Gal. 1:11-12 ... "I would have you know ... that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ."
For the past couple of centuries the Bible has been under attack by people who consider themselves to be "enlightened." The traditional view is that God selected men to inscribe His word with pen and ink and then required them to put down exactly what He wants us to know. These documents were written during the period from perhaps 1500 BC to about 100 AD. They were at first mostly separate, but as the centuries passed, they were gradually assembled into a single body. By about 180 BC the Old Testament scrolls (books to us) had assumed their present unity. We count them as 39 books, but by joining certain ones together the ancient Jews counted them as 22. The New Testament books had been collected and united as a single volume by about 360 AD, and perhaps much earlier. Speaking of the formation of the Old Testament, the apostle Peter wrote, "No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" (II Pet. 1:21). The apostle Paul in II Tim. 3:16 proclaimed that "All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness."
Beginning some two hundred or more years ago, however, various scholars began to dispute the claims of Peter and Paul that the Bible is inspired of God. They advanced arguments that the Bible is really just another book produced by men, in many cases not even the men whose names are attached to the various books that compose the Bible. For example, rather than being written by the prophet Daniel in the sixth century BC, they claimed it was actually written in the second century BC by nationalistic Maccabbean Jews who incorporated myths or even allegorized factual events. These liberal scholars claim that much material in the Psalms was borrowed from the literature of the Egyptians, Syrians, or Phoenicians. They declare that in the New Testament, Christians of the two generations following the apostles wrote the books that bear the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and other leaders in the church of the first century. They argue that most of the sayings of Jesus and His miracles were invented to give stature to the man whose name their religion carried. Although they attribute a few epistles to Paul, most say they were written by a later Christian who used his name.
The Letter to the Galatians, however, is generally conceded by even liberal scholars to be a genuine document written by Paul. And in this very letter that apostle emphasizes that the doctrine he preached was not of human origin. He assures his readers that it came to him only by revelation from God. And in II Tim. 3:16 he firmly states that "all Scripture is inspired by God." If the liberal theologians are correct, then Paul was either misguided, or he was deliberately lying to deceive. If Paul was a man of integrity and intellect, which all evidence serves to indicate, then the liberal theologians are wrong. Paul knew whether he received the gospel by revelation; modern theologians do not. Saul of Tarsus the persecutor would not have become Paul the apostle had not God intervened in his life. The only reason this writer can see why people would discredit Paul, his writings, and the rest of the Bible is to free themselves from the responsibility to submit their lives to the teaching contained therein. As Jesus said in Jno. 3:20, "Everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed."
