The Preservation of Scripture Through the Centuries

On a cold day some six hundred years before Christ, a king of Judah sat before a fire in his winter apartment while a servant read to him from a scroll. The scroll contained the words God had given to the prophet Jeremiah. The king did not like what he heard. So as each few columns were read, he took a small knife, cut that portion from the scroll, and threw it into the fire, until the whole roll was consumed. It was a deliberate, unhurried act: not a fit of rage, but a policy. He would destroy the Word of God, and there would be an end of it.

There was not an end of it. God simply told Jeremiah to take another roll and write the same words again — and many similar words were added besides. The king got a longer book than the one he burned. He himself is remembered chiefly as the man who tried to burn it, and the words he cut up with his penknife are still being read this morning in a hundred languages.

That small scene at a winter fire is the whole history of this Book in miniature. This article is about what happened afterwards: about the promise God made concerning His own words, and about what became of everyone who set out to see that promise broken.

1. The promise itself

Preservation is not a claim invented later by the friends of the Bible. It is a promise made inside the Bible, repeatedly, and made in the strongest terms available in human language.

"For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven." (Psalm 119:89)

Consider where the Word is said to be settled. Not in a library, which can burn. Not in a monastery, which can be sacked. Not in the memory of a nation, which can be scattered. It is settled in heaven — beyond the reach of the knife, the torch, the decree, and the censor. Whatever men do to the copies, the original stands where no man can climb.

The prophet Isaiah, writing in a world of vanishing empires, put the same truth in the plainest picture available to a farming people:

"The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever." (Isaiah 40:8)

Grass and flowers are not evil things; they are simply temporary. And the comparison is not with wicked institutions only, but with everything human — the strong as well as the corrupt, the reformer as well as the tyrant. All of it is grass. The Word alone is not.

And the Lord Jesus Christ, who might have appealed to any authority He chose, staked the endurance of His words against the endurance of the universe itself:

"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." (Matthew 24:35)

That is a remarkable way to speak. He did not say His words would last a long time, or outlive their critics, or remain influential. He said the sky and the ground would go first. Twenty centuries later, both sky and ground are still here — and so are the words, which is precisely what He predicted.

2. Why preservation must follow inspiration

There is a logic here that is worth making explicit, because some who accept that God inspired the Scriptures have never thought about what must follow.

If God gave His Word at all, He gave it for a purpose: that men might know Him and be saved. But a Word given to one generation and lost to the next accomplishes nothing for the next. A revelation that perishes is a revelation wasted. It would be a strange God who took the trouble to speak, and then took no trouble at all to see that His speech survived the century.

Moreover, the Scripture is presented as the means by which men are brought to God and built up in Him:

"All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works." (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

If that is what the Scriptures are for, then their preservation is not an optional extra; it is the necessary condition of their usefulness. Inspiration without preservation would be a lamp lit in a sealed room. Preservation is simply inspiration continued into history — the same care that gave the Word, keeping the Word.

And this is why the doctrine matters practically rather than merely academically. If you cannot be confident that the words in your hands are the words God gave, then every sermon, every doctrine, and every promise rests on a text that a scholar may withdraw from you next year. But if God has kept His Word, then the Book on your table is not a report about revelation. It is the revelation.

3. The first campaign: a king and a penknife

Return to that winter fire, because the pattern set there has been repeated in every century since.

Notice first what the king was actually doing. He was not disputing the words; he was destroying them. Men rarely argue with Scripture when they can simply remove it. It is easier to burn a scroll than to answer it.

Notice second the futility of it. God's response was not thunder from heaven but something far more humiliating to the king: He had the book written again, with additions. The destruction of the copy did not touch the Word. That is the crucial distinction, and it will hold through every episode that follows. Men can destroy paper. Nobody has ever laid a finger on the Word itself.

Notice third what became of the man. He is remembered for one thing only, and that thing is his failure.

4. The Word that outlasted the emperors

In the year 303, the Roman emperor Diocletian issued an edict of a thoroughness that had not been seen before. Churches were to be demolished, assemblies forbidden, and — this was the heart of it — every copy of the Christian Scriptures was to be surrendered and burned. The empire that had conquered the known world turned its full administrative machinery upon a collection of documents.

Copies were burned in great numbers. Christians who refused to hand over their Books were imprisoned, tortured, and executed. For a time it looked as though the thing could be done: the Roman state was efficient, and it was patient.

Within about twenty-five years, the empire that had ordered the burning was itself paying for copies to be produced. Within a century, Diocletian's edict was a historical curiosity and the Scriptures were being copied faster than any book in the world.

This became the pattern. Empires legislate against the Book; empires end; the Book is still being read. The names change — Roman, atheist, revolutionary, totalitarian — but the outcome does not. A state can outlaw a Book within its borders for the length of its own existence, which always turns out to be shorter than expected.

5. The Word that outlasted those who chained it

There is a subtler campaign than burning, and in some ways a more effective one: not to destroy the Book, but to keep it away from the people.

For long stretches of history the Scriptures existed in a language the common man could not read, and to translate them into his tongue was a crime. The reasoning offered was that ordinary people would misunderstand. The effect, whatever the reasoning, was that the ploughman could not check what he was told.

Men paid dearly to change that. One English scholar spent his life in exile translating the Scriptures into English, was hunted across Europe, betrayed by a man he had trusted, strangled and burned. His last recorded prayer asked God to open the king of England's eyes. Within a very few years, an English Bible drawing heavily on his work was being placed in churches by royal authority. Another, an Oxford man who had translated the Scriptures a century and a half earlier, was condemned long after his death, his bones dug up and burned and the ashes thrown into a river — and the Book he had translated went on being copied by hand.

Consider what those authorities achieved. They killed the translators. The translations survived. Every measure taken to keep the Scriptures from the common people ended by putting the Scriptures into the hands of the common people, and often within a single generation.

6. The Word that outlasted the philosophers

A third campaign is quieter and more confident: not fire, not law, but the announcement that the Book is finished.

Every century has produced men of learning who declared that the Bible had been superseded — that the new science, or the new philosophy, or the new criticism had at last put the old Book on the shelf, where it would remain as a monument to an earlier stage of human development. Some of these men were brilliant. Some were confident enough to name the century by which Christianity would be extinct.

Meanwhile the Book quietly became the most published, most translated, most distributed volume in the history of the human race, and not by a narrow margin. It has been rendered into thousands of languages, many of which had no written form at all until someone arrived wanting to translate the Scriptures into them and had to invent an alphabet first. Whole literatures exist because somebody wanted a people to be able to read this Book.

Here is the sober point, and it is not offered in triumph. The men who buried the Bible are themselves buried, and their works are read by specialists, while the Book they dismissed is read by farmers and prisoners and children. There is a warning in that for anyone tempted to be the next to announce the funeral.

7. How God actually preserved it

It is worth asking how this was done, because God's method here is characteristic of Him and often misunderstood.

He did not preserve one sacred original in a vault. There is no golden autograph of Isaiah kept under guard, and it is a mercy there is not, for men would certainly have worshipped it. Nor did He suspend the laws of nature to make the pages fireproof.

What He did was multiply. He caused His Word to be copied, and copied, and copied again, and scattered so widely across so many lands, languages, and centuries that destroying it became a physical impossibility. A tyrant may seize every copy in his own territory; he cannot seize the copies in the next kingdom, or the ones already buried in a jar in a desert, or the ones read aloud so often that they live in the memory of the poor. The Scriptures survive today in a mass of manuscript evidence out of all proportion to any other ancient writing — vastly more copies, and copies far closer in time to the originals, than we possess for any classical author whose text no one thinks to doubt.

Alongside the multiplication ran the copying discipline. Those who copied the Hebrew Scriptures did not regard themselves as authors or editors. They counted the letters. They counted the words. They knew which letter stood at the middle of a book, and would check it. A scroll with errors was not corrected and kept; it was buried. This was not scholarship as a career. It was reverence expressed in arithmetic, by men who believed they were handling the words of God and would answer for every one of them.

And the Word itself forbids tampering, in terms that leave no room for the helpful improver:

"Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar." (Proverbs 30:5-6)

Note the two halves. First, every word of God is pure — the purity is not in the message broadly considered, but in the words. Second, the prohibition falls not on subtraction only but on addition. A man who adds to Scripture is not enriching it; he is, in the Book's own blunt term, lying — because he is presenting as God's word something God did not say. The same warning stands at the very end of the Bible, where a curse is pronounced on any who add to or take from the words of the prophecy.

8. What preservation does not mean

Honesty requires a distinction here that careless friends of the Bible sometimes blur.

Preservation does not mean that no copyist ever made a slip of the pen. Men copied by hand, by candlelight, for centuries, and a hand can tire. What it means is that God so governed the process that His Word was never lost, never corrupted beyond recovery, and never left the church without a text it could trust. The evidence bears this out plainly: the enormous body of surviving manuscripts agrees to an extraordinary degree, and where copies differ, the differences are overwhelmingly matters of spelling and word order. Not one doctrine of the Christian faith hangs in the balance.

Nor does preservation mean that God's Word can only exist in one language. The Scriptures were given in Hebrew and Greek, and God plainly intends them to be carried to every nation and tongue. Faithful translation is not a departure from preservation; it is preservation doing its work in the world.

What preservation does exclude is the notion that the Bible is a text still being recovered — that the church has spent twenty centuries with an uncertain Book while awaiting the verdict of experts. That is not the picture the Scriptures give of themselves, nor is it what the history shows.

9. An incorruptible seed

All of this would remain a matter of history if the Word were merely a document. But the Bible describes its own permanence in a different category altogether. It is not preserved the way a monument is preserved. It is preserved the way a living thing is.

"Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you." (1 Peter 1:23-25)

Follow the argument. The Word is a seed — and not a corruptible one. Everything human is grass: our strength, our reputations, our institutions, our achievements. Grass withers, and it does so on a schedule. But the seed that God plants in a man does not share the fate of the soil it is planted in.

And notice where the passage lands. This enduring, incorruptible Word is not something distant or inaccessible. This is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you. The very Word that emperors could not burn is the Word that reaches an ordinary person in an ordinary room and gives him a life that will not perish.

"For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12)

Here, perhaps, is the deepest reason the Book has never been successfully destroyed. Men have not been fighting a document. They have been fighting something alive.

10. The Book that reached your hands

Stop for a moment and consider the ordinary object you can hold.

Behind it stand men who wrote at God's direction across fifteen centuries; scribes who counted letters by lamplight; believers who hid copies in walls and under floors; translators who died for putting it into the language of the poor; printers who risked everything to set the type; and ordinary people who carried it through persecutions and wars and famines because they would not be parted from it.

It cost lives to put that Book on your table, and none of the people who paid ever met you. And it is available to you at a price that would have seemed absurd to any of them — often free, in a language you learned as a child, with the whole of it in your pocket.

The tragedy of our own generation is not that the Bible is forbidden. It is that it is unread. The king with the penknife at least took it seriously enough to burn. It is a strange kind of contempt to let a Book like this sit unopened on a shelf.

11. What the preserved Word says to you

God did not keep His Word through fire and edict and exile so that we might admire its survival. He kept it so that it could reach you and tell you the truth.

"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23)

"For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 6:23)

It shuts every door we might use to save ourselves, in order to open the only one that leads out:

"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9)

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)

And it tells you, in words that have survived everything men could do to them, exactly what to do:

"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." (John 1:12)

That sentence was copied by hand for over a thousand years before printing existed. Men were burned for translating it. Governments have banned it. It has come all this way, across all those centuries, through all those fires — and it has arrived intact, on this page, in front of you.

The fire is out; the Word remains

The king's fire in that winter apartment went out, as fires do. The scroll he burned was rewritten. The empire that outlawed the Book collapsed. The men who chained it were outlived by their own translations. The philosophers who buried it were buried.

The grass withers. The flower fades. Every power that ever set itself against this Book has taken its turn at being grass. And the Word of our God shall stand for ever — which means, among other things, that it is still standing today, wherever you happen to be reading this, waiting to be opened.

Let us Pray:

Our gracious heavenly Father, we come before Thy throne of grace through the precious name and perfect merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone has opened the way into Thy presence.

We thank Thee for Thy beloved Son, and for **Him** whose words shall not pass away though heaven and earth pass. We praise Thee for Thy preserved Word, which declareth **"For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven"** (Psalm 119:89), and which cannot be broken.

We confess before Thee that we have doubted the keeping power of the God who kept **His** own Son through death. Forgive us, we pray, and cleanse us, for Thou art faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

We beseech Thee for every soul reading these words who is yet without Christ. Send forth Thy Holy Ghost to convince them of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; open their understanding; and draw them to Thy Son before this day is done.

Strengthen Thy people who read it. Comfort the discouraged, establish the wavering, and let none go away empty. And use this message to give every reader confidence that **Thou** hast preserved **Thy Word** to this hour, for Thy glory and not for ours.

We pray all of this to Thee, O God, our Holy and Heavenly Father, in the precious name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by the power and anointing of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The Most Important Prayer You Will Ever Pray

Before you close this page, one question matters more than everything you have just read: if you died tonight, do you know where you would be?

You cannot be saved by joining a church, by being baptized, by giving money, or by living a decent life. Salvation is not a wage that is earned; it is a gift that is received. Every one of us has sinned, the wages of sin is death, and there is a real hell prepared for sin — but the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross in the sinner's place, was buried, and rose again the third day.

If you know yourself to be a sinner, and you are willing to turn from your sin and trust Him alone, then speak to God now. There are no magic words — but if these words are the cry of your heart, pray them and mean them:

After You Have Prayed

1. Tell somebody today. "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9).

2. Begin reading the Bible. Start with the Gospel of John, then Acts, then Romans. Read a little every day. "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:2).

3. Talk to your Father every day. You may now come boldly, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. No appointment is needed and no man's permission.

4. Find a Bible-believing church and be baptized. Not to be saved — you already are — but in obedience, and as the public confession of what has happened to you.

5. Rest in this, and do not be shaken by your feelings. "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24). You will still sin; when you do, confess it and go on — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).