The Bible is the gift of God and the writers of the individual books testify that they received a revelation from God.
“The Spirit of the LORD spake by me, and His Word was in my tongue” (2 Samuel 23:1); “I have put My Words in thy mouth” (Jeremiah 1:9); “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16); “Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). The Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 4 describes the Holy Scriptures as “every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”
The Books of the Old Testament were written in Hebrew on rolls prepared from the skins of animals, and scrupulous care was taken to ensure that copies were accurate. These books were compiled over a period of nearly one thousand years and were completed about 400 years before the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ at Bethlehem.
Nearly 300 years before that event the Hebrew books appeared in a Greek translation which became known as the Version of the Seventy (Septuagint) because the translation was believed to be the work of seventy learned Jews of Alexandria. This version was in common use in the days of the Apostles and is often quoted in the New Testament. Inspiration And Authority The New Testament Books were written in Greek and were added at intervals during the hundred years following the Saviour’s birth.
Like the Old Testament Books they were recognized as “Holy Scripture” and acknowledged to be divinely inspired. Peter includes the epistles of Paul with “the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16), and Paul declares that his teaching was delivered “not in words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth” (1 Corinthians 2:13).
From the last quarter of the first century to the end of the second there is a widening stream of testimony to the unique authority of the New Testament Scriptures. These testimonies may be gathered from the surviving writings of early Christian teachers in the Greek and Latin churches of Africa, Palestine, Syria, Rome and France. Here we may allow Irenaeus of Lyons (AD 180) to speak for them all–“The Scriptures are perfect, inasmuch as they were uttered by the Word of God and His Spirit”–and he proceeds to use the Old and New Testaments as “Scripture” without distinction