Is the bible inerrant?

[Vinnie]

@knor

I guess the basic NT writings accepted by a vast majority of churches (almost all?) were Tetraevangelion and most letters of Paul. Hebrews was probably not written by Paul but the message in it agrees with the other accepted scriptures. The same could be said from the other scriptures that are part of the Bible today. Anything clearly in conflict with the message of the basic writings was rejected. In this sense, the voice of the apostolic teaching can be heard even today through the biblical scriptures.

I personally don’t think the Bible is as univocal as some claim. I think a lot of that univocality is just our interpretation of Scripture, taking it in one direction. Some of it may be forced. I think the Gospels agree on major things like Jesus is Lord but there are plenty of non-canonical Gospels that do that and the Gospels seem to have a lot of disagreements as well. I think the Bible is polyvalent, multi-vocal and reflects the human sin and outlook of its authors in many places. Its composition, its dissemination and its canonization were all done by fallible, sinful humans. I can also believe the Holy Spirit played a role in this. That doesn’t make scripture perfect or infallible. It makes it “useful.” Only God is infallible, not a human book made by a human publisher, that was translated by a bunch of scholars after a ton of other scholars reconstructed the best and earliest versions of text (in their opinion) that a bunch of scholars in the early church generally came to agree were inspired hundreds of years after Jesus (in many cases based on faulty reasoning). Not to mention the human authorship of the works themselves. I can accept through Faith and personal experience that the Bible in general is God-breathed or life giving because God uses it to teach us about Jesus, lead us to salvation and a proper way of life. I don’t find the text inerrant. I don’t find the manuscripts inerrant. I don’t find the canonization process inerrant. I don’t find the translations inerrant. I don’t find our interpretations inerrant. I don’t find our doctrines of Scripture to be inerrant or infallible. The only thing inerrant and infallible is the God who uses Scripture. This is really why the Catholic Church appeals to me so much. Because without its authority passed from Jesus to Peter to the Church, so much is lost. I can’t really see how to maintain that “Scripture” without the Church.

At the end of the day I think modern sola scripture is intertwined with inerrancy and I also think how many Christians defend canonization is as well. We have this imagination that all these books teach the same thing. Rather, pious imagination makes all the books teach the same thing through selective readings and uncritical harmonization. There are certainly overarching themes and we can imagine Jesus as the fulfillment of a whole bunch of stuff in the OT that may or may not have originally applied to him, or a bunch of events that may or may not have happened as described (first passover, the whole Exodus etc). It’s very clear that the NT authors and Jesus saw himself as the fulfillment of Jewish hopes from the scriptures.

@knor

he writings not universally accepted into the canon have elements that seem to be ‘odd’ compared to the message in the core of the canon. For example, apocrypha and deuterocanonical books include something valuable but also parts where the message does not fully fit to the teaching in the core of canon. When reading these, there is a sense of not hearing the pure apostolic gospel (/the voice of the Holy Spirit).

The problem is the Jewish canon was probably net set until the end of the 1st century. The MT doesn’t have all the books the Septuagint did. Some scholars like Augustine and others wanted the wider Greek canon and others like Jerome favored the Hebrew (MT). What this tells me us Canonization in many parts was messy, not cut and dry as @St.Roymond seem to think it was. Christians argued over these works for centuries and still do today. There are at least 4 different Christian canons today with a lot of overlap. Heck, even Luther “doubted the canonicity of Hebrews, James, Jude and the Apocalypse of John” in the 1500s. Today, maybe we should question works like the Pastoral and 2 Peter. Maybe they should be apocrypha?

@knor

Although the biblical scriptures are perhaps not inerrant in the modern sense of the word, the message in these scriptures hits inerrantly to the bullseye. Anyone denying the authority of those scriptures should tell what else is a more reliable witness and voice of the original apostolic teaching?

I personally don’t think we have a more reliable “witness and voice of the original apostolic teaching” than found in the Gospels and Paul but I think most of the NT comes from second and third generation Christian writings in a language different from Jesus’s own and that there were competing views of Jesus in the early Church. I also think the names affixed to the Gospels are largely incorrect and that the early Church mixed up their order of composition. They also included a lot of books that they probably thought were written by apostles but are now recognized to be later works using apostolic authority to bolster their own views. In today’s world we would call this process forgery.

@St.Roymond

No, it doesn’t, because most of those were written after the canon was essentially established. It’s like saying that if twenty or thirty people wrote something they claimed was by Tolkien what they wrote should be considered on par with his work.

That is false. The canon was not fully established for centuries and the canon that was generally established has a bunch of works not written by who the Church thought them to be written by. The fourfold Gospel was becoming largely established by the end of the second century. But there were other Gospels (like Thomas) widely used by Christians. Gospels (some lost that come from the late first century and 2nd century before the canon was established). The Muratorian canon (which does have some differences from our canon) cannot be firmly dated enough to tell us anything certain about the state of the canon in the 2d century. Scholars such as Sundberg and Rothchild have cast enough doubt on a 2d composition as to render judgments based on it entirely hypothetical. Even if 2d century, it omits Hebrews, James and 1 and 2 Peter and includes the now rejected Apocalypse of Peter and Wisdom of Solomon (rejected by Protestants). Not to mention it accepts a bunch of works that are pseudonymous.

@St.Roymond

But that human element is the hand of the Spirit; the lists that are mostly the same with some unevenness along some edges is a lesson for us.

This is oversimplifying. As I noted to Knor, Luther in the 1500s “considered Hebrews, James, Jude, and the Revelation to be “disputed books”, which he included in his translation but placed separately at the end in his New Testament published in 1522; these books needed to be interpreted subject to the undisputed books, which are called the “canon within a canon.”” Canonization is far more messy than you claim and there were significant disputes over some books for hundreds of years.

The devil is in the details. Let’s look at 2 Peter, a Greek text almost certainly not written by an unlettered Galilean fisherman who spoke Aramaic, and probably the last NT work written.

–There is no clear mention of 2 Peter in the 2nd century.
–Even if the Muratorian Canon was a 2d work and not a 4th century forgery, it does not include 2 Peter.
–Its first reference is by Origin in the first half of the third century and in the very first reference to it on record, he puts it in the “disputed” category.
–Eusebius in the early fourth century agrees with Origin.
–First manuscript is 3rd to 4th century.
–Jerome notes many who doubted it in his time by he accepted it.
–Athanasius’s Festival letter (367CE) accepts it.
–Churches in the 5th century still reject it.

–2 Peter incorpates the small book of Jude.
–2 Peter is probably dependent on the Apocalypse of Peter.
–It probably dates from 150-200CE (after the apocalypse pf Peter)

It was refreshing to see two conservative scholars like Bird and Wright say the following:

“Postulating the apostle Peter as the author of this letter feels to us like pushing a big rock up a steep hill; the indications of post-Petrine authorship appear overwhelming. It seems to be a pastiche of so many parts of the New Testament—mentioning Paul’s letters, echoing episodes from Matthew and John, incorporating the polemical sections of Jude, and making deliberate connections back to 1 Peter.”

Yet the Church included it in the Canon as apostolic most likely because they incorrectly thought Peter wrote it. As far as I am concerned, the Canon is not even set today. Mostly set would be fine, unless one is a full fledged Roman Catholic that believes Jesus handed Peter the keys and established the Church and gave it continuous authority, I cannot remotely see how the canon is etched in stone. This is purely a faith position like inerrancy and so many other things. I’m starting to see why Wayne Grudem argued as he did more and more.

What do Wright and Bird base this on? What the vast majority of scholars know, these arguments they summarized below:

1. The reference to Paul’s letters being on par with the ‘other scriptures’ presupposes the collection and acceptance of Paul’s letters as authoritative scripture, while the comment that ‘ignorant and unstable people’ distort them implies a contest over Paul’s literary legacy between proto-orthodox and ‘heretical’ groups—both of which might be thought to take us forwardinto the mid-second century at the earliest.56

2. The second chapter of 2 Peter incorporates a large section of the epistle of Jude; this might be thought odd if Peter, the apostle, was the author.57

3. The writer seems to draw on the gospel of Matthew concerning the 58 transfiguration and the gospel of John regarding Peter’s martyrdom.

4. The author calls himself Syme􏰁n rather than Sim􏰁n; which might be a deliberate allusion to James’s recognition of the validity of Peter’s testimony at the apostolic council of Acts 15, which is the only other place in the NTwhere Peter is called Syme􏰁n.59

5. The style of Greek and mode of argument in 2 Peter is markedly different from that in 1 Peter. Notwithstanding some spasmodic replication ofwording and themes from 1 Peter into 2 Peter,60 stark literary differencesremain.61 The rhetorical style of 1 Peter is elegant and measured, but the style of 2 Peter has been labelled, somewhat colloquially, as ‘Asiatic Greekon steroids’.62 First Peter is full of scriptural language, while 2 Peter is filled with greco-roman words for deification (‘become divine’), moral discourse (talk of self-mastery and virtue), and even pagan terms like ‘Tartarus’ (theunderworld).63 Second Peter includes fifty-seven hapax legomena (words not found elsewhere in the New Testament). And, as for the tone of voice, ‘2Peter is bellicose as 1 Peter is irenic’.64

6. The language and theology of 2 Peter more closely resembles Christian vocabulary and phrasing in the second century than the first century.

7. Second Peter is not explicitly mentioned by anyone until Origen65 in the third century; the first manuscript to contain it is 72, dated to the third to fourth century.66

8. Eusebius indicates that many in the ancient church doubted the authorship and antiquity of 2 Peter.67

For thoroughness, they do go on to say:

This does not mean that 2 Peter is a ‘forgery’. It is more probable that 2 Peter is what Richard Bauckham calls a ‘transparent fiction’, whereby an author might use the device of pseudepigraphy, inherent in the ‘testament’ genre (as in the largely Jewish Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs), in order to be a faithful tradent of apostolic tradition. Eventually, however, the later gentile church did not recognize or accept the conventions of Jewish literature, and appealed to apostolic authorship rather than apostolic content to justify 2 Peter’s inclusion in the canon at a time when other late (and often heretical) books were being excluded.

If the later Church knew 2 Peter was not actually written by Peter but was a work written possibly well over 100 years after he died, it would have never been included in the canon. The same is probably true of the Pastorals and several other works. This mixup underscores just how messy canonization was in reality.

I waver between being a good Catholic and accepting their full canon and being a liberal Protestant that would probably keep about half the books of the NT (4 Gospels and at least 7 letters of Paul but probably a few more and a few other works) as full fledged scripture with the rest being secondary works useful for faith. It would be a lot easier if the Bible did fall from heaven.

Vinnie