Not surprisingly, then, no subject is more important for the Christian than the Bible.  Every Christian who reads it knows that the Scripture claims to be the divinely inspired and inerrant Word of God. This means that the inspired Scriptures comprise God’s very own words to us and that they do not contain even a single error. The Lord Jesus Christ told us this when He stated, "Thy word is truth" (Jn. 17:17, KJV). The Scripture itself declares it is "perfect," "very pure," and "sacred" (Ps. 19:7; 119:40; 2 Tim. 3:15, NASB).

We are told by God Himself that the Scriptures can never be destroyed; they are irrevocable.  The Apostle Peter emphasized that "the living and abiding word of God" is "imperishable" (1 Pet. 1:23, NASB). Jesus said, "The scripture cannot be broken" (Jn. 10:35) and "heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (Mt. 24:35, KJV), for "it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of the letter of the law to fail" (Lk. 16:17, NASB). The Prophet Isaiah cried out, "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever" (Is. 40:8, KJV).

Thus, the position of the Christian church for twenty centuries has been that only the original writings by the inspired authors, those who first penned the 66 books of the Bible, are the actual, authentic Word of God. In other words, collectively, as soon as these individuals stopped writing, the Bible was complete and divine revelation ended. From that point on, in order to have God’s Word, Christians had to make copies of the original, divinely inspired manuscripts.

Today, even though we do not possess the original autographs (the actual parchments or papyri that Scripture was first written on), and even though variant readings (copyists’ 2 differences) exist for about 1–2 percent of the Bible, we can still know that the copies, collectively taken, give us one hundred percent of the original manuscripts. In the small area where differences among copyists do exist, textual critics of the Bible attempt to determine the most probable original reading. However, even this 1–2 percent of the text affects no Christian doctrine or belief.

Nevertheless, many Christians today claim that the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is really the only Bible God wrote and further, like the original writings or "autographs" of Scripture, that only it is inspired and inerrant—i.e., without error.

Those who defend the King James Version Only (KJVO) as the inerrant Word of God make several assumptions. For example, we know today that the KJV Bible was produced from a half-dozen relatively late manuscripts selected by Erasmus who used them in 1516 to write the Greek text employed by the King James translators—who themselves placed critical notes and variant readings in the first edition. Actually, they used Erasmus’ text as it had been revised by Stephanus (1551) and Beza (1589–1598). Yet KJVO writers assume that these manuscripts were somehow divinely inspired and preserved from all error. Out of the hundreds of carefully copied Old Testament Hebrew manuscripts and the thousands of New Testament Greek manuscripts, only a small portion of these manuscripts were actually divinely inspired and protected in order to produce the King James Bible. Obviously, those who defend the King James Version only must claim to know which of all the manuscript copies were inspired and which were not. On what basis do they make such a claim?

The problem with this assumption is that there is not a shred of biblical or other evidence to substantiate it. No Scripture in the KJV Bible even hints that this scenario might be true.

(So, if the King James Bible is our only authority, shouldn’t we accept the implications of what it does not say, as well as what it does say?) We think a different approach is more prudent. Rather than assume that only one family of manuscripts has been divinely inspired and protected, the evidence tells us that no single manuscript or family of manuscripts is 100% perfect. Why? Because copyists’ errors exist in every manuscript we possess and this can be proven merely by looking at them.

Even very careful copyists always make a few mistakes. But if no manuscript is perfect, this is also true for Bible translations.

(to be continued)

1 Frank S. Mead, The Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations (Revelle, 1965), pp. 25–30.

2 Edwin A. Blum, "The Apostles’ View of Scripture," in Norman Geisler (ed.), Inerrancy (Grand

Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1980), p. 49.

3 Jack P. Lewis, The English Bible From KJV to NIV: A History and Evaluation (Grand Rapids, MI: