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The Canonisation and Preservation of Scripture
Jeffrey Khoo
There are Christians who
wrongly think that the Bible is only infallible and inerrant in the past
but no longer infallible and inerrant today. They say that the church
today does not have all the words God has “breathed out” for His people
(cf. 2 Timothy 3:16-17). Such a view undermines the very foundation of the
Christian Faith. If the church today does not have an infallible and
inerrant Bible, then how can we know for sure that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of the living God? If we do not have every inspired word of the
Holy Scriptures today, then how can we obey Jesus’ command that “Man shall
not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4)?
It is disturbing that
so-called Christians today, even conservative or fundamental ones, do not
and cannot believe they have in their possession a perfect Bible,
infallible and inerrant. They would rather accept the false teaching that
the Bible is no longer infallible and inerrant; that God did not preserve
His words perfectly to the jot and tittle; that some of God’s inspired
words have been lost and remain lost. According to them, it is simply
“foolish faith” to believe in the perfect preservation of the divinely
inspired Scriptures.
The New Testament comprises
a total of 27 books with 140,521 words that God has inspired and preserved
throughout the ages according to His promise, “For verily I say unto you,
Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass
from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:18); “Heaven and earth
shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35; Luke
21:33; Mark 13:31). By faith in God’s unfailing promise, every sincere
Christian ought to believe that he has a perfect Bible today.
How do we know this? In the
same way that God worked in history to preserve and identify for us the 27
canonical books of the Greek New Testament, God has also preserved and
identified for us the 140,521 inspired words of the Greek New Testament in
the time of the 16th century Protestant Reformation. It is important to
understand that God’s special providential work can involve a closure, a
terminus. All the inspired New Testament books were completed by A.D. 100
when the Apostle John wrote the last book of Revelation, and God warned
against adding to or subtracting from His Written Word in Revelation
22:18-19. We also know that in the first few centuries, there were
uninspired men who penned spurious writings and passed them off as
Scripture. Some of these were the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of
Nicodemus, the Epistle of Barnabas, etc. These false and heretical books
threatened to confuse and overthrow the truly inspired books of Scripture.
Nevertheless, God would never allow any of the inspired books of Scripture
to be lost or obscured during the process of biblical canonisation (i.e.,
the precise identification and authoritative listing of the divinely
inspired books of the New Testament). The Holy Spirit providentially
guided the church in His own special way to identify the 27 books which we
accept today as our New Testament Canon, no more, no less. There was a
terminus to the canonisation of Scripture at the Council of Carthage in
A.D. 397.
In like manner, the Lord
allowed copyist errors and corruptions to enter into the transmission
process through the pen of fallible scribes. Nevertheless, His special
providential hand kept His inspired words from being lost. By virtue of
God’s special providence, that nothing happens by chance, and that history
is under His sovereign control, in the fulness of time—in the most
opportune time of the Reformation when the true church separated from the
false, when the study of the original languages was emphasised, and the
printing press invented (which meant that no longer would there be any
need to handcopy the Scriptures thereby ensuring a uniform text)—God
restored from out of a pure stream of preserved Hebrew and Greek
manuscripts, the purest Hebrew and Greek Text of all—the Text that
underlies our KJV—that accurately reflects the original Scriptures.
That the special
providential preservation of Scripture sees its historical parallel in the
special providential canonisation of Scripture was Dean Burgon’s thinking
as well. Dr E. F. Hills wrote of Burgon: “Burgon … never lost sight of the
special providence of God which has presided over the transmission of the
New Testament down through the ages, expressly set out to maintain against
all opponents that the Church was divinely guided to reject the false
readings of the early centuries, and to gradually accept the true text. He
denied that he was claiming a perpetual miracle that would keep
manuscripts from being depraved at various times, and in various places.
But ‘The Church in her collective capacity, has nevertheless—as a matter
of fact—been perpetually purging herself of those shamefully depraved
copies which once everywhere abounded within her pale’ (The Revision
Revised, 334-5). He believed that just as God gradually settled the
Canon of the New Testament by weaning His churches from non-canonical
books, so He did with the Text also.”
The God of the Bible is an
all-powerful and all-knowing God, and this God cannot fail to preserve His
inspired words to the last iota according to His promise, so that His
people at every age, even today, can say with absolute certainty that they
have in their possession a 100% perfect Bible, infallible and inerrant;
and can tell precisely where all His divinely inspired words are
providentially preserved to the glory of His Name.
Rev Dr Jeffrey Khoo is the
academic dean of Far Eastern Bible College.
- Published in
Bible Witness, Vol 5 Issue 2 (March - April 2005)
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