The Bible’s Enduring Quality

● Professor Oscar Paret, in his book The Bible, Its Preservation in Print and in Writing, attributes the preservation of the Bible to the fulfillment of God’s own promise: “The saying of Jehovah endures forever.”—1 Pet. 1:25.

“Briefly, the results of our consideration are these: The Bible is the best preserved book of ancient times. It is true that the Bible Scriptures were written by men and transmitted by them and therefore have been affected by human mistakes and imperfections. But, as Christians, we perceive God’s governing hand behind the human destinies of the Bible, for despite all of men’s attacks, it has preserved the Bible for two thousand years through a period of the most severe kinds of persecution. Numberless worthwhile creations of human minds have been lost and forgotten. The Bible, however, which today is still riding the crest of a worldwide victory march, still printed and distributed in the millions of copies annually, translated either fully or in part in eleven hundred languages, will neither be lost nor forgotten, since, as a witness to God’s revelation, it stands under the promise: The Word of the Lord endures forever. Because this Word of God houses, as it were, delightful treasures within earthen vessels, thereby explaining the much greater influence it has had upon human civilization far and wide than any other book in world literature, expressing itself in the realms of poetry (songs by Luther and Paul Gerhardt, language of the classics), or pictorial art (Grünewald, Dürer, Riemenschneider) and of music (Johann Sebastian Bach), too, the Bible has and always will endure as THE BOOK OF BOOKS!”