When my theory of Bible preservation was challenged

November 3, 2024 • Series: Bible Preservation

I once held a King James-only view of the Bible, convinced that God preserved every word without variation. But as I began studying, my assumptions were challenged.

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For believers, understanding how we got the Bible is essential. Yet, like many Christians, I once assumed the Bible’s path to us was simple and miraculous in a way that shielded it from human error. Twelve years ago, I held a King James-only view, convinced that God had preserved every single word without variation. But as I began studying, my assumptions were challenged, and I found that the Bible’s journey from inspiration to canonization, transmission, and translation was more complex than I’d realized.

The Bible didn’t fall from the sky. Rather, it was written by more than 40 authors over 1,500 years. God “breathed out” these words, as Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3:16, and the early church recognized which books were inspired, forming the 66-book canon. This canon was not chosen by a few but accepted by the broader church, though debates occasionally arose. Yet even with this confidence in the canon, I had never considered the transmission of the text—how it reached us today or how God preserved it despite human frailty.

For centuries, the Bible was copied by hand. Both Old and New Testaments were painstakingly replicated until the printing press emerged in the 15th century. With each generation, these copies and translations spread across regions and languages, adding layers of complexity. This process was not flawless, as human error in copying was inevitable. Yet, remarkably, God preserved his message through it all.

When I examined the 1611 King James Bible, I discovered revisions, footnotes suggesting alternative translations, and a preface by the translators themselves. Surprisingly, the translators didn’t claim perfection for their work, acknowledging that no translation could capture every detail precisely. In fact, they stated that even a poor translation still carried God’s Word, just as the king’s speech retains its meaning even when translated differently.

This challenged my view that only a “perfect” translation could be trusted. I realized that while God’s message remains intact, exact wording often varies. For example, the Gospels sometimes record Jesus’ words differently, yet the message is unified. The apostles themselves cited the Greek Septuagint, even though it had differences from the Hebrew text, showing us that variations do not negate the divine authority of Scripture.

Transcript

How did we get the Bible?

This is such a fundamental, all-important question for believers, yet I’m guessing most of us can’t answer it. Only twelve years ago, I couldn’t answer it. Well, I could give an answer, but it wasn’t a correct answer. It wasn’t a well-studied answer.

So, how did we get the Bible? Obviously, it didn’t fall out of the sky with gilded pages and a leather cover. I think most of us know that God inspired more than forty human authors to pen these sixty-six books of the Bible—Genesis through Revelation—over the course of fifteen hundred years or so. Second Timothy says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2Ti 3:16). It’s expired or exhaled by God. Or, if you prefer, all Scripture is inspired by God. The apostle Peter says, “No prophecy [no divine teaching or writing] was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2Pe 1:21). I think every Christian understands this.

I suppose fewer Christians know how these sixty-six books became part of the biblical canon. You can throw out what you learned from Dan Brown novels. No one chose these sixty-six books. It would be more accurate to say that God’s people simply recognized these sixty-six books as inspired. And this happened with each book before any formal list was made.

But even if we don’t know the exact details of how these books were canonized, I think most Christians understand the simple point that God inspired the books and the church accepted them as inspired with relatively few exceptions. There were outliers, of course. There have been debates among pockets of Jews and Christians regarding some of the books—Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Apocrypha, Revelation, and so on. But for the most part, God’s people have always agreed about the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible.

So, most Christians are on the same page regarding the Bible’s inspiration and canonization, but what about transmission? How did the Bible get from its human authors—some of them writing 3500 years ago—to people living on the other side of the world in the 21st century? How did the Bible get from Point A to Point B? And how did God preserve the text over all of that time so that readers today can trust they are reading the inspired words of God?

This is the question I don’t think most Christians have given much thought to. Granted, we accept the words of Scripture by faith, as we should, but it’s becoming increasingly imperative that we be able to give a defense not only of our faith but also of the Bible itself. There are many critics out there who would love nothing more than to undermine our trust in the Bible. As one who watches a lot of sermons and Christian content on YouTube, it’s become rare for me to pull up YouTube and not see the algorithm recommend a video of someone trying to convince viewers that the Bible can’t be trusted. And when we hear their arguments, if we don’t understand the Bible’s history, we might begin to doubt whether the Bible is the Word of God.

But I’ll say more about that later. For now, let me back up twelve years and tell you my story.

Approximately twelve years ago, I was the pastor of a church that used the King James Bible exclusively. In fact, within the denomination, this was becoming codified in many of the church’s articles of faith. For example, the statement might say, “We believe that the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired Word of God and the only rule of faith and practice, and we prefer the King James translation.” Some went a bit further saying, “We believe that the scriptures comprising the Old and New Testaments, as given in what is known as the King James Translation, are of divine authority.”

Now, my congregation didn’t have this in our statement of faith, but we would have agreed with it. Of course, what’s implied by that statement is that the King James Version is the only Bible of divine authority, at least in English. And that’s precisely how I viewed it at the time.

Now, you should know that I didn’t go to seminary. I didn’t have any formal theological training. I didn’t learn Greek or Hebrew. I believed in using the King James Bible exclusively, not because I knew the Bible’s history, or how translations work, or anything like that. My exclusive use of the King James grew out of my assumptions about how God preserved the text of Scripture. And I think many people who don’t even use the King James can relate to this.

I said before that the Bible didn’t fall out of the sky with gilded pages and a leather cover. We all know this, yet we may still have a view of Bible preservation that isn’t far removed from that notion. And here’s what I mean. Until twelve years ago, I believed that the only way for God to have preserved the Bible was to have preserved every word of it down to the very last jot and tittle. If he didn’t preserve every word, how could we say he preserved the Bible? And even more important, how could we trust it? If not every word was preserved, then we wouldn’t know whether we were reading the actual words of God or not. Do you see what I mean?

Without researching it or having studied the matter, I think this is probably the default assumption of many Christians. God inspired the text, and then he providentially, miraculously guided scribes, generation after generation, to copy the text without making any mistakes. And this would have to be a miraculous work of God because every scribe was a fallible man, prone to make mistakes. But, of course, God is God, and if he purposed to preserve the text of Scripture through a perfect, error-free line of manuscripts, then that could certainly happen.

And I say this is probably our default assumption because, first of all, it makes sense. It makes sense to believe that if God preserved the Bible, he preserved all of the Bible—every word of it.

Second, we naturally want to trust the Bible, and any questions regarding the authenticity of the text make the Bible feel less trustworthy. So, we simply assume we are reading the precise words God inspired in the first place.

And third, most people have never heard anything different. Pastors often teach about the Bible’s inspiration, and inerrancy, and infallibility, and authority, and sufficiency, but we don’t hear nearly as much about preservation. And I don’t believe it’s because pastors are trying to hide anything. Both the transmission and translation of the Bible are somewhat complicated issues. There’s a lot of history here. Twelve years later, I’m still learning new things all the time. It’s complicated, so many pastors just lay it aside. Meanwhile, people in the pews are left to make assumptions, and again, I think the default assumption is that God preserved the text perfectly.

Now, before I continue telling my story, I realize I should probably establish a few basic points about Bible transmission.

As you probably know, the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic—primarily Hebrew. The New Testament was written in Greek. In fact, by the time the New Testament was written, Greek was so widely used that even the Old Testament had been translated into Greek. We actually have evidence in the New Testament that the apostles and early church were using the Greek version of the Old Testament.

So, once the Bible was written in its various stages, the text had to be transmitted from one generation to the next. That’s what I mean by transmission of the Bible. It had to be copied. Now, the printing press wasn’t invented until the 15th century, so every copy was painstakingly made by hand. The Old Testament was hand-copied for fifteen hundred years. Both the Old and New Testaments were hand-copied for another fifteen hundred years or so. Even after the printing press, people still hand-copied the Bible because printed versions of the Bible were expensive.

Of course, the Bible didn’t just pass from one generation to the next. It also moved from region to region. Hebrew was already becoming an archaic language by the 1st century. Greek followed soon after. So, in addition to transmission, the Bible also had to be translated. And this creates another level of complexity.

Not only that, but different styles of copying the Bible developed. And I don’t want to get too deep into the details just yet, but the history of Bible transmission is not a straight line by any means. Clearly, if God preserved a perfect line of manuscripts, his divine, miraculous intervention was necessary. Just imagine trying to copy the more than 600,000 words of Scripture by hand without making a mistake. Now, imagine people doing that over and over again for more than three thousand years. I mean, we have spellcheck on our computers, and we still make typos. But with God, all things are possible, right?

Well, I believed God preserved a perfect line of manuscripts, and I believed those perfect manuscripts were then perfectly translated into the King James Bible.

Now, you may wonder, Why the King James? How did you know the King James was the perfect Bible? Well, I didn’t, not really. I assumed as much because that’s what I had been taught. Obviously, the King James was a much older translation than our modern Bibles, so it had the benefit of being time-tested. Plus, I knew enough to know there were differences between the King James and modern translations, so it was easy to conclude that one must be right while the others are wrong. And since the King James was much older, it felt quite natural to assume the King James was the accurate translation. This is a little ironic for reasons I’ll eventually explain, but an older translation felt like it must be closer to the original writings of Scripture.

So, this is what I believed. This is what my church believed. But I also recognized that I didn’t know why we believed it. I couldn’t make a reasonable defense of the position. So, on a random week twelve years ago, I decided I would study the matter and attempt to teach the church why we use the King James Version exclusively. And I thought I would begin my study in the year 1611, when the first edition of the King James was published, and work my way backwards. My thought was that I would start with the King James Bible itself and trace its lineage all the way back to the time of the apostles. I wanted to show how God preserved the text of Scripture perfectly all the way through history.

Now, the first thing I did was get a facsimile of the 1611 King James. I wanted to see the text as it was originally translated, and I immediately ran into a few challenges.

First of all, the text of the 1611 wasn’t the same as what I was reading in my version of the King James. And that’s because the King James underwent several revisions after it was first published. Now, most of the changes were things like spelling and punctuation, but there were changes that affected the meaning of the text. For example, there’s a verse in Matthew where the name Judas was replaced with Jesus. That’s a meaningful difference. In fact, there’s a version of the King James that was published back in 2005 that attempts to restore the original wording of the King James because there have been several meaningful changes to the text.

Now, for most people, this doesn’t feel like a major issue at all because every Bible undergoes revisions for one reason or another. But you have to understand that this was challenging for me because I thought the King James was perfect. How can it be perfect if changes were made? So, that was the first difficulty for me.

Second, I noticed how the 1611 edition had all kinds of footnotes. My King James didn’t have footnotes, but the original 1611 did. And these footnotes offered alternative ways of translating the text. And again, most people would think, So what? Of course, there’s more than one way to translate from one language to another. This is especially true when you’re going from a more detailed, sophisticated language like Greek to a less sophisticated language like English. But again, I thought the King James was translated perfectly. But within the translators’ own footnotes, they suggested alternative word choices, many of which changed the meaning of the text. This simply did not square with my understanding of Bible preservation.

Now, I’ll give you an example of one of these footnotes in just a moment, but I think another issue that’s relevant here is the matter of how text is translated. We often talk about word-for-word translations versus phrase-for-phrase translations. Especially within King James circles, it’s often stressed that the Bible should be translated literally. Well, there’s no such thing as a literal translation of the Bible. If there were, it would be unreadable. The idea of a literal translation is a relatively new idea that is little more than a marketing tactic.

So, back in 1862, Robert Young published his translation of the Bible, which was called Young’s Literal Translation. As far as I can tell, that was the first time that word was ever used in connection to Bible translation. And it’s a word that’s been used ever since. Sometimes, the word literal is replaced with words like true or faithful, but the idea is the same. We tend to think that (1) a literal translation is possible—again, it’s not—and (2) the more literal, the better.

Now, we should want accuracy in our translations. We want to minimize interpretation in our translations. But some amount of interpretation is necessary. And accuracy doesn’t necessarily mean literal. For example, Americans use the idiom, “hold your horses.” If we were to translate that phrase literally for people of another language and culture, it wouldn’t mean the same thing to them. When we use that expression, we’re saying, “Be patient. Wait.” We’re not telling someone to literally hold on to a horse. So, if we want to convey the proper meaning of that phrase to someone of another language, we cannot translate it literally. Literal, in that case, would not be accurate.

And the fact is, every Bible, including Young’s Literal Translation, has to employ some amount of interpretation. I’ll give you a quick example from the King James. In Romans 6, it says, “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid” (Ro 6:1-2). “God forbid” is an example of interpretation, if you will. The word for God is not found in the text. Basically, it reads, “Not to be.” It’s a short two-word expression in the Greek to say, “No, never.” But in the minds of the King James translators, the best way to convey the essential meaning of this phrase to 17th-century English speakers was to write, “God forbid.” Is that a literal translation? No, but I would argue it is accurate, especially for its time.

So, getting back to the footnotes in the 1611 KJV, I was challenged because the translators were openly acknowledging that there is more than one way to translate a text, despite the fact that these other translation choices could change the meaning of the text.

I told you I’d give you an example. This is not the best example, but it’s one that really confounded me. You see, this example is found in Psalm 12, and Psalm 12 was one of those important passages for defending my view of Bible preservation.

Here’s what it says. I’ll begin reading at verse 6. “The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever” (Ps 12:6-7).

Now, reading those two verses without their context makes it sound as though the Lord will preserve not just his Word but his very words (plural) for every generation. I thought this was a promise from God to preserve every last word of his Word for all generations. As I said, this was a crucial text for defending my view of Bible preservation.

But the King James translators added a footnote here. Among their eight footnotes in this psalm, one of them suggests that verse 7 could read, “Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve him from this generation for ever” (Ps 12:7). Who is him? I thought verse 7 was talking about God preserving his pure words from verse 6.

Well, if we read the full psalm, we realize that God’s promise—called his “pure words” in verse 6—is to preserve or keep his poor, oppressed people throughout all generations. Verse 5: “For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the LORD; I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him” (Ps 12:5). Then, verse 8: “The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted” (Ps 12:8).

This isn’t a promise regarding the preservation of Scripture at all. It is God promising to preserve his people and stressing that his promise is reliable. His words are pure in that they are truthful. There’s no dross of lies or insincerity in them.

Now, we don’t need the KJV’s footnote to realize this, but twelve years ago, this was eye-opening for me. I suddenly had a dilemma. Not only was one of my proof texts taken from me, but I now had to wrestle with the fact that Bible translation is not the black-and-white process I thought it was.

And that leads me to the third challenge I faced when I began studying the original King James from 1611. The King James translators originally published their Bible with a preface they called “The Translators To the Reader.” And in it, they said several things that surprised me, but I’ll focus on two, in particular. And both can be summed up by saying they did not believe any translation of the Bible was perfect.

So, first of all, they believed that even inferior, faulty translations were, in fact, the Word of God. Listen to what they wrote:

We do not deny—in fact, we affirm and assert—that the very poorest translation of the Bible into English, produced by men of our profession [they mean Protestant translators] … contains the word of God—no, is the word of God.

Now, this is something I’ll definitely come back to, but the King James translators did not believe a translation has to be altogether perfect to truly be the Word of God. A version of the Bible doesn’t have to be the very words of God in every place to be the Word of God. They write:

The King’s speech, which he utters in Parliament, when translated into French, German, Italian, and Latin, is still the King’s speech, even if it is not always interpreted by every translator with identical grace, nor always appropriately phrased, nor always expressing his precise sense at every point.

In other words, while some translations will be better than others, no translation is perfect. But even the poorest translations—within reason, of course—will still capture the essence of God’s Word. Now, maybe someone might argue, “That’s not good enough. If we don’t have the very words of God, we don’t have God’s Word.” And that’s what I thought twelve years ago. But let me give you an example of the Bible itself capturing not the very words of God but the essence of what he said.

We have four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and they will often use different words to convey the same thing. For example, there’s a moment when Jesus is explaining how he is able to cast out demons. In Luke’s account, he says, “If I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you” (Lk 11:20). But in Matthew’s account, he says, “If I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you” (Mt 12:28). The finger of God and the Spirit of God are not the same thing. And yet, we see even within the inspired text of Scripture that God did not always lead its authors to record the precise words of Jesus. Instead, he inspired them to capture the essence of what he said.

Now, the King James translators use a really compelling example to show how an imperfect translation is still the Word of God. They use the example of the Greek Septuagint, which was that commonly used Greek translation of the Old Testament that I talked about before. We have evidence that even the apostles used the Septuagint. Well, here’s what the King James translators say:

It is certain that the Septuagint was not completely sound and perfect. In many places it needed correction—and who was more qualified for this work than the apostles? Yet it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to them to take what they found (since it was, for the most part, true and sufficient) rather than to make a new translation.

In other words, the translators did not believe the Greek Septuagint was entirely accurate when compared with the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament. And yet, the apostles did not hesitate to use it. They did not hesitate to quote it as Scripture—as God’s Word. And we see this in our Bibles today.

To give you just one example, Hebrews chapter 8 in the New Testament cites Jeremiah 31 from the Old Testament. In the book of Hebrews, we read—this is God speaking about Israel—“They continued not in my covenant, and I regarded them not” (Heb 8:9). But if we turn back to Jeremiah, we read, “My covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them” (Jer 31:32). That’s clearly not the same thing—“I regarded them not” versus “I was a husband to them.” So, what’s going on here? Why the discrepancy?

Well, the Old Testament of our Bibles was primarily translated from Hebrew manuscripts, but the author of the Book of Hebrews wasn’t quoting from Hebrew manuscripts. He was quoting from the Greek Septuagint. And he was quoting from the Septuagint despite this very obvious textual variant (or difference).

So, the inspired text of Scripture actually validates the point made by the King James translators. The apostles themselves didn’t disregard a translation because it had textual variants. They quoted, as Scripture, some of the actual variants.

Of course, this really troubled me. It flew in the face of everything I thought I knew about Bible preservation. And maybe it troubles you. If so, don’t panic. There is another way to understand preservation.

Unfortunately, hosting audio on the Web can get really expensive. So, I’m trying to keep these episodes as close to thirty minutes in length as possible, which means I’m going to end this one right here. We’ll continue this discussion soon enough.

When my theory of Bible preservation was challenged

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