theological traditions make of each verse, what the key Greek words meant in their original context, how those words were used by writers outside the Bible, and — crucially — what the text does not say, however confidently your tradition may have said it.
One of the things I care most about is the kind of reader who no longer fits neatly inside a single tradition. Maybe you grew up evangelical and the cracks have started to show. Maybe you walked away from church years ago but never fully walked away from the questions. Maybe you've always believed something but never been given language for it that didn't come pre-loaded with someone else's assumptions.
Those readers are exactly who this is for.
Not because I want to talk you out of your tradition, or into mine. But because looking broadly — sitting with the full range of what the text actually offers — is almost always more honest than sitting inside a single inherited reading and calling it the only possible one.
The New Testament is a complex, layered, occasionally contradictory, endlessly surprising set of documents written across decades by people with different perspectives and purposes. It deserves better than being flattened into a single system. And the people reading it deserve the same.
That's why this tool exists.
— John Faulkner