Bryan C. Ross begins Volume 3 with a clear, pastoral posture: “The purpose of this project has been to set forth our belief that the King James Bible is God’s Word for English speaking people.” That conviction frames the study of canonicity and transmission that follows. Ross intends to enunciate a position on the final authority of the King James Bible that is “scriptural, reasonable, factual, and historically accurate,” and he approaches the historic questions of canon and textual history guardedly, with the presuppositions set out in Volume 2.
Ross defines canonicity as the process by which the church recognized which books are to be included in Scripture. He traces the word 'canon' to the idea of a measuring reed (kanon/qaneh) and shows how the New Testament uses the notion of a standard or rule. The early church—so Ross recounts from the lessons—looked for writings reliably connected to apostles, for books valued across churches, and for agreement with known truth. Athanasius’s 39th Festal Epistle in A.D. 367 is often cited as the first formal list of the twenty‑seven New Testament books, but Ross stresses that such lists only acknowledged what the Spirit and New Testament prophets had already borne witness to in the churches.
A sober assessment of preservation undergirds Ross’s work. He reminds readers of hard facts: the original autographs are not extant; no two Greek manuscripts are exactly the same; no two printed editions of the Greek New Testament or of the King James are identical; and modern versions differ among themselves. Quoting the volume’s review, Ross observes that “If the preservation of the Word of God depends upon exact preservation of the words of the original documents, then the situation is dire.” That stark fact forces the believer to an honest standard of what God’s promise of preservation actually requires.
From those facts Ross argues for a biblical understanding of preservation that does not demand verbatim identicality of every original line. He sets out the biblical marks by which the preserved text is to be identified: multiplicity of copies, availability/accessibility, and long use by God’s people. In his words, God’s design was to preserve His word “in a multiplicity of accurate reliable copies that were just as authoritative as the originals,” and those copies would be available and in use by believers through the dispensation of grace. When these marks are applied, Ross reasons, the Textus Receptus and the Reformation‑era text that underlies the Authorized Version best fit the Scriptures’ own standards.
Ross treats challenges from church history candidly, especially the Marcion episode. Standard accounts portray Marcion as rejecting the Old Testament and abridging New Testament writings, producing an altered Luke and ten Pauline letters. Ross cautions humility in weighing the fathers’ charges and warns against assuming that councils or later committees ‘made’ the canon. Rather, as his lessons emphasize, councils like Carthage merely recognized the canon that the Holy Spirit and apostolic witness had already established; the Marcion model fails if it assumes a human subgroup determines the borders of Scripture apart from the Spirit’s historical testimony.
The link between prophecy and preservation is another theme Ross explores with pastoral balance. He acknowledges the persuasive spiritual logic—fulfilled prophecy argues for inspiration and, by extension, for preservation of the prophetic text for future identification of fulfillment. Yet he resists an absolutist demand for textual verbatimism. Quoting the course material, Ross points out that recognizing prophetic fulfillment does not require exact identical wording at every transmission stage; Paul can say “it is written” even when slight, non‑doctrinal verbal differences exist between citations and earlier texts. Thus preservation guarantees that the Word’s doctrinal character and redemptive content remain intact even when wording varies in minor ways.
For the believer today Ross’s pastoral charge is straightforward: our work is not to reconstruct some lost autograph but to allow Scripture itself to guide us in identifying the text God preserved. As he puts it, “our job as believers is not to reconstruct the text as though it has been lost. Rather our job is to allow the scriptures to be our guide in identifying the text God has preserved from generation to generation.” Volume 3 promises to trace that transmission from the apostles to the Authorized Version of 1611, applying the biblical marks of multiplicity, accessibility, and continual use so that KJV‑centred believers may stand on a historically and scripturally coherent ground.