A representative of the Great Books of the Western World came to my house recruiting salesmen for their series. He spread out the chart of the Great Books of the Western World series. He spent five minutes talking to us about the Great Books of the Western World series, and we spent an hour and a half talking to him about the Greatest Book.

I challenged him to take just ten of the authors, all from one walk of life, one generation, one place, one time, one mood, one continent one language, and just one controversial subject (the Bible speaks on hundreds with harmony and agreement).

Then I asked him: "Would they [the authors] agree?" He paused and then replied, "No!" "What would you have?" I retorted. Immediately he said, "A conglomeration."

Two days later he committed his life to Christ (the theme of the Bible).

Why all this? Very simple! Any person sincerely seeking truth would at least consider a book with the following unique qualifications. Here is a book:

1. Written over a 1,500-year span.

2. Written over forty generations.

3. Written by more than forty authors from every walk of life, including kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen, and scholars. Among its authors were Moses, a political leader trained in the universities of Egypt; Peter, a fisherman; Joshua, a military general; Nehemiah, a cupbearer; Daniel, a prime minister; Luke, a doctor; Matthew, a tax collector; Paul, a rabbi.

4. Written on three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe

5. Written in three languages: Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament Aramaic, the "common language" of the Near East until the time of Alexander the Great (6th-4th century B.C.); Greek, the language of the New Testament.

6. Treating hundreds of controversial subjects with harmony and continuity from Genesis to Revelation. (A controversial subject is one that would create opposing opinions when mentioned or discussed.) There is one unfolding story: "God's redemption of man."

Geisler and Nix put it this way: "The 'Paradise Lost' of the Genesis becomes the 'Paradise Regained' of Revelation. Whereas the gate to the tree of life is closed in Genesis, it is opened forevermore in Revelation."

F. F. Bruce concludes: "The Bible, at first sight appears to be a collection of literature-mainly Jewish. If we inquire into the circumstances under which the various biblical documents were written, we find that they were written at intervals over a space of nearly 1400 years. The writers wrote in various lands, from Italy in the west to Mesopotamia and possibly Persia in the east. The writers themselves were a heterogeneous number of people, not only separated from each other by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles, but belonging to the most diverse walks of life. In their ranks we have kings, herdsmen, soldiers, legislators, fishermen, statesmen, courtiers, priests and prophets, a tentmaking rabbi, and a Gentile physician, not to speak of others of whom we know nothing apart from the writings they have left us. The writings themselves belong to a great variety of literary types. They include history, law (civil, criminal, ethical, ritual, sanitary), religious poetry, didactic treatises, lyric poetry, parable and allegory, biography, personal correspondence, personal memoirs and diaries, in addition to the distinctively biblical types of prophecy and apocalyptic.

"For all that, the Bible is not simply an anthology; there is a unity which binds the whole together. An anthology is compiled by an anthologist but no anthologist compiled the Bible." 2

From Evidence that Demands a Verdict, 16-17.