Biblical Inerrancy – A Pious Fraud

“But a fraud being once established, could not afterwards be explained; for it is with a pious fraud as with a bad action, it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.” Thomas Paine

Is the bible inerrant? That depends on who you ask and how you define inerrant. I get my definition of inerrant from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: inerrant: adj. free from error.  So, for people to say that the bible is inerrant would mean that it is free from error, right? Well, it appears not to be the case.

Inerrancy does not mean that every copied manuscript is free of errors — only the original texts.

 

Wait… what?

Establishing a pious fraud.

In October of 1978, over 200 evangelicals gathered in Chicago to formulate a written statement defending the position of biblical inerrancy against a trend toward liberal conceptions of scripture. The document they produced called The Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy is a 3,900-word document with three parts. The first part has five short statements that summarize the entire document in a little over 220 words. Part two, which contains 1,000 words is called “Articles of Affirmation and Denial”, with 22 affirmations and 25 denials. Part three, Exposition, is the longest at 2,200 words and is the compilation of their three days together.

The curious part about this for me, is why these christian soldiers felt the need to defend their god’s reputation and authority. Think of it for a minute. Evangelicals believe that their god, Yahweh, created and oversees the entire universe, is all knowing and all powerful. So, why would Yahweh need 200 men (trust me they were all men without exception) to come to his defense? If Yahweh felt the need, couldn’t he have defended himself? So why is Yahweh noticeably lacking in this interaction? Was he unable or unwilling to defend the book which he is supposed to have inspired? In a way their actions in October of 1978 were in reality a vote of no confidence in Yahweh. “God can’t handle this liberal intrusion by himself so we (his christian soldiers) must do it for him.”

I find it rather amazing how many times in the past two years, I’ve read articles written by christians for the sole purpose of defending their god for one reason or another. Wouldn’t Yahweh be perfectly capable of defending himself. Sometimes they say the silliest things when they’re defending the character of their god as seen throughout the bible. This will be the topic of an upcoming blog. For now, let’s get back to the christian soldiers of Chicago.

Inerrancy doesn’t mean without errors.

One would think that a Statement of Biblical Inerrancy would unequivocally prove that the bible is without errors. But that’s not exactly what they do, as we can see in the following statements.

• Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching.
• We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.
• Inerrant signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.

But later in the Exposition segment of their document it seems that the writers had to face an inconvenient truth: the bible is not inerrant in the sense that it is not (according to the dictionary) “free from error.”

• Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards…
• The truthfulness of Scripture is not negated by the appearance in it of irregularities of grammar or spelling, phenomenal descriptions of nature, reports of false statements, or seeming discrepancies between one passage and another.
• God has nowhere promised an inerrant transmission of Scripture.
• It is necessary to… maintain the need of textual criticism as a means of detecting any slips (500,000 of them at last count) that may have crept into the text in the course of its transmission.
• (It is a) fact that the copies we possess are not entirely error-free.
• No translation is, nor can be perfect…

According to New Testament scholar Dr. Bart Ehrman, there are (by last count) some 5560 copies in the original Greek language of the New Testament, all of which contain errors. He writes,

• “All of these surviving copies are different from one another, giving different wording for this verse and that verse, up and down the line, page after page over the entire New Testament. We don’t know how many differences there are among our surviving copies but they appear to number in the hundreds of thousands. Most scholars think that there are some 300,000 or 400,000 differences among these copies. [Now we think there are up to 500,000!]”

It’s important to remember that we’re not saying that the copies differ from the original text. No autographic original text has survived that we can compare with the copies. The 500,000 number is how they differ from each other. How’s that for inerrant?

Sufficiently Accurate?

So how do evangelicals reconcile this inconvenient truth? Christian writer Timothy Paul Jones in an online article entitled “Why we can still trust the Bible, despite manuscript differences” says this,

• Is it true, then, that the biblical manuscripts differ from one another? Of course they do! The copyists were human beings, and being human means making mistakes. God did not choose to override the copyists’ humanity as they copied the New Testament; as a result, these human beings were every bit as prone to short attention spans, poor eyesight, and fatigue as you or I.

It’s important to point out that the original autographic writers were also human beings and prone to human mistakes as well. In addition, why don’t we have a single autographic copy of any biblical scripture? God in his infinite foresight could have seen this debate coming, right? As you might imagine, Jones has a solution to that issue too.

• Of course, one might wonder why God chose to preserve the text in this manner. Why not just preserve the autographs? Why didn’t God just allow Christians to keep the autographs sealed away in a vault somewhere?
• It’s possible that God may have not wanted the autographs to survive. One can imagine how easily (and quickly) such documents would become objects of veneration, if not worship. They might have become the equivalent of Gideon’s ephod —a good gift the people begin to treat as an idol.

How does Jones know what “God chose to do or not do? It’s clear to anyone without a religious bias that he is completely making this up. And if that’s not enough, he goes on to say this about God directed inspiration of scripture.

• “Inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. … Copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.” (Which we do not have!)

Not a single autographic text has survived. For example, the earliest fragment of the book of Mark that has survived, dates to the beginning of the third century. Meaning, that fragment of Mark is a copy of a copy of a copy that had been copied year after year for 14 decades. So, how do we know that any of the over 5,000 Greek NT copies that we have “faithfully represent the original” if we don’t have the original to compare them with? We simply can’t, and any statement to the contrary is an untruth.

It’s hard to judge Jones for this attempt to justify errors in the bible. He’s only doing what his evangelical beliefs dictate. He does deserve some credit for acknowledging the errors, that’s more than most evangelicals will admit, but then he rationalizes them away with the flimsy argument that “God inspired the original writer but not the copyists.” Weak!

He continues,

• This means the original manuscripts of the bible (of which we have none) were fully God-breathed and therefore without errors. God inspired the authors of Scripture and safeguarded their words from any mistakes. God did not, however, prevent the thousands of copyists across the ages from making mistakes as they copied the manuscripts. As a result, the surviving copies of Scripture are sufficiently accurate for us to recover the inerrant truth that God intended and inspired, but they have not always been copied with perfect accuracy.

Notice that we have gone from completely inerrant to sufficiently accurate. One must ask, if it was so important that the “god-breathed” original manuscripts were without error, why did God not make any effort to keep them that way? Notice that Jones calls the surviving copies of a copy of a copy “sufficiently accurate… to recover the inerrant truth that God intended.” So now, the “truth is inerrant” even though the bible is not. Hmmm, that’s an interesting twist. Maybe that level of reasoning is acceptable in evangelical circles, but anyone without a religious bias would see that statement for what it really is… untrue. (You thought I was going to use another word, didn’t you?)

Is your bible inerrant?

Even though their church’s mission statement might say that the bible is inerrant “in the original text,” the average christian has no idea what that really means. They are unaware that none of the “original texts” have survived the passage of time. Some might think that “original text” means that the bible is inerrant in the original Greek, yet there are hundreds of thousands of discrepancies between different copies of the Greek bible. Nevertheless, I can say with confidence that every evangelical christian believes that the bible they carry with them to church on Sundays is “inerrant.” But is it?

I can accept that average christians believe what they are told about biblical inerrancy. Most of them don’t know any better. It’s the 200 christian soldiers who wrote that Chicago document and their modern-day counterparts who are propagating the little white lies of biblical inerrancy. If evangelicals were being honest with themselves (and others), their statement of Biblical Inerrancy might read as such.

• “We affirm: Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture for a short period of time was inerrant, (until the first copy was made), but what we now have is full of errors because God chose not to intervene with the copyist. We can’t really affirm the statement that ‘what Scripture says, God says,’ but we choose to adhere to it anyway, because our authority would be damaged if inerrancy were disregarded. Therefore, we cannot declare scripture to be “completely inerrant,” but we can, without hesitation, declare scripture to be ‘sufficiently accurate.’ May He be glorified. Amen and Amen.”

Jones even puts a number to it. He says that “according to scholars’ best estimates, the English New Testament text is more than 92 percent stable.”

It’s kind of like being consistent. There are no degrees of consistency. You can’t be kind of consistent or consistent most of the time. You are either consistent or you are not. It would be silly for someone to say that they are consistent 92% of the time. In the same manner, scripture is either inerrant or it is not. Saying that it is “sufficiently inerrant” is a conflict of terms and frankly, downright deceptive.

We’re not making this stuff up! We promise.

The following affirmation and denial are taken from the Chicago Statement.

• We affirm that the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to the Church’s faith throughout its history.
• We deny that inerrancy is a doctrine invented by scholastic Protestantism, or is a reactionary position postulated in response to negative higher criticism.

Let’s see what the internet has to say on this topic.

• “The Bible itself does not claim to be inerrant. The doctrine of inerrancy is more post-biblical, even modern. And it has been particularly influential among U.S. evangelicals, who often appeal to the doctrine of inerrancy in arguments against gender equality, social justice, critical race theory and other causes thought to violate the God’s infallible word. The doctrine of inerrancy took shape during the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States.”  The Conversation.com
• “As already observed, not all theologians and church historians agree that biblical inerrancy has… been a central church teaching among Western churches. Indeed, during the past forty years an influential historiography (study of history) has emerged arguing that biblical inerrancy is a doctrinal innovation of American fundamentalism, itself portrayed as a doctrinally innovative movement and thus suspect. As late as the 1970s, most evangelicals assumed that biblical inerrancy was one of their nonnegotiable and the most basic fundamental of beliefs.”  The Gospel Coalition
• “According to McGrath, “the development of ideas of ‘biblical infallibility, or inerrancy’ within Protestantism can be traced to the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century”. Wikipedia.org

Well, that took all of three minutes to debunk.

Liar, Liar pants on fire!

I’m always reluctant to call someone a liar. Someone might believe something even though it’s not factual or true, (like a six-day creation story or the historicity of Adam and Eve). It might be a bit delusional but if they profess to truly believe in the untruth, then I will refrain from calling them liars. Case in point, I would not call Jones a liar. He is clearly restating what he has been told to believe is true, but I don’t think he’s being dishonest. He’s only doing what his evangelical beliefs dictate. But the Chicago group saying that biblical inerrancy has been a part of church history for its entirety and was not invented by scholastic Protestantism as a reaction to negative higher criticism is a bold face lie because they knew it wasn’t the truth and said it anyway. That’s dishonest and qualifies them to be called liars!

As a former christian it upsets me when christians purposefully profess some grand idea while knowing that it’s a lie. Why do they do that? I’ll bet that in 1978 those christian soldiers never imagined a world where such a collection of knowledge could expose their deception so quickly. I wonder if they would have been more careful now days knowing that with a couple of clicks anyone could reveal their falsehoods. Feeling disgusted and angered.

Final note

What does a dictionary built from the bible up have to say about inerrancy?

In my very first blog back in February of 2022, I critiqued a christian writer who believed that an evil adversary was out to destroy our civilization by (you won’t believe this) redefining words. He claimed that all modern dictionaries were playing into this sinister plot, and he pointed to the Daniel Webster 1828 dictionary, which he called “a dictionary build from the bible up” as the only true source for definitions. It’s online now, so I went there to see how Webster defined “inerrant.” To my great surprise neither “inerrant” nor “inerrancy” was in the 1828 dictionary. Meaning, of course, that biblical inerrancy was not an issue in the early part of the 19^th century. It is indeed a creation of modern-day fundamentalism.

“Liar, liar pants on fire.”

Coming next:

In the next blog we will explore why biblical inerrancy is so important to evangelicals. Hint: it’s all about power.

 

From Where I Stand

Dale Crum