That’s a good place to start, but it’s not impossible that it could be read so that there are things which can be understood from it that the original audience wasn’t ready to understand.
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I read an article that argued that there was an idiom in Aramaic that was translated into an idiom in Greek in a way that reversed the meaning.
That’s a problem in both Matthew and Mark, where the authors had less-than-stellar Greek. It’s one of the reasons that venturing to guess at what underlying Aramaic there may be can be useful.
Though that doesn’t eliminate the ‘error’, it just moves it from the text to the translator of the text, which I don’t think is much of an improvement,
Right here is the problem: it is not necessary to hold to inerrantism in order to be bound by the words of scripture. That is a false dichotomy.
Most of church history, the Bible was treated as authoritative because of who it came from, not because of an evaluation that it was in agreement with ‘fact’. We are “bound to the words of scripture” because those words came from people with the authority to teach in Christ’s name, and for no other reason – to add inerrantism as a requirement verges on idolatry.
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I’ll need to think about that a little more.
Did you see this in the thread? Regarding the staff and no staff passages, it’d probably be right up there in your wheel house:
Right off the cuff, I think the view of inerrantists, is that because of who it’s from, it will be in agreement with the facts.
The only idiom in the text that I have read about is here
The passages have two errors, “no staff vs. staff” and “acquire vs take.”
I can always mention another error if needed, another in which scripture disagrees with scripture.
As I wrote before, people who are diehard inerrantists will never accept an error unless the Bible itself disagrees with itself.
Not necessarily – I knew a grad student who said that thanks to “lit crit” a text came alive for him as it never had before because suddenly he was seeing it in its actual context and grasping the literary structure.
Why – because they get to dictate how God speaks to ancient people?
The moment they say “agreement with the facts” they are imposing a modernist worldview where science is the measure of truth. It is not.
But only people who accept the same premises as the inerrantists would call things “errors” which actually aren’t, just as it is atheists who accept the same error the YECists make when they accuse the scriptures of being wrong on science.
The odd thing is that most of this argument assumes that the church never noticed the discrepancies before, which isn’t true at all; scholars have been dealing with them since before Origen wrote his extensive commentaries!
One writer says Jesus told them not to take a staff
Another writer says Jesus told them they could take a staff
To say there is no error is to redefine error to some other meaning
It’s not a false dichotomy. My comment assumes plenary inspiration. Yes, there are other models but when I think of inerrancy I generally associate it with plenary dictation type models. If God didn’t choose the words of scripture why are we even discussing inerrancy? It’s a non-issue. Even the most careful of people make mistakes. A work of the Bible’s size by a host of authors over a thousand years in many different times and places from all walks of life and different levels of education will inevitably have some internal and external errors—unless it’s God picking the very words of scripture and writing from a heavenly perspective. Inerrancy is meaningless to me from the perspective of accommodation. To believe in accommodation is to believe there are biblical errors.
Would you care to list all the things Paul says then we can through through them box by box marking off what’s true? What’s maybe true and what’s not. Do you realize what you are asking for. Christians don’t all agree on how to interpret Paul or on what epistles he even wrote. This is not how I approach scripture… or I try not to.
Paul thought Christians should not get married because Paul thought Jesus was the first fruits of the general resurrection which was at hand. Paul had a mistaken eschatology and should be read in this context on several issues. There is still a lot of value to glean as we should as we should always be vigilant and ready for that day. In addition, the kingdom of God takes precedence over every aspect of our life and while we hope it always coincides with them, that includes parental and familial duties as well.
Rather than soften Paul’s views on marriage and claiming some controversy in the Corinthian church making them specific to that location, I am taking them at face value. Inerrancy advocates use way too much theological fabric softener.
Vinnie
There has to be some issue the Corinthian church faced, otherwise Paul would not have written Timothy that widows should remarry.
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No, I think it would a whole lot easier for you to say a book or chapter you think is without error.
As you know, it’s the scholarly consensus that Paul did not write Timothy. Paul is also, like everyone else, allowed to change his mind or contradict himself as well. Jesus can grow in knowledge and wisdom per Luke but apparently Paul can’t? Later Paul must always be 100% consistent with earlier Paul? Why? People change their minds and beliefs evolve over time. People also contradict themselves. This is only natural.
Paul is careful to distinguish his words from the Lord’s here but it seems he contradicts them. If marriage is really tied into the created order and two become one flesh, one wonders how Paul can allow remarriage when Jesus expressly forbade divorce and remarriage.
Vinnie
In the context of that discourse, Jesus also advocated blinding yourself if you look lustfully at someone, and cutting off your hand if you find it is doing something it shouldn’t. Context matters. And I agree that with Paul, context matters, and advice for one church at one time may not be appropriate for another church in another time.
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Would that be this one:
That’s just not true; there are other definitions of inerrancy. One of the more viable is that God let the writers do their thing and only intervened to keep the message straight or to correct drifts into inaccuracy. That means God didn’t choose words but He did rule out some. And given the wide range of literary types, idioms, vocabulary, and stylistic differences it’s far more sensible than any form of plenary inspiration.
The whole notion of inerrancy in its modern formulation, though, is pointless because it misses the concepts of “word” in scripture; the term does not mean “vocable”, it means “message” (or “concept”, or perhaps “proposition”, or even [in the logical sense] “argument”). Arguing over the vocables is missing the grove for the shrubbery.
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Given the concept of “word” in both the Old and New Testaments, yes – we need to define “error”: an error would be a deviation sufficient to change the message. So confining it to individual vocables or even clauses deviates from the scriptural standard and thus misses the whole point; it misses the message by dwelling on details.
This is the one I heard