Why I am a Christian (16)

The Bible Has Withstood and Overcome Centuries of Unparalleled Attack

In 2012 I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I found 26 so I decided to serialise them in a blog every fortnight for a year.

I have so far covered themes linked with science, philosophy and theology before looking at five different facets of Jesus (I could have explored many more). Now I am looking at the Bible.

Having marvelled at the extraordinary unity of its message in Reason 15, I want to write about its almost miraculous durability.

In July 1994 I travelled up a long and winding road in the wild and beautiful Cévennes in Southern France. There is a museum at the end of the road - in the middle of nowhere - called le Musée du Désert. It bears testimony to the large community of Huguenots who fled and hid in that rugged terrain following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by Louis XIV, ending a period of tolerance towards Protestants. One of the features of the museum is a display of tiny Bibles that were printed at that time, some small enough to be successfully concealed in a woman’s hair. The Bible was absolutely forbidden in those days and, in peril of their lives, many people made inordinate efforts to safeguard it from obliteration.

It has occurred to me many times since that visit that the Bible must easily be the most consistently and passionately opposed book of all time.

As A.W. Pink noted in The Divine Inspiration of the Bible; “For two thousand years man’s hatred of the Bible has been persistent, determined, relentless and murderous. Every possible effort has been made to undermine faith in the inspiration and authority of the Bible and innumerable enterprises have been undertaken with the determination to consign it to oblivion.”

No army has ever gone into action to either impose it on unwilling readers or defend it by force. Its principal endorsement and sole defence have been the love and esteem in which it is held by ordinary people who have read it and been transformed by its message.

There are billions of us. It is easily the best-selling and most translated book in world history. At least one book of the Bible has been translated into over 2,500 languages. As an indication of the scale of that achievement, the publishing phenomenon that is J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter has been translated into less than 70.

And yet, despite its popularity, the Bible is surely the most banned, burned, ridiculed and smeared book ever published. Why does the Bible polarise opinion like no other publication? I'll offer an answer at the end of this piece, but first of all I want to trace the extraordinary history of hatred towards the Christian Scriptures.

It started in the Roman Empire. On 24th February 303, the Emperor Diocletian published his Edict Against the Christians ordering the burning of Bibles, the demolition of places of worship and issuing a blanket ban on Christians assembling to pray. This was the last great wave of Roman persecution against Christians but the first to explicitly target the Bible itself as well as those who read it. 

Of course the Christian Scriptures in those days were all painstakingly copied by hand. There were no printing presses so the production of even one Bible would take many months. But despite Diocletian's bonfires, the Bible prevailed.

After the Roman Empire declined, the Bible was zealously censored by a lamentable, political corruption of Christianity we call Christendom. The period we now call the European Dark Ages lasted for about a thousand years (5th - 15th Centuries). During this time learning was stifled, the arts were suffocated, social progress ground to a snail’s pace and, with Christianity sick and separated from its main source of inspiration, Islam was born.

(As an aside, I would argue that, had the Bible been available to ordinary Christians during the Dark Ages, none of the above would have happened; education would have been encouraged, the arts would have flourished, social progress would have accelerated and Islam would never have filled the vacuum left by a corrupt and ailing church, unrecognisable from that of the 1st Century. Incidentally, it’s also worth pointing out that the crusades occurred at a time when the Bible was not publicly available. So people were denied the opportunity to read plainly that taking up the sword to spread faith, or even defend it, is contrary to the teaching of Jesus).

The American sociologist, author and pastor Tony Campolo once mused about how Christendom had been a bad idea. "Mixing the church and state" he said, "is like mixing ice cream with cow manure. It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream!"

Various Councils from the time of Christendom stamped on calls for the Bible to be made available to the masses. They expressly forbade the translation of the Bible from Latin, thereby limiting its readership to the rich and powerful, who were eager to preserve their privileges at all costs. Canon 14 of the Council of Toulouse (1229), Canon 2 of the Council of Tarragona (1234) and Rules on Prohibited Books from the Council of Trent (1545-63) are three examples of this. In fact, even priests were usually denied access to the Scriptures for personal study.

But towards the end of the Dark Ages, people rose up to reclaim the Bible. Dissenters began to argue that God's Word should be available to everyone, unshackled from Latin, and rendered in the language of the marketplace. At that time, restrictive suppression of the Scriptures gave way to violent attack on them.

John Wycliffe (c.1320–1384) was the first to attempt to translate the Bible into English, though it was from the Latin and not from the Hebrew and Greek source texts. The Council of Constance (1414-1418) later declared Wycliffe a heretic, banned his writings and trashed his work. His remains were exhumed and burned. Wycliffe’s followers, called Lollards, were also burned at the stake with their Bibles hanging round their necks.

The scholarly William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) worked painstakingly, and at great personal cost, to produce the first English-language Bible translated directly from the original Hebrew and Greek. In his day it was a capital offence not only to translate the Scriptures into English but even to read or own such a translation or any part of it. He spent many months of his life in hiding, having to travel clandestinely around Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany to evade arrest and arrange for Bibles to be printed. They were smuggled into Britain hidden in bails of wool. In the end, Tyndale was betrayed, captured, tried and strangled to death before his remains were burned at the stake. His last words were "Lord, open the King of England's eyes!"

Many others were publicly executed at this time; most were burned alive. But the Bible was now available all over England and throughout Continental Europe on the black market. The lion was out of the cage!

Fierce opposition to the Bible spread like a rash all over Europe. But little by little, Bibles became available in more and more languages as the Reformation took hold. The long and severe intellectual, artistic, cultural and social winter of the Dark Ages started to thaw as the Bible began to influence culture once again.

But God's Word then came under another form of attack; an assault on its authority through higher criticism.

Enlightenment scholars in the universities and seminaries of the 18th and 19th Centuries began to erode confidence in the Bible’s divine inspiration and authority. It was dismissed as inaccurate, unreliable and exaggerated. It was patronised as primitive legend, fable, and myth. It was disparaged as a human fabrication and rejected as revelation from God. Such attacks continue to the present day.

Of course, selective reading of the Bible was nothing new. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) once said "If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself." But at this time in history higher criticism was a full-frontal attack on the authority of Scripture just as it was becoming freely available everywhere.

Christians who believe in the devil should be under no illusion why the Bible has been so ferociously opposed throughout history. It is in the interests of the enemies of Christ to keep the Holy Scriptures firmly shut. For wherever Christianity is vigorous, growing, mission-minded and healthy, the Bible tends to be held in high esteem and is centre stage. It is not for nothing that all the great revivals - from the Great Awakening in New England, to the Wesleyan movement that transformed 18th Century Britain, to the 1905 Welsh revival, to the Azusa Street Pentecostal outpouring in Los Angeles - all held tenaciously to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. Conversely, wherever the Bible is marginalised and scoffed at, the churches associated tend to slide into decline and irrelevance.

In more recent times, the Bible has been opposed and forbidden by atheist political dictatorships such as the former Soviet Union and present-day North Korea. It has been denounced and barred by Islamic theocracies such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Maldives and Afghanistan. The Gideons list 18 countries where they are not allowed to operate at all. There are many other countries where severe (though not outright) restrictions are imposed. Increasingly, their work is resisted in Western nations (for example recent reports in Canada and the U.K.) to avoid "causing offence" to people of other faiths.

Has any other book in human history sparked as much opposition and antagonism? It's hard to think of anything that comes close. 

And yet the Bible not only survives, it prevails. Even in secular countries where the Bible’s obituary was written long ago, it refuses to go away. Just last month (June 2013), for example, it stormed back up the best-seller lists in Norway, knocking Fifty Shades of Grey off the top spot.

The Bible itself asserts its invincibility. 2,750 years ago the Prophet Isaiah said “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever” (Isaiah 40.8). And Jesus said “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24.35).

Like Daniel and his contemporaries emerging unscathed from Nebuchadnezzar's furnace without a hair singed or even the smell of fire on them (see Daniel 3), the Bible continues to stand unflinching, untainted and undiminished by every angry attack on it.

So why does the Bible divide opinion like no other book? 

I think it is uniquely hated and attacked because it tells the full, unpalatable truth about human nature. We are sinners in need of a Saviour. And human pride and ego rage against the very idea that we need to be saved from ourselves and from the folly of our rebellion against God.

Furthermore, no other book spells out so clearly the devil’s ultimate fate; he will be judged and thrown into a lake of fire prepared for him (Revelation 20.10) and he unleashes his fury against the book that affirms it. No wonder that virtually throughout the history of Christianity the Bible has been burned, suppressed, outlawed, belittled and undermined.

And, conversely, I think the Bible is loved and treasured like no other book because its central message of God's love and grace is such good news. It transforms millions of lives like no other book ever can, ever has done and ever will. I'll reflect more about this in two weeks' time (Reason 17).

The near miracle of its stubborn survival and ever-enduring popularity is the 16th reason that I am a Christian. I love it that God's Word is indestructible!