Preservation: The Most Carefully Handed-Down Book in History

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The Bible promises its own endurance: "For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven" (Psalm 119:89), and "the word of the Lord endureth for ever" (1 Peter 1:25). The question is whether the text we hold is the text that was written.

The Old Testament

For centuries Jewish scribes copied the Hebrew Scriptures with extraordinary care, counting letters and words to guard against error. Paul acknowledged that the Jews were entrusted with the task: "unto them were committed the oracles of God" (Romans 3:2). Until the twentieth century, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts were from the tenth and eleventh centuries AD (the Aleppo and Leningrad Codices).

Then, in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered near Qumran. They include portions of every Old Testament book except Esther, a thousand years older than the previous manuscripts. The Great Isaiah Scroll, complete and dated to about 125 BC, proved astonishingly close to the later text. Differences were largely matters of spelling and style, not doctrine [6]. The Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and ancient translations provide further cross-checks [7].

The New Testament

No other ancient writing has so rich a manuscript record.

When early translations (Latin, Syriac, Coptic) are added, the total reaches many thousands more, and the early Church Fathers quoted the New Testament so extensively that most of it could be reassembled from their writings alone [8]. The oldest fragment, the Rylands papyrus P52, contains words from John 18 and is usually dated to the first half of the second century.

Variants: An Honest Look

Scholars acknowledge several hundred thousand textual variants across the manuscripts. That sounds alarming until we realize that the great majority are spelling differences, changed word order, or an accidental omission, and that, because we have so many manuscripts, the original reading can be determined with a very high degree of confidence. The great scholars of both conservative and critical persuasions agree that no doctrine of the Christian faith depends on a disputed reading [9].

A few passages are genuinely debated by textual scholars: the ending of Mark (16:9-20), the account of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), and the last clause of 1 John 5:7. Honesty requires acknowledging them, and the KJV carries them according to the Greek manuscripts available to its translators in 1611.

The KJV

The King James Version, first published in 1611, was the work of about 47 scholars working in committees under strict rules of cross-checking. It built on earlier labors, especially the English Bible of William Tyndale, who was strangled and burned in 1536 for translating Scripture into the language of ordinary people. For more than three centuries it shaped English language, literature, and devotion [10].

CHAPTER 5