The Bible warns in 1 Timothy 4:1-2, "Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron."

The Bible today is under attack like never before. The modernists through The Da Vinci Code tell us that the 27 books of the New Testament Canon are false and must be replaced by newly discovered Coptic manuscripts which speak of a more realistic down-to-earth Jesus stripped of all His deity and moral purity. They claim that the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, and other Gnostic Gospels are the true Gospels; and that these Gospels must replace the Canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Many evangelical Bible Colleges and Seminaries today teach that the Bible was only infallible and inerrant in the past, but no longer infallible and inerrant today. According to popular theology, the Bible today contains "insignificant mistakes," "redundant words," and so-called "scribal errors."

A new book written by Bart Ehrman entitled Misquoting Jesus (HarperCollins, 2005) is fast becoming a bestseller. In his book, Ehrman attacked the KJV and the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures behind the KJV. According to Ehrman,

The King James Bible was based on corrupted and inferior manuscripts that in many cases do not accurately represent the meaning of the original text. The favorite Bible story of Jesus’s forgiving the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3-11) doesn’t belong in the Bible. Scribal errors were so common in antiquity that the author of the Book of Revelation threatened damnation to anyone who ‘adds to’ or ‘takes away’ words from the text.

In other words, in Ehrman’s mind, if you quote from the KJV or its underlying texts, you are misquoting Jesus.

Bart Ehrman began as a fundamentalist at Moody Bible Institute but finally lost his faith at Princeton Seminary where he got his PhD. How did he lose his faith? Let me read Ehrman’s tragic testimony on page 11 of his book. He wrote,

If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture? In some places, as we will see, we simply cannot be sure that we have reconstructed the original text accurately. It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are!

This became a problem for my view of inspiration, for I came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words, surely he would have given them to them (and possibly even given them the words in a language they could understand, rather than Greek and Hebrew). The fact that we don’t have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that he did not preserve them for us. And if he didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words.

In short, my study of the Greek New Testament, and my investigations into the manuscripts that contain it, led to a radical rethinking of my understanding of what the Bible is. This was a seismic change for me. Before this—starting with my born-again experience in high school, through my fundamentalist days at Moody, and on through my evangelical days at Wheaton—my faith has been based completely on a certain view of the Bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of God. Now I no longer saw the Bible that way.

Let me just say this: If we do not believe that God has verbally and plenarily preserved His words, that we have truly the very words of God today—100% infallible and inerrant without any mistake—and are against the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek words behind the KJV, we might just end up like Ehrman—an agnostic and a modernist.

It goes without saying that it is not enough for true Christianity to believe in the verbal plenary inspiration (VPI) of the Scriptures; it is equally important to believe in the verbal plenary preservation (VPP) of the Scriptures. "The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever" (Ps 12:6-7). The twin doctrines of VPI and VPP are our only sure defence against the attacks on the Bible today.

The Faculty and Board will soon take the Dean Burgon Oath as spelled out in the College Constitution which states:

1.1.1.1 We believe the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament underlying the Authorised (King James) Version to be the very Word of God, infallible and inerrant.

1.1.1.2 We uphold the Authorised (King James) Version to be the Word of God—the best, most faithful, most accurate, most beautiful translation of the Bible in the English language, and do employ it alone as our primary scriptural text in the public reading, preaching, and teaching of the English Bible.

1.1.1.3 The Board of Directors and Faculty shall affirm their allegiance to the Word of God by taking the Dean Burgon Oath at every annual convocation: "I swear in the Name of the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit that I believe "the Bible is none other than the voice of Him that sitteth upon the throne. Every book of it, every chapter of it, every verse of it, every word of it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High. The Bible is none other than the Word of God, not some part of it more, some part of it less, but all alike the utterance of Him that sitteth upon the throne, faultless, unerring, supreme."

We have a fixed Canon and a fixed Text. We see no need for textual criticism and we reject higher criticism altogether. May the Lord protect and preserve FEBC as we stand fast on His forever infallible and inerrant words until we see Him face to face. Amen.