Matthew 5:18

I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

(NIV)

• The entire Bible is now translated in more than 400 languages.
• Portions of the Bible have been translated into nearly 2,500 languages.
• The United Bible Societies report that their network of organizations distributed 633 million portions of the Bible in 2000.
• There are more than 5,300 ancient manuscripts of the Greek New testament, more than 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 9,300 other early versions. (The next most commonly copied document is Homer's Iliad with 643 manuscripts... all of them partial. Yet nobody doubts the reliability of the Iliad.)
• What about mistakes from the copying? 99.7% of the mistakes that are found are easily accounted for. Only 0.3% remain, and none of them have to do with any major doctrine of the Faith. "No fundamental doctrine of the Christian Faith rests on a disputed reading." -Sir Fredrick Kenyon (Leading authority on textual criticism.)
• The New Testament was completed around A.D.100, and the oldest copy is dated at A.D.125. Only twenty-five years! (Compare that to the Iliad, which earliest copy is dated 500 years later than the time it was written.)
• The Bible was written by forty different people who lived over a period of 1,500 years apart and consisted of prophets, kings, shepherds, fishermen, a physician and a tax collector... just to name a few. Yet, contrary to the minority opinion, they are all in agreement. (You might say, "what are you talking about? The bible is full of disagreements!" My response: name one. My e-mail is mattharmless@gmail.com.)
• Every one of the 61 major prophecies concerning the messiah were fulfilled by Jesus. Even unbelieving scientists applying the measurement of statistical probability tell us that the chances of just eight of those prophecies being fulfilled is one in 10¹⁷.

I have just skimmed the surface. No other book has been as hated as the Bible. Countless numbers of people have tried to destroy it, ban it, and burn it. And all have failed.

Here is one illustration of how the Bible has been preserved under attack. You may have heard of Voltaire, the French infidel. He predicted that Christianity would be destroyed within 100 years of his lifetime ant that the only place you'd find a Bible would be in a museum. Instead, Voltaire has become history, and the circulation of the Bible continues to increase around the world.

Ironically, within fifty years of Voltaire's death in 1778, the Geneva Bible Society bought his home and used his own printing press to print Bibles.

--James MacDonald, God Wrote a Book

All facts came from James MacDonald's book, God Wrote a Book. You can read my review of this book on this post.