Charles Thomson was the first secretary of the Continental Congress and the first person to translate the Septuagint into English. After completing his Bible in 1808, Thomson began work on this “Synopsis” of the four Gospels, which combined the separate Gospel accounts into a single text. He had grown dissatisfied with previous attempts to harmonize these books. He hoped his work would help demonstrate the consistency of the Gospels, and therefore their reliability when describing Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. In addition to the harmonized text, Thomson also included explanatory notes and an index that allowed readers to locate where he had arranged each verse of the original books.