man and the way by which we can experience the reality of God’s presence and power in our lives. The Old and New Testaments are like the two halves of a sentence: both are necessary before we can grasp the whole meaning. We can begin to clear away some major misconceptions about the Bible by listing some fundamental facts that most of its critics (and some of its supporters!) have never grasped. Firstly, in Western versions of the Bible the sixty-six documents (I will call them ‘books’ from now on)