Has God adequately preserved the Bible?

The Bible on your shelf is not what Paul wrote. His original letters are long gone, along with everything Moses, David and John put on the page. What we have are copies, and copies of copies, written out by hand for fourteen hundred years before anyone printed a page. A scribe worked while the daylight lasted, because a lamp near a manuscript risked burning it, and he stopped when the light went. So a fair question follows: how much of what God said actually reached us?

Christians often answer this from God's character: He is perfect, so His book must have come through perfectly. The trouble comes when the reader meets his first footnote saying that some manuscripts read differently. There are such places. Hand-copied documents contain slips, and Christians have never pretended otherwise. An argument built on what a perfect God must surely have done falls apart the moment the evidence looks untidy.

God has said what He would do with His word.

Isaiah 40:8 (NKJV)

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.

Grass is the shortest-lived thing Isaiah could point to. It comes up green after rain and the hot wind off the desert kills it in a day. The flower on it lasts even less. Isaiah puts God's word beside those two things and says it stands forever.

He is not making a claim about a book. He is talking about everything that dies. The verses just before this one say that all flesh is grass — men, kings, armies, the empire that had carried Israel off. Simply put, God's word, unlike everything in this world, will not wither.

Isaiah made that promise about God's word in roughly 700 BC. Seven hundred years later, Peter opens a letter to churches in Asia Minor and quotes it.

1 Peter 1:24–25 (NKJV)

because “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and its flower falls away, but the word of the LORD endures forever.” Now this is the word which by the gospel was preached to you.

Look at what those seven centuries contained. Assyria fell. Babylon rose and fell. Persia, then Greece, then Rome. Every person who first heard Isaiah speak was long dead, and so were their grandchildren's grandchildren. The empires Isaiah was comparing to grass had withered exactly as he said. His sentence about them had not. It was still there, word for word, for a fisherman to read out to a congregation — and Peter then tells his readers that this enduring word is the gospel they had just believed.

So what did God promise, exactly? Not that every copy would come out flawless. He promised that His word would not perish.

Think about how a slip actually travels. A scribe in one town copies a letter and writes one word wrong. Everything copied from his page inherits that word. But copies of the same letter were already in a dozen other towns, made from other pages, and they carry the word correctly. Centuries later both readings are sitting on the table. The odd one belongs to a single family of copies from one place; the other stands in manuscripts from Egypt, Syria, Italy and North Africa, made by people who never met. Nobody has to guess which is the mistake.

That is what preservation looks like in practice. Not one perfect copy handed down untouched, but so many copies in so many places that no error can hide and none can spread everywhere. A slip of the pen does not put a word of God out of reach. It puts a mark in one manuscript that the rest of them correct.

Men have also tried to destroy it, and Scripture records one of them. It is winter, and Jehoiakim, king of Judah, is sitting in the winter house with a fire burning in front of him while a servant reads him a scroll of everything God had given Jeremiah to say.

Jeremiah 36:23 (NKJV)

And it happened, when Jehudi had read three or four columns, that the king cut it with the scribe's knife and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth.

He does not argue with a word of it. He does not send for Jeremiah, or dispute the prophecy, or ask whether it came from God. Three of his officials beg him not to burn it and he ignores them. By the end of the evening the word of God is ash.

Then Jeremiah is told to fetch another scroll, and Baruch writes it all out again — this time with more added to it (Jeremiah 36:32). The new scroll also carried a sentence the first one did not: because Jehoiakim burned the word of God, none of his descendants would hold David's throne, and his own body would be thrown out unburied to the heat of the day and the frost of the night (Jeremiah 36:30). He got the fire he wanted and lost the dynasty he was protecting. The scroll he burned is in your Bible, and so is the account of him burning it.

Diocletian tried the same thing on a far larger scale. In AD 303 the emperor ordered every copy of the Christian Scriptures in the empire seized and burned. Within thirty years a Roman emperor was paying for fifty fresh copies to be made for the churches of his capital.

God preserved His word the way He does most things — through ordinary means, not by miracle. He could have kept one flawless original in a locked room. He did not, and there is good reason to think that was mercy. When Israel kept the bronze serpent Moses had made, they ended up burning incense to it, and Hezekiah had to smash it to pieces (2 Kings 18:4). Men will worship an object God once used. Had the actual scroll of Isaiah survived, it would have been a relic in a shrine with a queue outside, and the words on it would have been the last thing anyone came for.

Instead the copies multiplied and scattered: Hebrew scrolls in Egypt, in Babylon, in the Judean desert; Greek letters carried to churches from Rome to Antioch, copied on arrival and copied again. No emperor could gather them all in. No council could quietly rewrite a line without every other copy in the world exposing it. The very thing people worry about, that we have copies rather than originals, is what makes the text checkable — and it has been checked.

Has He preserved it adequately? Adequate means the church has never been without the Scriptures, and no generation has had to wait for a lost book to be found. It means that when you read Isaiah, you are reading what Peter read. Parchment rots and scribes die. What they copied is still here. The word of God will survive till the end of time, as Jesus Himself promised:

Matthew 24:35 (NKJV)

Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.