I’d like to take up an argument my friend Kent makes in support of his view of Bible preservation. I do so with some trepidation as I am not wanting to get into a wide-ranging debate on the whole topic, it is just this particular argument that I want to address with a few comments.

It comes up by way of a guest post on Kent’s blog by David Sutton, but the subject is one Kent himself has written about as well. The most recent blog is called, “Perfect Tense Preservation”.

First, I’ll try to state the argument succinctly. Kent (or others) can correct me if I am wrong in my understanding of the argument:

it is written

The argument uses the words of the Lord Jesus in responding to Satan as an argument for the perfect preservation of the Scriptures.

The argument is based on the Lord’s use of the perfect tense in the phrase, ‘it is written’. The perfect tense, we are told, refers to past action with ongoing results in the present (to the person speaking).

Since the Lord referred to God’s Word by using the Greek word gegraptai, ‘it is written’ or ‘it hath been written’ (YLT), the argument goes that this proves the words initially written by Moses and quoted by Jesus were continually in existence from the time of Moses to the time of Christ in a perfectly preserved written form. Further, the word assumes, according to the argument, that the words will be preserved into the future since the ongoing effect of the perfect tense is such that when the future becomes the present, the effect is maintained.

In TSKT, I made the point that what Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy was written down by Moses and continued written down some 1400 years later when Jesus referred to those passages. Thus, if Jesus claimed those words were still written down in His day, then we should understand that we still have them written down in our day.

Well, I have some questions about this.

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I regularly read the blog of my friend Kent Brandenburg. He often posts here so we have a mutual admiration society thing going. However, we do disagree at some key points.

He is blogging lately about “The Erroneous Epistemology of Multiple Version Onlyism”. I usually don’t enter into the debates on this subject as I find the argumentation exceedingly tedious. The same things get said, over and over, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Against my better judgement, however, I do occasionally wade in. Here is my foray on Kent’s latest post. I am arguing against some assertions Kent made, especially the assertion that God’s people are promised to always have God’s word perfectly preserved in every generation. Kent cited Mt 4.4 as proof of this, I object that it says no such thing. I also offer the example of Josiah in 2 Ki 22, where a scroll of the law is discovered in the temple, apparently forgotten and unused and perhaps the only copy of the law in existence at that time (my inference from the reaction of the king and the apparent mystification of the priests about the scroll – see also 2 Chr 34 for more details).

A commenter on Kent’s blog takes me to task for my arguments, I give a smart alecky reply, which Kent takes umbrage at. So there we are.

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