The Bible [antikvár]

ntroduction What's Unique About the Bible? It's a collection of sixty-six individual books written by many different persons over a span of nearly 1,500 years. Yet it is one book, sharing one life-changing message. The Bible claims that its message is from God himself. More than 2,600 times the writers of the Bible claim to speak or write God's words—not their own. How Did We Get the Bible? Books of the Bible were written by different individuals and reflect their individual styles and circumstances. Yet the words they penned accurately convey the message God intended to communicate. The first thirty-nine books of the Bible are called the Old Testament. They were mostly written in Hebrew, although parts of Daniel and Ezra were written in Aramaic, a related language. The Jewish people regarded these books as sacred, and they meticulously copied them word for word, widi every care taken to avoid transcription errors. About a hundred years before Christ, the Old Testament was translated into Greek. The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were written in Greek between about AD 40 and AD 95, and they were quickly recognized by believers as sacred. A number of individuals authored these books. Chapter and verse divisions were added much later to make it easier to find and remember the location of specific teachings. Most modern English translations of the Bible take great care to accurately express in our language the meaning of the Hebrew and Greek so we too can understand God's message. But Can We Really Trust the Bible? The answer to that question is yes. No other source claiming to provide knowledge about God was written by so many different authors over so many centuries—and yet conveys a totally consistent message. No other religious or secular source contains the hundreds of predictions about the fiiture provided in the Bible. And in no other source has prediction after prediction been exactiy fulfilled, often hundreds of years after they were made. The only way this is possible is that God, who alone can declare "the end from the beginning" (Isaiah 46:10 nkjv), revealed the fiiture.