Every major religion has its scriptures Hindus have the Vedas, Islam the Koran Buddhism the Theravana and Mahayana amongst others, while Judaism and Christianity share the Old Testament, and Christians also have the New Testament. Are all these scriptures simply records penned by previous generations? The Koran claims to have been dictated by the angel Gabriel. The Bible, on the other hand, claims to be “God-breathed” - a revelation of the mind of God to his people. How are we to examine such claims? Unlike other scriptures, the Bible is a compilation of 66 different books written over a long period of time, by a great many authors. The most striking thing about the Bible is the consistency of its message across the various books. When Jesus came, he “opened the disciples’ minds to understand the scriptures”. There are references to Jesus’ life and work in every one of the books of the Old Testament, while the New Testament, written towards the end of the first century AD contains both a record of Jesus’ own teachings and the writings of his immediate successors, the apostles, based on those teachings. Jesus once said: “If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” Suppose you came across the torn-off spine of a telephone directory. You could read people’s names, but the rest of the information was missing. Then somebody told you that the missing pages had been found and you can put them back together again. That’s a bit like what happens when you take the Bible’s pages and put them together with what you already know of the way the world works. The Bible is not a rule book, but a relationship manual! It is only as we take Jesus’ words seriously that we will discover that truth for ourselves.