Our topic today is “the uniqueness of the Bible.” In this
two-part blog, we will study how the Bible is unique in its circulation, unique
in its translation, and unique in its survival. On Monday, we will examine how
the Bible is unique in its teaching, unique in its influence, and what the
implications of these truths are for us today.
These are statements that you can talk about openly with
people who may be skeptical about the Bible. The points that we will explore
today and Monday are verifiable facts, whether or not you believe the Bible to
be the inspired Word of God.
The Uniqueness of the Bible
1.
The Bible is unique in its circulation.
The Bible has been read by more
people, published in more languages, and distributed in more countries than any
other book in history. There is no comparison. You may find a higher circulation
of another book in a particular month, but in all of history, nothing compares
to the popularity of the Bible.
In 1990, the British and Foreign
Bible Society (which, for many decades, was the primary publisher in London of
the King James Version) published one copy of the Bible, every three seconds,
around the clock in order to keep up with the demand. That amounts to 22 copies
printed every minute, 1,300 copies produced every hour, and 32,876 copies
created every day (24 hours per day, 7 days per week). What book comes close to
this? And that only accounts for the 30 year period in which the British and
Foreign Bible Society was the primary distributor of Bibles.
The Cambridge History of the
Bible writes, “No other book has ever known anything approaching this constant circulation.”
2.
The Bible is unique in its translation.
One of the first major
translation projects is the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the
Hebrew Old Testament. This project was completed in 250 B.C. The Bible was the
very first massive translation effort. There was no other work that came close
to this prior. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that by 1966, the entire
Bible had been translated into 240 languages and dialects. Portions of the
Bible have been translated into 739 languages. This equals 1,280 languages and
dialects!
3.
The Bible is unique in its survival.
What other book has ever been as
persecuted, attacked, and had such widespread efforts to eradicate it as the
Bible? No other book! And yet it has survived. Jewish scribes kept tabs on nearly
every letter, syllable, word, and paragraph. They had a meticulous attention to
detail!
Thomas Cahill wrote a trilogy
titled The Hinges of History. The three
books (which offer a quick, compelling, and easy read) are titled The Gifts of the Jews (about the
influence of the ancient Jews on history and present culture), The Desire of Everlasting Hills (discusses
Roman civilization’s impact on our culture), and How the Irish Saved Civilization (the story of Ireland’s heroic
role form the fall of Rome to the rise of Medieval Europe). In the latter work,
Cahill explains that while the great libraries of Rome and Byzantium were
burning under barbarian invasions heading into the Dark Ages, Irish monks
living in obscurity in the British Isles were busy by candlelight copying and preserving
for us the literature of antiquity, among which are the illuminated manuscripts
of the Bible.
If you were a scribe or monk,
every letter—every stroke of your pen—would be scrutinized. You could write all
day, get to the end, have a bad moment or nod off, make a mistake, and you would
have to start over. It had to be perfect. God used this in the preservation of
His Word!
Let’s compare the New Testament with
Shakespeare’s plays. An article in the North
American Review reported that in every
one of Shakespeare’s 37 plays, there
are nearly 100 readings still in dispute by Shakespearian scholars. The New
Testament text of nearly every verse may be said to be settled by general
consent of scholars with only a dozen exceptions. That is 200 years for
Shakespeare, and 2,000 years for the New Testament![1]
If this book had not been the
Word of God, it would have been destroyed long ago, completely gone from
history. In 303 A.D., Emperor Diocletian in Rome issued an edict to restrict
Christians from worship and to destroy
their Scriptures. He made it Roman political policy to stop Christians from
worshipping and eradicate the Bible. Twenty-two years after this edict, Emperor
Constantine issued another edict that 50 copies of the Scriptures should be
prepared at the governor’s personal expense.
In 1778, the French philosopher Voltaire
said, “One hundred year from now there will not be a Bible left on earth except
one looked upon by antiquarian curiosity seekers in a museum.” Voltaire is
dead, and the Bible has survived. Ironically, 100 years after Voltaire’s death,
his home was used for a Bible distribution center in Europe! We serve an
awesome God!!
Bernard Ramm, a noted biblical
scholar writes, “A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been
sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, but
somehow the corpse will just never stay in the grave.”
Earl Radmacher, president of
Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, quotes Nelson Glueck. Glueck was not an
orthodox, evangelical Christian. He was the former president of the Jewish
Theological Seminary (a secular Jew) in the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati
and one of the three greatest archaeologists of his day. Radmacher said, “I
listened to him [Glueck] when he was at Temple Emmanuel in Dallas, and he got
rather red in the face and said, ‘I’ve been accused of teaching the verbal,
plenary inspiration of the Scripture. I want it to be understood that I have
never taught this. All I have ever said is that in all of my archaeological
investigation, I have never found one artifact of antiquity that contradicts
any statement in the Word of God.”
Join us on Monday as we dive into two more ways the Bible
is unique: in its teaching and in its influence!
Pastor Jeff Frazier
[1]
Stowe, Professor C.E. Origin and History
of the Book of the New Testament, Both the Canonical and the Apocryphal. London:
Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1878. pp. 80-81.
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