Who's who in the Bible

A Jewish man from Nazareth, a village in Galilee, who lived about two thousand years ago under Roman rule. He worked as a carpenter, and at about thirty he began to teach in public. He told stories about a God who goes looking for people who are lost, he healed people others kept away from, and he ate with people the respectable avoided. He asked ordinary working people, fishermen among them, to follow him. After a few years of this he was arrested in Jerusalem, handed over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and executed on a cross. His followers said that on the third day his tomb was empty and that they saw him alive, and they kept saying it even when it cost them their lives. Christians believe he is the Son of God: God living a human life, dying, and rising, for everyone. Everything else on this site is about him.

Led a group of enslaved people out of Egypt and across a desert for forty years, though he never got to enter the land they were going to. God spoke to him directly, more than to anyone else in the Old Testament, and he still argued back: when God first called him, he objected repeatedly, right up to asking God to send someone else instead. He is the reason Judaism and Christianity both call the first five books of the Bible "the Law."

Left his home country at seventy-five because God told him to, with no map and no explanation of where he was going. God promised he would become the ancestor of a great nation; he and his wife Sarah didn't have their first child until Abraham was one hundred. What makes him matter here specifically: the Bible says he believed God, and that belief itself, not anything he did, was counted as righteousness. Paul builds his entire argument for justification by faith in Romans and Galatians on that one line about Abraham, centuries later. It is the Old Testament root of the Reformation's "faith alone."

Abraham's wife. When she overheard God tell Abraham she'd have a son in her old age, she laughed, out loud, to herself, because it sounded impossible. She wasn't punished for laughing; the son was named Isaac, which means "he laughs." Her story is usually told as background to Abraham's. It is worth reading as its own story about waiting for something for decades after giving up on it.

A shepherd boy who became king of Israel. Killed Goliath with a sling before he ever held a sword. Wrote or inspired many of the Psalms, including the ones read most at Vespers and Compline. Also committed adultery, arranged a man's death to cover it up, and was confronted about it directly by a prophet named Nathan. His response afterward, Psalm 51 in most translations, became the model penitential psalm behind confession and absolution as Lutherans still practice it. The Bible does not edit any of this out of his story, which is part of why Lutherans read him as an example of someone both deeply flawed and genuinely loved by God.

A prophet who spoke for God in Jerusalem for roughly forty years, mostly warning of coming disaster and then, later, promising restoration after it. More of his writing is read aloud in church than almost any other Old Testament book, especially in Advent. Some of his language, about a child to be born, a suffering servant, a highway through the wilderness, was read by the New Testament's own writers as pointing forward to Jesus. That reading is a Christian tradition going back to the Gospels themselves, not a claim about what Isaiah's own audience would have understood him to mean at the time. Both things are true at once: Isaiah spoke first to people living through the actual collapse and exile of their nation, and Christians have long read his words as opening onto something further.

A prophet in Israel about eight and a half centuries before Jesus. He stood up to King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who had led the country into worshipping the god Baal. At his lowest point he ran into the desert and asked God to let him die; God sent him food, let him sleep, and then spoke to him, not in a wind, an earthquake or a fire, but in a quiet voice. The Old Testament says he was taken up into heaven in a whirlwind instead of dying, and a prophet later promised that Elijah would come back before the day of the Lord. That is why the Gospels connect him with John the Baptist, and why he appears with Moses beside Jesus on the mountain of the Transfiguration.

A wealthy, genuinely good man who lost his children, his health, and his property in rapid succession, for reasons the book never fully explains to him. Most of the book is Job and three friends arguing about why this happened. The friends are confident, articulate, and wrong, and the specific way they are wrong is worth naming plainly: they keep explaining to a suffering man why he is suffering, while he is still suffering. It is, among other things, a warning against doing exactly that to someone in grief or illness. God eventually speaks to Job directly, but does not answer the question "why." The book's honesty about that is unusual for ancient religious writing.

A teenage girl in a small town who was told by an angel she would have a son who was the Son of God, and said yes. Her response afterward, a song of praise now called the Magnificat, is one of the most politically pointed passages in the New Testament.

Luke 1:52, King James Version (1611).

Lived in the wilderness, ate locusts and wild honey, and told people to change their lives before Jesus ever began teaching publicly. He baptized Jesus, then later, as his own followers started leaving to follow Jesus instead, said this about it:

John 3:30, King James Version (1611).

A fisherman who became Jesus's most prominent follower, then denied even knowing him three times on the night Jesus was arrested, after specifically promising he never would. He was not quietly dropped for this. He went on to become a central leader of the early church. Lutherans often read his story as the clearest New Testament picture of failure followed by restoration, not replacement.

Actively persecuted Christians (he was present at an execution) before a sudden experience on the road to Damascus changed his life completely. He then spent the rest of it writing letters to churches he had founded, many of which are now books of the New Testament. Luther's doctrine of justification by faith is built largely on Paul's letter to the Romans.

A woman from Magdala, a town on the Sea of Galilee. Luke says Jesus had freed her from seven demons, and that she was one of several women who traveled with him and supported his work with their own money. She stayed near the cross when most of his followers had fled. Early on the third day she went to his tomb and found it empty. John tells how she mistook the risen Jesus for the gardener until he said her name, and she became the first person sent to tell the others that he was alive. Later tradition mixed her up with other women in the Gospels; the Gospels themselves never say she was a prostitute.

Two sisters who lived with their brother Lazarus in Bethany, a village just outside Jerusalem, where Jesus often stayed. In one story Martha is busy serving while Mary sits listening to Jesus, and when Martha asks him to send her sister to help, he says Mary has chosen the good part. When Lazarus died, Martha went out to meet Jesus on the road and told him she believed he was the Christ, the Son of God. A few days before his death, Mary poured expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet and wiped them with her hair. This Mary is a different person from Mary Magdalene and from Mary the mother of Jesus.

The brother of Martha and Mary of Bethany, and a friend of Jesus. When he fell ill and died, Jesus arrived four days after the burial. John records that Jesus wept, then stood at the tomb and called, “Lazarus, come out!”, and Lazarus walked out still wrapped in his grave clothes. John says this is what made the religious leaders decide to have Jesus killed. A different Lazarus, a poor man, appears in a story Jesus told about a rich man, in Luke’s Gospel.

One of the twelve apostles, also called the Twin. He was not there the first time the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples, and he said he would not believe unless he saw and touched the wounds. A week later Jesus came back, showed him his hands and his side, and Thomas said, “My Lord and my God!” He is often called Doubting Thomas, but earlier in John’s Gospel he is the one who told the others to go with Jesus toward Jerusalem, even if it meant dying with him.

The Roman governor of Judea from about AD 26 to 36. The Gospels say he questioned Jesus, found no reason to condemn him, and still handed him over to be crucified, to satisfy the crowd and keep order in Jerusalem at Passover. He is one of only three people named in the Apostles’ Creed, with Jesus and Mary: “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” That line ties the story of Jesus to a real time and a real place.