TRY TO IMAGINE, if you can, being a follower of Jesus in the first century. The movement known to some as “The Way” was still quite new, and not everyone understood what it was. Many of the citizens of the Roman Empire had only heard vague and hard-to-believe stories of some strange, itinerant rabbi named Jesus—if they had heard anything at all. There were no television and cable news programs, no Internet feeds, no newspapers or magazines, no social media. What information there was of Jesus traveled by word of mouth, even within the church. Eventually, decades after his death and resurrection, people undertook the task of writing the story down.

Imagine, then, that you’re one of the people who’s considering writing a gospel of your own. Where will you begin? After all, in any story, beginnings matter. So, how does one start to tell the story of Jesus?

Mark’s version is the shortest and most action-packed account. There’s no birth narrative; the first chapter begins with a brief account of the ministry of John the Baptist. By the middle of the chapter, Jesus has been baptized and tested in the wilderness; he’s called his first disciples and performed his first miracle. The narrative moves quickly, with a sense of urgency: “This happened. Then this. Then this. Then immediately, this.” In fact, Mark is quite fond of the word “immediately”: of the over eighty uses of the word in the New Testament, almost half of them are in Mark’s gospel alone.

Matthew begins differently, with a genealogy of Jesus’ ancestors. The genealogy begins and ends with these words:

This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham… there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah. (Matt 1:1, 17, NIV)

In this way, Matthew makes clear what he’s up to. He seems to be writing to a primarily Jewish audience, to whom he declares right up front that Jesus is the Messiah, God’s anointed king from the line of David, a descendant of Abraham.

And John goes further back still, to the beginning of all things, echoing the very first words of Scripture. Genesis 1:1 reads, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” while John 1:1 reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John wants his reader to understand that Jesus was divine, the agent of creation itself.

You can’t start a story any earlier than that.

So, what about Luke? All four gospels mention John the Baptist and his ministry. But only Luke tells the story of his birth, indeed, of the miraculous pregnancy of his mother, Elizabeth. It’s in that context that he then narrates the pregnancy of Mary, Elizabeth’s cousin, and the subsequent birth of Jesus. As in Matthew, the ministry of John the Baptist as an adult begins in chapter 3, after the story of Jesus’ birth, and before Jesus’ baptism and testing in the wilderness.

Why does Luke begin the story of Jesus this way?

As we’ve seen, Luke was writing for a Gentile audience. The four verses that introduce his gospel to Theophilus would have sounded to educated Gentile readers like a well-written, somewhat scholarly lead-in to a historical narrative. Note that Luke hasn’t yet mentioned the name of Jesus, though surely anyone to whom Theophilus gave a copy would know that this was supposed to be his story.

And with that expectation, a reader might be confused by how Luke begins:

In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly. But they were childless because Elizabeth was not able to conceive, and they were both very old. (Luke 1:5-7)

Huh? a reader might wonder. I thought this was supposed to be the story of Jesus. Why are you telling me about some old priest and his childless wife?

But the reader’s curiosity would be piqued. Whenever someone tells a story, we assume that the events narrated are somehow relevant. If we don’t yet know what makes an event important, our brains will hunger for an explanation. What will happen next? What will we find out?

It takes several verses for an angel to appear and promise that Zechariah and Elizabeth will have a son who is to be named John. And a few paragraphs after that, we get another story, parallel to the first: an angel appears this time to Mary, promising that she will also have a son, and his name is to be Jesus. In both cases, the angel not only tells the father-to-be the child’s name, but his significance to the purposes and plan of God.

And there’s more. As New Testament scholar Joel Green has argued, the two stories of the births of John the Baptist and of Jesus both echo a still older story: the tale of Abraham and his childless wife Sarah. There, God promises Abraham—guess what?—that Sarah will have a son, tells him that the boy’s name is to be Isaac, and describes his significance to God’s plan.

This is Luke’s way of anchoring the gospel in the ancient story of Abraham. Indeed, as we’ve seen, the way Luke tells the story sets up the songs of both Mary and Zechariah. Mary, in her song, praises God for “remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors” (Luke 1:54-55). Zechariah, similarly, sings that in Jesus, God has raised up a king, “to show mercy to our ancestors and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham” (vss. 72-73).

To put the matter a little differently: the story of Jesus is not just the tale of a wise, compassionate rabbi, nor a powerful prophet and miracle worker, nor even that of the man born to be King of the Jews. It is all this, but at root, it’s more. In Luke’s hands, the gospel is the continuation of the story of God, a story that goes back to the day of Abraham and the birth of God’s people. That story, furthermore, continues through the book of Acts with the fulfillment of God’s purposes in the birth of the church.

The gospel, in other words, is not just the story of the man Jesus, beginning with his birth. It’s God’s story. And if we’re God’s people, we’re part of the story, too.