Encountering Challenges to Biblical Inerrancy

As you can see, they're both with us on Skype because they're in different locations. So, Andreas, why don't you tell us where you are and what you do where you are?

So, Michael, why don't you fill that out and talk about how that happened and where people can find that information and then we'll dive into the topic straightaway.

So as you know, I contacted you and Andreas and a number of other scholars and said, "Hey, you know why don't we go through these alleged contradictions sort of one by one and offer a response so that the world out there, particularly the lay level folks, can get a short succinct answer to some of these Bible challenges?" And so we did that. My site's name is called Canon Fodder. Obviously one N for canon less you miss the pun.

But, Andreas, when Michael asked you to do this, I know you responded positively as I did. Why do you think this is an important conversation to engage in?

This is very different. Here you have some people who would like to be considered evangelicals who believe they are evangelicals who are claiming to actually try to strengthen other people's faith and to uphold the trustworthiness of scripture, but they have forged this new paradigm that they call trustworthy but flawed or inadequate but still reliable. And if you and I think that's a contradiction in terms, I think what they feel like is, well, it's kinda like a marriage where both people are sinners, right, but just because they're sinful people doesn't mean they can't still have a great marriage.

The other thing I'll add to it too is part of the newness and what's happening here isn't just the retention of the evangelical label while you critique the Bible, which is sort of a weird hybrid. But also the idea of taking this to the lay audience has been sort of the turned for the last 10 or 15 years. It's been a much more popular thing. Armen certainly has done this. He sort of bypasses the academy and goes right for the laypeople in many of his works. You look at Pete Enns’ recent book, The Bible Tells Me So, written very much at a lay level, popular level. Published by Harper One; no footnotes. All designed to go for the lay level.

So the reason I thought the blog was important is because even though the three of us have written about these issues in books, the average person we know today, for better or for worse, isn't reading the books we write necessarily. They're reading blogs. They're reading the websites. We want to reach the average person, which is why I thought this series was so important.

What do we do with the idea of the claim that inerrancy is new? And I think to start of this discussion I want to put on the table something that I teach in exegesis that really is important, and that is what I call the word concept fallacy. Which is that just because you don't see the word in a discussion doesn't mean that you don't have the concept on the table. And I like to illustrate it this way. This might be tough since you guys are in North Carolina. But my illustration is the cowboys are going to the frozen tundra to melt the cheese heads. And when I say this I ask my class, what am I talking about? And of course they respond, well, that's American football. And I say, "Well, how do you know that's about American football? American football is nowhere in that sentence." And of course they're able to triangulate the various linguistic clues in the topic that tell me that's what it's about.

Or another example that I'll use that's theological. The Nicene Creed never uses the word trinity explicitly in its layout. And yet it's all about the trinity. So just because you don't use a word doesn't mean you don't have a concept. So with that kind of as the background, I don't know which one of you want to speak to this first, but let's deal with the idea that inerrancy is a new concept and a new doctrine.

And so first thing to be said, not the last thing, would be that really, you know even in scripture itself you already see that you have this testimony that scripture can be trusted because it is the word of God.

The other response we'd make, which is a typical one, is that historically studies have shown that, in fact, it's not a new idea. It's not simply a twentieth century fundamentalist concept. It dates all the way back to, we would argue, the early church. Certainly as Andreas has pointed out, the early scriptures themselves. But I was looking just in Augustine's work recently and you look at Augustine's interaction with the synoptic gospels and dealing with the synoptic problem, he makes a number of statements that are very clearly consistent with what we could call inerrancy even though he leaves the word out. And so you could date this all the way back to the early church.

So the trustworthiness has to do with ultimately a statement that God is responsible for the contents of scripture and thus it rests in the character of God. Inerrancy has two major concepts to it. One is the association of authorship and the divine roots of the generation of that authorship. And the second is a slightly more controversial addition and that is the qualification in the original manuscripts. This is something that gets put forward that a lot of people will raise and they will say, well, we don't have those original manuscripts so what's the point of referring to them? So let's deal with that question a little bit. How do you all respond to the idea that it's important to make a statement about original manuscripts versus say the copies of the scripture we hold in our hands?

I like to tell my students, our problem is we have about 105 percent of the text rather than 100 percent of the text. We've got the text plus all the variants that have come in through the process of copying and the process of text criticism is to whittle away at those options. And for a layperson for whom, you know text criticism and manuscripts is a completely different almost foreign world, even they get some access to this conversation. Cause a good Bible will oftentimes in the margin have a note that says or that tells you what the alternative is. So you know if it's not the reading that you have in the text, then the option is this thing that's sitting off in the margin that's tell you what the wording is.

So we've got access to the original text in many ways.

And I think sometimes we forget that when we've got a doctrine like inerrancy there actually is something we're trying to affirm that's important. And that is that when I approach the text, I approach the text with an openness and a trust that this text is accurate. That it's designed not just to affirm something but to deny something at the same time. And what it's primarily denying is the idea that the scripture errs. That when I approach it I've got to approach it with some kind of an understanding and appreciation that it – that I read it in such a way that I try and make sense of it first rather than simply assuming that it's wrong. And I think sometimes people forget that when they think about this doctrine.

So, Mike, let me start this kind of new direction in our conversation off this way. What were some of the kinds of specific issues that came up that your blog response has been dealing with? And let's think about them kind of in generic kinds of categories about the kinds of questions people have when you say the scripture doesn't err with regard to the original manuscripts.

So one of the issues is how the Bible squares with itself. And there's a number of those largely related to the gospel accounts. But then there's another category of objections that came up in terms of how the Bible squares to what is said in other disciplines or what is said in other historical accounts. So not just the issue of whether the Bible disagrees with itself, but does the Bible disagree with Josephus or about the census of Quirinius? Does it disagree with other thing we know about the ancient world and how things were done? And so those are two large categories of the kind of attacks that went down. The Bible disagrees with itself and the Bible disagrees with other known facts of history.

Anyway, so – and here's one of the examples that came up that I think illustrates the kind of problem that we're dealing with. I'm thinking about the confession that Peter makes at Caesarea Philippi. And he's answering the question, and in fact, even the question raises the question to some degree, who do people say that I am or who do people say the son of man is? I mean the question gets asked in two different forms to begin with. And the answer comes back, the Christ. The Christ of God. And then the Christ and then I like to embellish the Matthean version, the Son of the Living God. So you've got these three different replies that you're dealing with. And so the question becomes, you know in relationship particularly to the idea of a red letter Bible, you know Jesus said exactly this, what's going on here? So how would you explain that kind of an example to your audiences, or to your students.

And so it's not just that you're doing those things. You're doing those things with a particular audience in mind. So no wonder that Matthew has is slightly different than Luke. But they're all trying to condense or paraphrase or summarize what Jesus said in some fashion. So you have a whole number of different dynamics swimming around. And when we compare this to the other historians in the ancient world this is exactly what they did. They hear a speech. They don't give you the whole speech. They summarize the speech in a statement and then put it on the lips of the person who spoke it. Doesn't mean it's inaccurate. It means that it's accurate in the way that ancient historiography was done.

Another example that shows this kind of difference I like to point out happens in something as significant as the wording at the Last Supper. You've got the difference between this is the blood of the covenant versus this is the blood of the new covenant. Okay. And you go, you know the very, very literal person says, okay, what did Jesus say? And of course there's only one covenant that hasn't been established by the time Jesus is talking. The Abraham covenant's already operative. The Davidic covenant's been going for a while. It's the new covenant that was being anticipated to be realized. And so when he's talking about establishing the blood of the covenant, it's quite possible that's all Jesus said but implicit in that was the covenant that was being referred to, which was the new covenant. So someone comes along and makes explicit what's implicit. It was already there. It just wasn't on the surface. And in the process you get a difference of wording.

So those kinds of situations I think happen actually pretty regularly and can be anticipated. Michael, you look like you want to –

Regardless, you know it's a great reminder that chronological order is in principle not something the gospel authors always felt the need to follow. I mean one of the perennial examples of this, which probably you're headed to, Darrell, is the issue of the cleansing of the temple. Right?