The Ancient Path: A Covenant Reading of the Upper Room Discourse

The longest sustained passage of Jesus speaking that we have. The only one where He speaks to His own alone, with the world locked outside the door and the betrayer already gone into the night.

Across five chapters of John's Gospel - from the moment the Lord rose from supper and took the towel, through the morsel handed to Judas, through the long teaching about the vine and the Spirit and the world, through the prayer prayed aloud so that the eleven could hear themselves prayed for - the Upper Room Discourse has carried the church for two thousand years.

The Ancient Path is a covenant-faithful commentary on John 13-17, written in conversation with the fifteen-session series taught by Brother Art Nuernberg at the Evangelical Institute in Greenville, South Carolina. It walks through the discourse in the order John laid it down, not in the order the modern lectionary breaks it up. It assumes a reader with a Bible nearby and the patience for prose that does not rush.

The reading is covenantal. The plan of God did not begin in the upper room. It did not begin when Jesus was born, or when Israel crossed the Red Sea, or even when YHWH cut the everlasting Covenant with Abraham at Mamre. It began before there was a world to begin in. When the Mediator rose from supper and took the towel, He was not improvising. He was keeping a Covenant.

This book offers:

• Twelve chapters of unhurried prose following the discourse from John 13:1 to John 17:26
• A prologue on what the discourse is and why the church keeps returning to it
• A closing word gathering what the discourse asks and what it promises
• Charitable engagement with the Reformed and dispensational traditions, with gentle correction where the discourse asks for it
• A bridge voice for readers from any denominational background - Baptist, non-denominational, Methodist, Presbyterian, or seeker

For the reader who has loved the discourse for a long time, or has just discovered it, or has heard a single verse quoted at a funeral and wondered what the rest of the passage was about - any of these will do.

The hour had come. He loved His own to the end. Now He rose from supper.