The Scripture Witness
Gospel Grain Publishing · Rev. Brett James
The whole Bible, verse by verse. Every person and every place of Scripture, set down with their kindred, their lands and their years. And every claim carrying its witness and its grade, so that a man can see what is written, what is reasoned, and what is still being sought.
For the man who has to teach it Sunday
This library was not built to be admired. It was built to be preached from. A lesson or a sermon is put together here in three moves.
Take your text
Open the chapter and read it in the King James. Where the study has been written on a verse, it opens underneath it — the observation, what the Greek or the Hebrew word carries, the history standing behind it, and the application. That is your body of teaching, already worked.
Gather every witness
A verse also shows you every other place in the three works that points at it, so a doctrine can be traced across the whole library instead of resting on one passage. Any name or place in the text opens its own entry — kindred, lands, years, and every verse it appears in. That is where your illustrations and your background come from.
Know what you may say
Every claim carries its grade. Written is the Bible saying it plainly; Reasoned is this house drawing a conclusion; Sought is an open question still. So you can stand up knowing exactly which of your three points is thus saith the LORD and which is a sober inference you ought to name as one.
A man ought to know the difference between what he can preach and what he can only suggest. That is the whole reason this library grades itself, and it is the thing no commentary on your shelf will do for you. See all eleven grades →
Coming: a place to keep a passage, its witnesses and your own notes together as a lesson or a sermon outline, and print it. Today the library gives you the material and the grading; you carry it into your own notes.
Three works, one library
Written over years for the pulpit and the class, and joined here so that each one answers the others.
In the Beauty of Holiness
The expository studyThe Scriptures opened verse by verse — observation, interpretation, correlation and application — with the Greek and the Hebrew of the keywords, the history, the Qumran witness, and the author’s own position always given and always graded.
Open the Bible →The Book of Names
The register of personsEvery person of the Bible: their lives, their lines and their kindred, with family trees, the years of the world, and “which is which” charts where two men share a name.
Walk the register →The Book of Places
The register of landsEvery land, city, mountain, river and people of the Bible, region by region, with maps drawn to the text and the sites of the Dead Sea scrolls among them.
Walk the register →
Every claim carries its grade
This is the thing that makes the library what it is. Nothing is asserted without saying on what ground it stands.
Written is what the Bible says. Reasoned is this house’s own inference from it. Sought is searched out and not settled. Elder Witness is 1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Apocrypha of 1611 and the scrolls, read beside the Bible and marked as such, so that a reader whose canon differs can see exactly where a claim leans on them. A reader may weigh every one of them and go another way, and the grade is there so that he can.