This article is written from a KJV-only, right-division (Mid-Acts) posture and draws on Bryan C. Ross’s From This Generation For Ever: Volume 2 — Preservation. Ross states the project’s aim plainly: “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,” and the volume quotes Scripture from the King James Version (From This Generation For Ever, Vol. 2, front matter).
At the heart of Ross’s study is a simple scriptural conviction: God promised to preserve His word. Ross collects the Bible’s own witness — Psalm 12:6-7; 105:5; 119:89, 111, 152, 160; Isaiah 30:8; 40:8; Matthew 24:35; I Peter 1:23-25 — and affirms that “Preservation is the Bible’s claim for itself. God promised to preserve that which He inspired” (Lesson 28). That promise shapes how we evaluate manuscripts, editions, and translations.
Ross is careful with the facts of textual history. He observes plainly that the original autographs are not extant and that no two Greek manuscripts, editions of the Textus Receptus, or printings of the King James read exactly the same (Lesson 28: “Fact 1 — the original autographs are not extant… Fact 2 — no two Greek manuscripts are exactly the same… Fact 4 — no two editions of the King James Bible are exactly the same”). Quoting Kevin Bauder, Ross highlights the trouble with demanding literal “exact sameness”: “If the preservation of the Word of God depends upon exact preservation of the words of the original documents, then the situation is dire” (Lesson 28, citing Bauder).
To make sense of those facts Ross turns to Scripture itself for the proper categories. The book of Jeremiah is a key case: an original written by Jeremiah is burned (Jer. 36), God re-inspires Jeremiah and adds words, and then God directs that the later copy be destroyed (Jer. 51:61–63) — yet God’s message continued to be available to Daniel and was quoted by Matthew centuries later (Lesson 29). Ross uses this chain of events to show that God did not intend preservation to mean an untouchable single autograph, but rather the secure transmission of inspired content through copies: “Once the copies were made, God did not care what happened to the original. The original contents of Original #2 were preserved via the copying process” (Lesson 29).
From these facts Ross draws a clarifying definition: preservation, properly understood, assures a Pure Text — a text that has not been altered in its fundamental character so as to report false information about God, doctrine, history, or dispensational truth. He writes that what preservation promises is not “verbatim identicality” but “pureness,” and he appeals to Noah Webster’s 1828 sense of preservation as keeping something nearly in its original state (Lesson 29: “what the doctrine of preservation assures is exactly what verse 6 states, namely the preservation of a Pure Text…”, and Webster’s definition).
Ross also outlines the practical and theological stakes. He quotes men like R.B. Ouellette and William Combs to show the divide between those who see a preserved text carried forward (preserved) and those who treat the text as a problem to be reconstructed (restoration). Ouellette: “inspiration was completed in the past, preservation began in the past and carries through today” (Lesson 30). Combs’s threefold classification and Ross’s reading of the debate show why the question matters for translation and confidence in the English Bible we use (Lesson 30).
Pastorally, Ross counsels humility and faith. He warns against making preservation a demand for impossible ‘Xeroxed’ sameness and reminds readers that even within the King James camp there is diversity of nuanced views: “there is no universally agreed upon viewpoint to which everyone subscribes” (Lesson 28). The faithful posture, following Ross, is to trust God’s promise that He preserved His Word in a pure and available form, to use the KJV as the faithful English expression of that preservation (the book’s stated aim), and to approach textual questions with both diligence and confidence in God’s providence.