Page 4 - Doctrine and History of the Preservation of the Bible revised

Preservation of the Biblical Text

Once the manuscripts were penned by the work of the Holy Spirit, it was essential that God make sure
that those words He wanted all mankind to know were preserved through the ages, so that you and I
can know that the copy of the Bible we have are the words that were written thousands of years ago.
We need to know that God’s Word is reliable and trustworthy. We can study the efforts of mankind to
preserve the truth of the Bible, but we can also see as we study history that God preserved His Word for
us in many miraculous ways.

The Bible claims to be a Word from God or God’s revelation to mankind. The questions we can ask are,
“How do we know that the Bible’s claim is true? How do we know the Bible is REALLY God’s word to
man? And how do we know that the copy we have today is what was originally written?

Other faiths make similar claims. Islam claims that the Quran is God’s final revelation through the
prophet Mohammad. They also claim that the Bible was polluted by copyists and that Islam brought
back the truth lost in the contamination of the Bible. The Pali Canon, which means “the word of
Buddha,” is considered the word of god to Buddhists. Buddhists also claim the Sanskrit Canon,
Mahayana scriptures, Tantric Scriptures, and the Tibetan and Mongolian Canons all are god’s word to
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us. Hindus worship millions of gods and claim that the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and
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the Puranas are revelations from their gods. Even the cults write their own translations of “God’s
Word” to fit their errant doctrines. The New World Translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Clear
Word of the Adventist movement all are claimed to be accurate presentations of God’s Word to their
people.

Then other questions about the Bible must be considered:

Is the Bible really God’s Word as it claims?
Is there any proof that the Bible is trustworthy?
How do we know all the “books” of the Bible successfully made it into the canon?
What does “inspiration” mean?
What is “plenary inspiration?”
What does “inerrancy” mean?
What languages was it written in?
Has the truth written in the original manuscripts been preserved for us today?
Is the doctrine of preservation explicitly taught in the Scriptures?
Do we have the complete Bible? Were some books left out of the canon?
Are there errors in the Bible?
What about all the versions of the Bible? How come there are so many versions?
Is the King James Version of the Bible more accurate than modern versions?
Are there versions that are accurate to the original manuscripts and others that are NOT accurate?
Which version should I use? How can I know that a version is true to the original texts?

These and a multitude of other questions will be answered in this course. So, we set out on a quest to
find out if the Bible we have in our hands is really the Bible God wrote thousands of years ago. Let’s
start with the claims of the Bible itself.

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