Tenacity: It's All There

Last night I had a conversation with a person who is of a different faith than my own. At one point she honestly wondered what the Bible would say if we had the original. “It sure would be great to know what the Apostles originally wrote” she said trying in an attempt to cast doubt on the reliability of the Bible.

I had to sit there and wonder in amazement. Now here is a religious person who believes in God, yet doesn’t believe God has the ability to preserve His Word. It is one thing for Theological Liberals coming out of the 19^th and 20^th centuries and now spilling over into the 21^st century to believe in the corruption nonsense. It is quite another for someone of faith to remain so ignorant on the transmission of the Bible.

I have to admit at this point I am no scholar, but I understand just enough things to make me dangerously stupid in the light of those who do not trust the Bible.

I began to explain to her that “yes”, there are corruptions in the transmission of the Bible. However, the manuscripts that we have received are not all copied by one guy who then makes a mistake and the original is lost forever. The manuscript Traditions are far too vast to allow such a thing to happen. God has been pleased to preserve His Word not in one man or even one church or even one area of the world. Due to this wide variety of manuscripts there is a term to describe what has happened in the transmission process, the Tenacity of the Text.

Tenacity is a simple concept. What was originally written as well as every error has come down to us today. Andy Stanley once remarked in a tape series that there is a science that men use to distinguish between copyist errors and the original readings. During his classes he began to become tired of working through spelling errors. So he decided to ask his professor for the “big three”. He wanted to work with variants that actually had to do with a major point in theology. The response from his professor was plain and simple, “There are none.”

My point for this post is simple. If you are struggling with believing the Bible as the Word of God, if you doubt its transmission from the Apostles to us, I highly recommend a couple of books.

First is James White’s, The King James Only Controversy. You may wonder what does this book have to do with the subject. Well, my response is “Everything!” In dealing with King James Onlyists, who argue that only the King James may be trusted and IS the Word of God, he explains how the Bible was transmitted and deals with many of the so-called corrupted texts. By the time you are done reading this book, you will have an idea of how great the manuscript Tradition is.

Another book that I have on my shelf, that is becoming old, is The Origin of the Bible, by Comfort. Contributing Editors are recognized scholars such as F.F. Bruce, Carl F. H. Henry, J. I. Packer and R. K. Harrison.

In its self description it is “A comprehensive guide to: The authority and inspiration of the Bible, The Canon of the Bible, The Bible as a literary text, The Bible text and manuscripts, and Bible translations.”

So stop reading Liberal Scholarship that starts with the assumption God is not able to speak and preserve His Word and start where we all must, with God. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.”