By Pastor Dave Farmer
Summary
The Bible is unique in many ways. In the next several articles we will see the amazing unity of the Scripture, the magnitude of its circulation, the veracity of its texts, and the fact of its survival. It holds the record in so many areas that taken together; they point to the supernatural origin of the Bible.
The ministry of God the Holy Spirit in inspiration truly makes the Bible the most unique book ever written. Yet, the Bible is an amazing book in many other ways.
The Unity of the Scriptures
Another way the Bible shows its uniqueness is in its unity. By unity, I mean that the individual books of the Bible are in perfect harmony with one another. This is a literary phenomenon, a true miracle, attesting to the supernatural origin and divine control over the writings.
To illustrate, imagine this! Let us assemble writings from independent sources. We gather a few cuneiform tablets from the Ur of the Chaldeans and add a few scrolls of papyri from Egypt. Then we take a few books from the East; such as the Upanishads, and from the West, books from Greek and Roman literature. Now we select material from various men in different walks of life along a common theme: merchants, laborers, priests, kings, etc. Bind them together into one book. What do we have? We will have the biggest and largest collection of a hodgepodge in the world.
However, God is not the author of confusion, and His Book is wholly different in result. Let me say again, if an editor were to collect writings from various men over sixteen hundred years, they could never produce unity. Apart from divine guidance, the writers of these sixty-six books couldn't produce it even if they were mega-Einsteins. Dr. James Orr speaking about Mohammedan, Zoroastrian, and Buddhist writings says, "They are destitute of beginning, middle, or end. They are, for the most part, collections of heterogeneous materials, loosely placed together" 1
There is nothing in all of literature like the Bible. We have sixty-six different books, written by 35 different authors, over sixteen hundred years, in three different languages. These men came from all walks of life. You have farmers (Amos), fishermen (James, Peter, and John), a tax collector (Matthew), a priest (Ezra) and kings (Solomon and David). There was no conference held, and no collaboration took place between the writers. Yet the astonishing result is that we have, through the independent testimony of a multiplicity of men, perfect agreement with one another. This cohesiveness of content is so evident that we often refer to the Bible as one Book.
So the amazing composition of the Bible is confirmation that God superintended its assembly at every stage of writing. It is one Book with sixty-six unique chapters. In Genesis, we have the commencement of the story, and in the Revelation we have it's consummation, and all that is in between tells HIS STORY, the story of redemption, the story of the Redeemer, the only true celebrity - the Lord Jesus Christ. The promise of a redeemer was anticipated in the Old Testament by types and prophecy, accomplished in the Gospels by recording His life, death, and resurrection, applied to the needs of all people in the Acts and specifically to His people in the Epistles, and His ultimate victory achieved in the Book of Revelation. ONE STORY! A PERFECT UNITY!
The Distribution and Circulation of the Bible
The Bible holds The Record! It is the most published book in the world. It was the first significant work translated from one language to another - the Hebrew into the Greek Septuagint. It was the first printed book - Gutenberg's Latin Vulgate. It is the most valuable book in the world. Gutenberg's Bible sells for more than $100,000 a copy. The British paid the Russians 100,000 pounds for the Codex Sinaiticus. This was equal to $510,000 (at that time). The longest telegram on record was the sending of the Revised Version of the New Testament from New York to Chicago. The largest edition of any book in the history of printing was broken with the first printing of the Revised Standard Version on September 30, 1952. One million copies released. 2
The number of Bibles printed over the years is incredible. These estimates are incomplete and outdated, but staggering! The American Bible Society reports: Up to the year 1932, 1,330,231,815 Bibles had been published. Then they state this: “For the British and Foreign Bible Society to keep up with the demand for Bibles it must publish one copy every three seconds day and night; 22 copies every minute day and night; 1369 copies every hour day and night; 32,876 copies every day in the year. And it is deeply interesting to know that this amazing number of Bibles was dispatched to various parts of the world in 4583 cases weighing 490 tons. “
Some more statistics! The British Foreign Bible Society and the American Bible Society have published 84,000,000 entire Bibles; 104,000,000 New Testaments; and 144,000,000 Gospels and single books. In 1951 the American Bible Society published 952,666 Bibles, 1,913,314 Testaments, and 13,135,965 portions of the Bible. The National Bible Society of Scotland has published 88,070,068 copies (1928), the Hibernian (Dublin Bible Society), 6,978,961 (1928). The various German societies published about 900,000 for the year 1927. The Gideon's in America distributed 965,000 Bibles in 1928. 3
These figures have not scratched the surface. However, they are sufficient to establish one fact. The Bible holds the record! It would be interesting if all the various publishing houses produced a count of the number of "Bibles published" and forwarded them to a central computer for tabulation. I expect that we would need a mathematician to create a brand new numbering system to count them. I recall how people were surprised how long Rush Limbaugh's book "The Way Things Ought To Be" remained number one on the New York Times Best Seller's list. Apparently Rush's book established a record for nonfiction. Well, the Bible is a nonfiction Book, and it has been a best seller every year since they invented the printing press.
The Bible wins in popularity and circulation over all of the greatest literary works that the genius of man has produced. If the Bible was a farce, how could it possibly endure? It must then have the power to grip the human soul far beyond human literary works. 4
ENDNOTES
1 Thiessen, Henry C. Introductory Lectures in Systematic Theology. 9th Ed. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1968. (Thiessen, p. 86).
2 Ramm, Bernard. Protestant Christian Evidences. 10th ed. Chicago: Moody Press, 1967. (Ramm, pp. 227-228)
3 Ibid. (Ramm, p. 226-228)
4 Ibid. (Ramm, p. 228 -229)