I became a Christian and remain one due to personal experiences while reading about Jesus in the Gospels, not because through a careful study in my high school years I realized a 2,000 year old anonymous text written 40 years after the nature-defying, miraculous events it reports are all demonstrable true. God is sovereign and speaks to us how he wants and through whatever method he chooses.
Does the presence of an error in one of my physics textbooks render it all suspect or useless? Of course not. What about five inconsequential errors? The answer is the same. I recently read Matthew Kelly’s ’ The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity ’ and he mistakenly referred to butterflies as emerging from a cocoon instead of a chrysalis–a mistake I have also made. Does this terminology snafu render everything else in the book suspect or useless? Absolutely not! Mere errors in the Bible do not necessarily undermine its trustworthiness. Now if a physics textbook is observed to start making a significant number of errors when it came to actual physics content, since composing such information is its central purpose, one would rightfully be skeptical of the remaining text. If the Bible starts getting a bunch of things completely wrong about God and salvation when properly interpreted, then we would have cause for alarm.
I could equally ask inerrancy advocates the same question to be honest: "How do you keep faith in Jesus despite all the contradictions in Scripture?"I mean there are so many one famous apologists made an entire “encyclopedia” of them! Instead of trying to harmonize them all away with linguistic and mental gymnastics, I just admit what they are and move on. It wasn’t easy at first. I went through a tough deconstruction process and stepped away for a while. Took a long time for God to break through. I am slowly building a website with writings aimed at that group of Christians.
Vinnie