Welcome once more to our newest contributor, prolific Christian author, Marilyn Brown.

Marilyn has written a very comprehensive explanation of what the Bible is – The Truth – and how it is constructed. Because of the length of this most scholarly work, if you wish to read the entire document, please click this link:

https://www.fastmailusercontent.com/jmap/download/uc8f34144/G7e7f510223d96f233c65405ffc9d538298fa3641/THE%20BIBLE.docx?u=c8f34144&access_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpc3MiOiJiY2VhOTgyZWNhNDE5NzY0ZjA3ODEyMWY1NmE2NTc1NTA5MDU1YzkyIiwic3ViIjoieGdoeTJISlRaZHV1bXVaN2U0WjhXQW04eUo5ek84dHlOcEFpV3o0b21RWSIsImlhdCI6MTYxNDgxMjQwMH0.pJ67GYAYcZ-ZRg38B_AqZ3yeP9J6g07l4gbOgFzfZ0s&accept=application%2Fvnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document

and I shall send you a link. Many thanks Marilyn for sharing this significant work.

Gibber! Gibber!

Chugley

THE BIBLE

Compiled by Marilyn Brown (A synopsis).

Several years ago, a friend, who had come out of Buddhism

and embraced Christianity when she was in University, made the comment that “the Bible was full of errors“.  I assured her that that was not the case, but she was quite vehement in her affirmation that it was and, as it was not the time or the place to pursue the argument, I had to let it drop.  As we are commanded in I Peter 3:15 to “always be ready to give a defence to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you,” over the years since I have sought to clarify in my own mind the reasons that we can indeed have faith in God’s love letter to us – His precious Word, our Bible. This is the result of that search.

THE BIBLE’S CREDENTIALS

A few years ago, The New Yorker magazine carried an article entitled, “The Great Book Business and Why Publishers Love the Bible”. The writers made a remarkable claim:

“The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures an even more startling fact – that is, that the Bible is the Best-selling Book of the Year every single year!”

In the United States alone, 50 Bibles are sold every minute, 72,000 are sold every day, and 26,000,000 Bibles are sold every year.  By comparison, the top five best-sellers combined sold 12,000,000 copies!  In fact, the Gideons alone, during their 100 years of ministry, have distributed 1.6 billion copies of God’s Word in more than 190 countries around the globe.

Winston Churchill called the Bible “a masterpiece”; writers as diverse as Milton, Swift and Scott have borrowed liberally from its pages.  In fact, if you were to delete every Biblical reference from the great art and literature of the world, our galleries and libraries would shrink by half.  Artists, poets, writers, sculptors and musicians have filled the world with their works based on Biblical themes.

The Bible was written over a span of 1,500 years by more than 40 human authors from all walks of life.  They were kings and farmers, historians and fishermen, priests, prophets and apostles.  It was written in three languages – Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek; and in four geopolitical regions – the Middle East, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and southern Europe.  And yet the story-line remains consistent throughout!³

THE BIBLE’S IMPACT

Today, the English Bible is everywhere. If you have ever “made light of” something, or shown “the patience of Job”, or noticed “the signs of the times”, or called someone “the salt of the earth” or “full of good works”; if you have ever resolved to “fight the good fight”, “where two or three are gathered”, or found that “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”, and, in spite of “the powers that be”, decided to “eat, drink and be merry”, or been “saved by the skin of your teeth”, or something “gave up the ghost”, then you’ve quoted the English Bible in phrases etched into our daily language for over 400 years!

Believers down through the centuries have testified to the power of the Word of God by being willing to sacrifice their very lives for possessing it.  In the great persecution of the Church, in A.D.303, the Roman Emperor, Diocletian, was determined to destroy the Scriptures.  His command was that any copy of the Bible that was found was to be burned, and thousands of believers and their families were martyred because they would not throw away their copies of the Bible.  This killing and destruction of the Scriptures went on for two years, after which a victory column was erected over the ashes of the Bible with words that claimed that the Bible was now extinct.

However, 20 years later, the Emperor Constantine proclaimed the Bible to be the infallible judge of all truth and it came back to life.

French humanist, Voltaire, who lived between 1694-1778, boastfully proclaimed that, “Fifty years from now, the world will hear no more of the Bible,” yet, in the year of his boast, the British Museum purchased a manuscript of the Greek New Testament from the Russian Government for $50,000, while a first edition of Voltaire’s book was selling for 8 cents a copy!  And, 50 years after the death of Voltaire, bibles were being printed by the Geneva Bible Society in the very home where Voltaire had lived and on his own printing presses!

The French Protestants known as the Huguenots depicted the Bible as an anvil surrounded by three blacksmiths and, beneath the picture, they inscribed this little poem:

“The more they pound and the more they shout,

The more they wear their hammers out!”

History shows that the development of European culture and, from there, all of Western civilization, is based upon the Bible.  The Ten Commandments are the cornerstone of jurisprudence, and the Sermon on the Mount is the foundation of morality and ethics around the world.”³

CONTENTS   Page No.

Introduction……………………………………………………………………..  1

The Bible’s Credentials…………………………………………………………  2

The Bible’s Impact………………………………………………………………  3

The Bible’s Claims………………………………………………………………  4

The Texts…………………………………………………………………………  7

The Canon of the Old Testament………………………………………………..  8

The Canon of the New Testament……………………………………………… 10

The Translations………………………………………………………………… 11

The Messiah in the Scriptures…………………………………………………… 15

The Bible’s Historic Integrity…………………………………………………… 17

The Bible’s Prophetic Integrity…………………………………………………. 18

The Bible’s Supernatural Quality……………………………………………… 19

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………… 24

Marilyn Brown was born in Sydney, Australia.  A darkly unhappy child and passionately enamoured of horses but unable to own one, by the age of 10, she was suffering from ulcerative colitis, a stress-related illness, causing ulceration of the bowel.  She managed to scrape through the Leaving Certificate at the Methodist Ladies’ College, where evolutionary biology and geography were two of her subjects.  At the age of 21, an on-again/off-again relationship drove her to hand her life over to a God whose Word was not particularly relevant as science had proven that its opening chapters were not.  Classical singing lessons produced a passion to succeed in this field and, at the age of 30, she and Max, her life-long friend and husband of 6 years, set off for England to pursue the dream.  But the Lord had other plans.  Instead of continuing her training, the colitis, which had come as acute attacks at times of stress, now became chronic.  It was Max who directed their search for answers to the Lord, buying books on Christian healing for them to read.  It was through these books that the Lord led them both to be baptized with the Holy Spirit which, soon after, prompted Marilyn to question whether David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, showing on U.K. television at the time, were the whole story.  Could the Biblical version have any support at all?  As the Lord always does, once we display an interest in the truth, He will see to it that we find it.  It took very few pages of a thick tome, The Creation/ Evolution Controversy, by D.L. Wysong, for the truth to burst the bubble of the evolutionary lie.  From that moment, the passion of Marilyn’s heart has been to point people to the absolute, unshakeable truth of the Bible.  The worsening level of the colitis would send Max and Marilyn back home to Australia where they began attending Hills C.L.C. (now Hillsong), then only 12 months old.  Here they would be nurtured and encouraged to hold fast to the Word of God and would provide an Australia-wide network of prayer as the illness continued its grim progress over the next 10 years, culminating in a perforated bowel that would place Marilyn on life-support in hospital.  However, after 12 years, without any fanfare, the Lord moved and the colitis began to recede so that now, contrary to all medical expectations of this disease, there have now been 19 years that have been free of colitis.  When finally able to return to C.L.C., the Church that had once been Bible-based and Christ-centred seemed to be shifting away from these foundations, subtly at first and now, of course, in a landslide.  It was time to move on.  Marilyn continues to constantly strive to be equipped to impart Biblical truth to whomever should ask questions.  “…and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you…..” (1 Peter 3:15)