more important is understanding what to do (or not do) with these judgements.
RIchard
If we do not believe there are such judgments to be made, there is nothing to decide. So which is more important, believing they exist or not, or understanding what to do with them, the possibly nonexistent judgements.
If we believe they exist, then it is important to know what to do with them. But ‘more important’? More important than what?
(“Watch out” is the only mandate we are given in that passage.)
It would be refreshing if people who see those errors could simply face the facts.
I gave an example earlier of a minor error — but clearly an error.
If one account says Jesus told the Apostles they could take a staff on the missionary journey
And
If a second account says Jesus told the Apostles not to take a staff on the missionary journey
Then
At least one of these accounts has an error.
People who are dyed-in-the-wool believers in inerrancy will believe what the Bible says no matter what evidence there is to the contrary, so the only way that I have found to help them realize that there are errors is to show them where the Bible disagrees with the Bible
Not for the purpose of usurping God’s place to decide who’s eternally in or out! This is basic stuff, Dale! Of course we discern in order to know whether or not any given message (or even person) should be heeded. We are rather obliged to specialize in that around here, and dealing with the fruit and fallout of various false messaging all the time!
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“Watch out!” is a pretty basic mandate.
I’m doing no such thing and you’re making a flaming straw man argument. Joseph of Arimathea was presumably a Pharisee, wasn’t he. The Good Shepherd will find his lost sheep.
This is apropos:
And this is an interesting translation/paraphrase:
“But if any place refuses to welcome you or listen to you, shake its dust from your feet as you leave to show that you have abandoned those people to their fate.”
Mark 6:11 NLT
Learn from yourself:
Exactly, Dale! Good quote. Did you notice how the reaction is to just let go and move on yourself? It wasn’t about trying to run everybody else out of town who disagrees.
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Some facts matter more than others. Whether it was a staff or no staff isn’t super important for me. I recognize there’s a discrepancy, and I also recognize that reasonable people can disagree about what we do with it.
It is also not about entertaining, providing entertainment for, those who do.
Then inerrancy is not super important to you.
But that does seem inconsistent with your posts.
It’s not so important that I have to resolve every discrepancy or to have a complete list of all the supposed discrepancies.
So yeah, what I value about being an inerrantist, is that it has allowed me to find some really neat things in the Bible that I would not have otherwise seen. I also prefer reading theologians like Tremper Longman who say the Bible is without error, or Craig Keener who admits the weight of possible contradictions, but continues to maintain a high view the Bible as a kind of faith commitment. For me, an inerrant Bible is like a Noah’s Ark, and so far it has rescued me from a couple spiritual conflicts. I couldn’t imagine being in a church and under spiritual leadership if that person or group of elders was not also bound to the words of Scripture. And at this point for me personally, I’m not interested in a line drawing contest with the elders in my church.
I think we (or at least some of we ; - ) can safely say that God inerrantly communicates what he intends to his own if we read the Bible, not unhitching the OT from the New, in the manner that Dietrich Bonhoeffer approached it:
Or, we can read it like someone working on their dissertation for a lit crit PhD and get no practical or personal good from it.
I used to agree, but it’s become more and more evident that the problem with Revelation is that it is heavily Hebraistic and even more heavily in “code”, neither of which aspects is familiar to the modern reader.
As for 2 Peter, I don’t see any of the arguments against it as having much weight. Here’s an article that’s not far from my position: Is 2 Peter Peter’s? | Bible.org. Interestingly for this thread it invokes inerrancy!
This is where Bart Ehrman went off the rails: he concluded that since there are plainly ‘errors’ in the New Testament then it plainly wasn’t inspired. I see that conclusion as sophomoric, something most people reconcile early in their university attendance.
The moment I saw the critical apparatus in Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece editio 25 I treasured all those variant readings for not just the reason above, that we weren’t promised a perfect set of (or a set of perfect) documents, but that the existence of the variants was a signal to keep our eyes on Christ, not on any specific readings in the apparatus. That Ehrman concluded what he did tells me that his faith was not in God but in the text because one with faith in God would respond with, “Huh – I wonder why God permitted this?”
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I think the most compelling argument for its exclusion from the canon is that no church leader mentioned it for more than 100 years after the death of Peter.
If it were not a forgery, someone would have mentioned it before 200 AD.
“Hippolytus knew numerous other Christian writings from the first and second centuries, and on occasion quoted from such books as the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Acts of Peter, and the Acts of Paul. One observes, however, that all this literature does not possess in his eyes the same authority as do the Gospels or the Book of Revelation. He is the first Christian writer to reflect a knowledge of 2 Peter, but not as ‘Scripture’, and he must have known James and Jude at least slightly, for he once alludes to the opening verse of James with the words, ‘As the saying of Jude (sic) in his first letter to the twelve tribes “which are scattered in the world” proves’.13”
Excerpt From
The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance
Bruce M Metzger
This material may be protected by copyright.
Hippolytus, the first church leader to mention a knowledge of 2 Peter, wasn’t born until 170 AD.
Of course, its apparent plagiarism of other documents doesn’t help its case either.
And Eusebius declared it not genuine and not belonging in the canon.
This is a matter of Law and Gospel. Martin Luther said that we should take every condemnation made in scripture and apply it to ourselves, which is totally contrary to how the flesh prefers to do things. While we may see some condemnation and immediately think, “That doesn’t apply to me”, that just feeds self-righteousness; when encountering any condemnation we should ask,
“How does this apply to me?”
Much of what is called “Protestantism” fails to get this, and as a result there is so much condemnation of this and that and the other thing that the general public sees Christianity as being about rules that people have to be forced to obey.
Jerome’s statement can’t be taken as support for inerrancy given that when he encountered a Greek word that could be translated with two or more Latin words he frequently just put both Latin words into his text! My favorite example of this is from Galatians; the Greek has nine words there but IIRC Jerome has fourteen.
It’s perfectly possible to agree with Jerome’s assertion but not believe at all in inerrancy.
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I have a splitting headache at the moment so I can’t remember sources, but something we came across in a grad school course Canonization of the New Testament was that when what we translate now as “inerrancy” it generally didn’t have anything to do with details of the text at all, it had to do with the theme that God’s Word goes precisely where it is aimed, that it accomplishes the task God had in mind. The analogy was used of an archer: an inerrant archer was one who always put each arrow right into the center ring of the target, regardless of how good the arrow itself was.
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I like this statement and whilst i may not agree with what is derived from it in terms of the inerrancy of the Bible, we [YEC and TE’s] may find some common ground here.
My father is a retired minister and i have been raised with the Bible as an ultimate source of authority. I think we need to consider that Biblical inerrancy does not claim to teach calculus or TIG welding or even how to wipe one’s butt…but what it does teach is that the reason for our existence is one of intelligence…an intelligence in Genesis 1:26, Gen 2:7,15&18 that is willing to have a very personal and physical involvement in the molding and guiding of His creation. He became a man and even died on the cross for his creation to prove that He is not selfish…to show the universe that Satans charge against him was false and that His future plan is to restore us and the world back to the condition it was when He created it…without weeds and tares, sickness and death…without sin.
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What Jerome did shows that he valued the original Greek text so much that he was careful not to twist the message by using latin words that do not fully reveal the original message in the Greek text. It also shows how difficult it is to translate the meaning of the original text. When there are several possible ways to translate something, each translation is an interpretation; it tells that this meaning in more likely than the alternative ones. A translation revealing the possible alternative ways to translate gives a better understanding of what the original scripture tells. From this viewpoint, I would say that the way Jerome translated was thoughtful, more like a modern than ancient way to approach the problems of translation.
What Jerome did also shows that he was considering the Greek text as the original one and the latin translation just as an translation.
I doubt that you would like that world. Being able to sin is a part of the freedom of life. Remove it and you remove that freedom.
Richard