DRAFT
Martin Luther said the following in a sermon in Wittenberg on March 10, 1522:
[T]he Word created heaven and earth and all things; the Word must do this thing, and not we poor sinners. In short, I will preach it, teach it, write it, but I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything. Had I desired to foment trouble, I could have brought great bloodshed upon Germany; indeed, I could have started such a game that even the emperor would not have been safe. But what would it have been? Mere fool’s play. I did nothing; I let the Word do its work. What do you suppose is Satan’s thought when one tries to do the thing by kicking up a row? He sits back in hell and thinks: Oh, what a fine game the poor fools are up to now! But when we spread the Word alone and let it alone do the work, that distresses him. For it is almighty, and takes captive the hearts, and when the hearts are captured the work will fall of itself.[1]
This was the heartbeat of the Reformation. It was based on a God who is mighty, whose Word is mighty, and who answers to no king or human contrivance. Luther and others trusted in a God who ruled the universe with absolute power and authority, who could take care of his Word without man’s gimmicks, traditions, or ingenuity. Loraine Boettner wrote, “Put the truth of the sovereignty of God into a man’s mind and heart, and you put iron in his blood.” And the reformers who ushered in a dawning of divine light into a world flailing in murky darkness had iron in their blood.
While the Inquisition had believed a chained Bible would protect God and the people, the reformers saw the gospel flourish under God’s blessing as they flooded the world with unrestricted access to Scripture. In the case of some like Luther, it meant the loss of potential profits. In the case of Tyndale, it meant the loss of his very life. Some people would call this foolishness or sacrifice. I would simply call it obedience to a God who cares and provides for his children with unmatched faithfulness.
Just like the Middle Ages saw Christians limiting the access of other Christians to Scripture, today we see the same playbook being used by the prowling lion and enemy of our souls: Christians once again are keeping other Christians from freely using the Word of God. This is always done with the belief, whether sincere or feigned, that Scripture must not fall into the wrong hands. But Scripture was meant for the wrong hands.
That’s how the wrong hands are washed and cleansed and made new: 1 Peter 1:23 says, “you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.”
Medieval gatekeepers said, “The Bible is too dangerous for the masses.” Yes, an unrestricted Bible is dangerous, but not to the masses—rather to falsehood and unbelief. When the Sword of the Spirit is unsheathed, it pierces the heart, cuts down the darkness, and severs the head of the twisting serpent.
In this talk I want to show three main things:
- Since the recent invention of copyright law, it has failed to advance the protection of Scripture from corruption.
- How the origins and purpose of copyright law reveal its inadequacy to protect Scripture.
- God, in his providence, preserved Scripture for centuries without the help or existence of copyright law.
Copyright Law Has Failed
Let’s look first at some concrete examples of how human attempts to monopolize the Word have been unsuccessful in protecting it from corruption.
As we saw in my last talk, the KJV was born in a time before modern copyright law, but it fell victim to a printing monopoly ordained by the Crown which did essentially the same thing as a copyright. No one was allowed to print it besides a few privileged. Did this guarantee perfect bibles? Not at all.
You’ve probably heard of the “Wicked Bible” of 1631. This was an official edition of the KJV that ended up with a scandalous typo: the word “not” was accidentally omitted from the seventh commandment and rendered as: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The error slipped through the proofreaders and thousands of copies went out before anyone noticed. Clearly, the Crown’s system did not prevent a corrupted text from being published in this case. As history demonstrated again and again, central control is no guarantee of perfection.
Fast forward to 1653 with the publication of what has been called the “Unrighteous Bible.” In that official KJV printing, a typesetter once again dropped the key word “not” in 1 Corinthians 6:9, so that it read: “the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God.” And these were not isolated errors.
In 1833 Thomas Curtis published The Existing Monopoly: An Inadequate Protection of the Authorised Version of Scripture.
Curtis’s core claim was that the Crown’s Bible-printing monopoly did not actually protect the integrity of the biblical text or ensure fair prices. It bred careless editing and variable accuracy. And Curtis was not alone in his criticisms. His book sparked others to rally behind him and push for a change. For example, in 1840 James Campbell wrote Monopoly and Unrestricted Circulation of the Sacred Scriptures Contrasted. Let me give you two quotes from that book:
Oh! what a hardship is Bible bondage…? Men and brethren! will you not arise and put on your strength, and help to break its fetters? On what principle consistent with the good of our country, the glory of Christ, and the renovation of our world, can this cruel monopoly be vindicated? Gentlemen, answer me! I behold an answer in your emotions! It cannot be vindicated. No! men, angels, earth and heaven, the voice of the universe, as with the sound of ten thousand thunders, proclaims the impossibility of its vindication! This is not a question of sects and schisms, of church and dissent, but of the common salvation. It involves the honour and the operations of principle, which are dearer to the people of the Most High than life itself. Oh! who can estimate the impiety of a monopoly of the word of God? Who does not shudder at the thought of converting the charter of man’s redemption, the record of God’s mercy and Christ’s blood, into a mercantile monopoly? What Christian bosom is not convulsed in agony to think of exacting tribute from the world’s salvation?[2]
Brethren, this is our present awful condition…. The thought is dreadful! It sickens the very soul. Earth or in heaven, who among men or angels, can calculate and estimate the earthly and everlasting consequences of perpetuating this inhuman restriction, this barbarous embargo on the Word of God…? At the very first intellectual approach to the dread subject, the ears tingle, and the blood runs cold! Who can even attempt the terrible computation? Do men reason and declaim concerning taxes on knowledge, taxes on correspondence, taxes on corn? They do well; but hurtful and hateful as are all such taxes, vile weeds of the empoisoned soil of selfish nature, evil emanations of class-rule and perverted legislation; [but] they are roses of Sharon, plants of Paradise, as compared with the malignant and deadly effects of this monopoly! Think! A turnpike on the path of life! … A tax on sight when the pen of inspiration has inscribed with the blood of Christ the terms of pardon to a condemned world, a tax which must be paid before the trembling spirit of man dares either to listen to the word or look to the writing of his offended but compassionate God! How revolting the thought! What sovereign, at all apprised of the unutterable consequences of his deed, could be induced to create such a monopoly?[3]
Now, let’s look at a few examples of the textual corruption Thomas Curtis points out in his book.
- Judges 11:7 — Children for elders of Gilead.
- 1 Samuel 22 and 2 Samuel 24 — Three instances of God for Gad.
- 2 Chronicles 26:23 — head for stead; making the nonsensical sentence: “reigned in his head.”
- Psalm 5:7 — table for temple; worship toward thy holy table. Popery!
- Psalm 31:23 — plentifully rewardest the proud door for doer.
- Isaiah 59:20 — remainder for Redeemer; a direct and most important prophecy of the Messiah, quoted and reasoned upon as such in New Testament, Romans 11:26.
- Hosea 8:1 — angel, for eagle.
- Zechariah 11:17 — idle, for idol. Also in Oxford, 8vo. 1801.
- Luke 12:14 — said unto me, for said unto him.
- Luke 14:26 — Hate not his own wife for his own life. (If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.)
- 1 Timothy 5:21 — Discharge, for I charge thee before God, &c.
This is only a small selection and you can read many more in the book.
So, copyright not only failed to prevent these kinds of corruptions, but it also failed to prevent cults and cult versions of the Bible.
First, we have the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Bible, the New World Translation. This group objected to orthodox doctrines (like the deity of Christ), so in the 1950s they commissioned their own translation that famously renders John 1:1 as “the Word was a god” (among other biased alterations). No existing copyright could have prevented them from doing this. They had scholars of their own who could translate from Greek. And indeed, the NWT is entirely their own product, published with full legal rights by the Watch Tower Society. Copyright did not protect the text of Scripture from this corruption, because a determined group just made a new translation.
Second, we have the Joseph Smith Translation (JST) from the 1800s, in which he made significant additions to Genesis and other books to fit LDS theology. He wasn’t hindered by any copyright. He mostly used the KJV as a base and edited freely.
Obviously, in spite of these heretical versions of Scripture, the identity of the genuine biblical text remains clear.
It’s also worth noting that groups with heterodox beliefs prefer to make their own translation from scratch precisely because they don’t want the stigma of being a “derivative” of a mainstream Bible. If a cult thinks your translation is doctrinally corrupt, they won’t build on it; they’d rather start fresh to assert their independence and the truthfulness of their claims.
So, copyright has failed to prevent textual corruption and stop the advance of massive cults who use and misuse the Bible. But this is unsurprising because that was never copyright’s intended purpose.
The Purpose and Origins of Copyright Law
A thing’s telos is important. If you try to use a pencil to hammer a nail, you’ll be frustrated and never achieve your goal. But it’s not because your goal was a bad one; it’s just that what you’re using wasn’t made for that. The same is true of copyright law.
Karl Fogel writes in The Surprising History of Copyright:
The first copyright law was a censorship law. It was not about protecting the rights of authors, or encouraging them to produce new works…. The system was quite openly designed to serve booksellers and the government, not authors…. For about a century and a third, this partnership worked well for the government and for the Stationers. The Stationers profited from their monopoly, and through the Stationers, the government exercised control over the spread of information.
Later, as copyright evolved, it would become focused on creating artificial scarcity to maximize profits and minimize risk for publishers. This is completely different from the idea of protecting texts from corruption. That was never copyright’s purpose or goal.
Even if copyright were intended and useful for ensuring the purity of texts, another glaring question arises: can the gatekeepers be trusted? The assumption in today’s world is that the gatekeepers are incorruptible good guys, while you and I and the average Christian are inherently suspect and not to be trusted with the text. Is that a valid assumption?
I did a long series on the Bible in Arabic for my Working for the Word podcast, and in that I covered the Son of God controversy, which shook the world of Bible translation. The gatekeepers who were operating under an all-rights-reserved copyright mentality were publishing bibles in Muslim contexts that avoided calling Jesus the Son of God. That is, they used other phrases to avoid translating “Son of God” as it stands, for fear of offending Muslims. The people who were pushing for this translation philosophy were often external actors, but much of the indigenous church leadership was not in agreement with what they saw as unfaithful translation practice that was misleading at best. In spite of this, the local church community had no recourse because the custodians of these copyright-restricted translations were in favor of downplaying Son-of-God language. So because the indigenous churches lacked the legal freedom to revise or correct theological error within such translations, they were rendered powerless to safeguard sound doctrine in their own language.
This is not just something that threatens people in distant lands, though; the same control Western publishers wield could be misused or could prevent timely correction if they go astray. To give a not-so-nefarious example, the 1984 NIV Bible was updated in 2011 with changes that not all readers welcomed. The NIV’s owners then withdrew the 1984 edition from print, meaning only the new NIV can be legally sold. Churches or individuals who preferred the old wording found it increasingly hard to obtain legally. Although this may not sound catastrophic, it demonstrates the principle: copyright gives a publisher power not only to publish, but to unpublish. A translation can be altered, and then the people of God who used, loved, and relied on it in their church community are suddenly barred from printing the original. History has seen denominations and institutions drift theologically over time, and if that drift happened to the owners of a copyrighted Bible, the faithful in that language group could face a crisis.
So, returning to our question, is it a valid assumption that the gatekeepers are incapable of corruption? No.
On one hand, if we choose to live in a Pollyanna world where you see publishers through rose-colored glasses as never prone to temptation, as paragons of perfection who would never countenance the idea of intentionally corrupting the text of Scripture, then we’re naive. The Bible never calls us to have such confidence in sinful man.
On the other hand, if we choose to live in a man-centered world where God is not the supreme, sovereign owner and master who ordains all things, who guards, governs, and guides every molecule of the universe, then we’re setting ourselves up to operate out of fear—fear of man and other forces outside of our control.
And many people live in this world, where they simultaneously trust in sinful man and fear sinful man more than God. The way this plays out in the context of our topic is that the Church entrusts the stewardship of Scripture to publishers, believing they will always do right and act in the best interest of believers. And at the same time they doubt 1) that God is able to protect and preserve Scripture (so man must do it) or 2) that God is able to provide through his people in order to undertake large translation and publication projects. Often there is a lack of faith in both areas.
But when we look at the world through the lens of God’s goodness, faithfulness, power, and providence, we see his wisdom and realize that unrestricted Scripture is one of the most effective safeguards against the entrenchment of theological unfaithfulness. In a context of openness, nothing remains hidden; all is subject to scrutiny, reform, and correction (which is why those responsible for the proliferation of distorted translations are often opposed to dedicating anything to the public domain).
This idea of protecting and preserving Scripture by letting it “run freely and be glorified” (2 Thess 3:1) leads us to our third point of discussion.
God, in his providence, preserved Scripture without the help or existence of copyright law
Long before any copyright, the scrolls of the biblical authors were preserved for centuries by hand. As with all human copying, errors inevitably creep in. But because there were so many different copies and versions made across different regions, it was very difficult for corruptions to fully take over. Today we have thousands of biblical manuscripts which act as a cloud of witnesses to an accurate text. It was the absence of copyright that allowed for this proliferation and decentralization. And this enables textual scholars to compare and spot errors. The variations that exist are mostly minor spelling or word order differences, and no major doctrine is affected by them.
God did not choose to preserve his Word by anointing one single “Pope of Publishing” to guard it. He preserved it by lavish redundancy, spreading it out freely, so that even if a few copies got corrupted, the truth could be reconstructed from the many that didn’t. It is precisely because the Word was not bound that it was preserved so well.
God’s Sovereignty and Our Responsibility
Throughout history the Dragon has unyieldingly sought to devour and destroy the Bride, trying to snatch away or break her Sword with fury and cunning. And God has preserved both Her and her Sword with unflinching power through centuries of heresy, empire, and flame. So, the suggestion that divine protection now hinges on modern copyright law is a strange one. It may even be described as silly.
Is it truly dangerous to let God’s Word out into the open, unchained? Or is the greater danger in thinking we can keep it safe? God and his Word are inseparable, and he takes care of himself. He does not need a bodyguard. Our purpose is not to keep the Ancient of Days from embarrassment through our flawed contrivances. We must ask ourselves if we are at risk of becoming Uzzah, reaching out to steady the Ark (2 Sam 6:6-7).
At this point, one might still say, “Alright, I see that history doesn’t guarantee that copyright protects purity. But aren’t we supposed to put safeguards in place? Shouldn’t we do our part to guard the good deposit?”
Indeed, we are to guard the gospel (2 Tim 1:14), but how we guard it matters. Do we guard it by locking it up, or by proclaiming it widely and refuting errors with truth?
Nowhere does the Bible suggest that legal mechanisms are required to keep God’s Word pure. Instead, we find passages like 2 Timothy 4:2-4, where Timothy is charged to “preach the word in season and out, to reprove and exhort with patience and teaching,” because errors will come. “People with itching ears will turn to myths,” and the antidote is faithful teaching, not restricting access to the Bible. Jude 1:3 tells us to “contend for the faith once delivered to the saints.” That contending happens by confronting error with truth, not by creating an artificial scarcity of access to Scripture.
Again, we are called to defend and preserve truth by preaching the Word in context, by correcting false interpretations, by discipling the Church to handle the Bible rightly. But that task is spiritual and educational, not legal. It’s accomplished by the Spirit, not the lawyer and the cease-and-desist letter. Our modern legal inventions are not what stand between truth and falsehood. God stands between truth and falsehood. And he will prevail.
God watches over his Word to perform it (Jer 1:12) and will not let it pass away (Matt 24:35). Did he panic when King Jehoiakim cut up the scroll of Jeremiah’s prophecy and burned it piece by piece? Did that thwart Yahweh’s message? Not at all. He simply told Jeremiah to take another scroll and write all the words again (Jer 36).
Ephesians 1:11 says God “works all things according to the counsel of his will.” All things. Do we imagine that the purity of his Word is somehow the one area he leaves to human legal ingenuity?
I want to end with some encouraging, empowering words from Scripture that never grow old:
- Daniel 4:34–35 – His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and His kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the peoples of the earth are counted as nothing, and He does as He pleases with the army of heaven and the peoples of the earth. There is no one who can restrain His hand or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’”
- 1 Peter 1:24–25 – “All flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.” And this is the word that was proclaimed to you.
Empires rise and fall, copyright laws come and go, printing technologies evolve, but God’s Word outlasts them all. John Piper writes,
God has revealed his purposeful sovereignty over good and evil in order to humble human pride, intensify human worship, shatter human hopelessness, and put ballast in the battered boat of human faith, steel in the spine of human courage, gladness in the groans of affliction, and love in the heart that sees no way forward.
May God grant us courage of steel as we let go of what was never ours to begin with, and watch him use it in ways we never imagined.
So, in closing, I would invite the Church to consider whether we are worrying more about muzzling the ox than we are about muzzling the Word.