Let me begin with a string of disclaimers. I am a Christian, but I shall not write here to promote Christianity. I am a Catholic, but nothing I say here should be taken as Catholic doctrine or as the opinion of my church, for which I have no license to speak. I am neither a theologican nor a biblical scholar. I will boast, however, that I possess a couple of advantages most critics lack: I have actually read and reread the book in question. And I am a writer, the author of some twenty-odd books of my own.

There are insights that result from being of the trade, though separated by the ages. The humblest seaman, given an account of Drake or John Paul Jones, will understand things that have escaped scores of earnest historians. They may not be pivotal or even significant things (at least, not in the opinion of the historians), but they are actual things none the less; and the process of writing has changed far less in the past five thousand years than that of sailing in the past two hundred.

If you carry nothing else away from this humble essay, take this: it is not all that different in the doing. Divine inspiration makes an immense difference, to be sure. Nothing that any modern writer writes can claim the dignity of, say, Samuel. But the authors of the books that make up the Bible were not (as I believe and a multitude of details show) stenographers taking God's dictation, but human beings inspired by Him. And it was as human beings that they wrote, conveying the message of inspiration to their fellows.

This is much nearer the practice of the Greeks than is usually acknowledged, by the way. The Greeks believed that their gods spoke to them through the ‘makings’ of inspired poets, of whom Homer was the first and greatest. The ancient Jews believed that God had spoken through Moses, whom they credited with the authorship of the Pentateuch. The fashion today seems to be to discount both, to say that Moses wrote nothing, and to add that Homer never lived – to contend that the books anciently credited to each were actually written by no one.