How the grading works

The Bible says it. The claim rests on the text itself and not on any inference drawn from it. This is the only grade that carries the authority of Scripture, and it is used sparingly on purpose.

Here it is held that the command governs personal revenge, and does not forbid self-defence, the work of the police, or service in arms

The work has examined a contrary claim and refuses it, answering from the KJV. A denial is a ruling, not a silence — it says what was weighed and why it does not stand.

Laban lived some four centuries before Balaam on the Hebrew count, and the identification is a sermon, not a record

A second witness, independent of the first, agrees. The record has been checked and it holds.

The spelling differs only as Greek renders the Hebrew letter, and the identification is the plain reading of the genealogy

Scripture declares it, with the text standing behind the claim. The declaration is the point, rather than a bare statement of fact.

They were seeing the two comings of the one Messiah from inside Israel before the first had happened, and so counted Him twice

The author's own inference from what is written. The reasoning is shown on the page so a reader can weigh it and refuse it if he will.

Here it is held that sexual unfaithfulness in marriage is the ground the Lord allows, and that the innocent party is free to remarry

The evidence leans one way without settling it. More than a guess, less than a finding.

The campaign of Gog in Ezekiel is likely the same as that of the nineteenth chapter, for both end in the same supper of the fowls

A historian, a tradition or a witness outside the Bible reports it. It is entered as reported and carried no further.

A tomb at Awarta, near Shechem, has been shown since the Middle Ages as his, beside a tomb ascribed to Phinehas

1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Apocrypha of 1611 and the scrolls of Qumran — witnesses older than or standing alongside the New Testament. Enoch and Jubilees are received here as inspired — canonical in the Ethiopian church, and not received in the Western canons; the rest are read beside the Bible as witnesses to it. The grade is not a ranking. It marks plainly where a claim rests on one of these, so that every reader may weigh it by the canon he himself holds.

The Aramaic Enoch is among the oldest manuscripts recovered from the caves, as old as the oldest copies of the Law

The church fathers, the councils, the historians: the record after the apostles. Valuable, and never the measure of the apostles.

The one Latin copy of that book, found at Milan and published in 1861, breaks off before the death of Moses, so the passage is lost

Searched out and not settled. The question is live, the work says so plainly, and it is not to be preached as though it were written.

Whether the redeemed are at last seated in the stations the Watchers forfeited is a thing sought, not written, and is not to be preached as written

The record is thin or silent. Rather than fill the gap with a guess, the work leaves it open and shows the reader where the ground runs out.

The view taken here keeps both readings before the reader without a decree, the conscious waiting of the soul standing as the received reading