The Bible never claims to be inerrant. That is a man-made claim not found in scripture.
God has always used imperfect people do achieve His work. Why wouldn’t He use imperfect documents?
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Since this is not about science, isn’t it about time the moderators turn it into a private message and eliminate its value to the kingdom of God?
To the original post:
You do know that there are multiple canons, don’t you”
I prefer the NT canon of the Church of the East, which has only 22 documents
This is the argument I hear the most. The all-or-nothing theory. As if we get all knowledge at once. Paul, in 1 Corinthians admits we only know in part!
The problem is that people are trying to impose an authority onto topics or knowledge that is not related directly to God and faith. The Bible, like all religious texts, is primarily “designed” to imbue faith and encourage a certain religious viewpoint. Topics like creation or healing are peripheral at best. Genesis 1 is a necessary starting point for theology but it does not have to be ground down into minutia.
The Garden of Eden is clearly a rant about the unfairness of this world. Why do we have weeds! Why do women suffer birthing pain? (That one would seem to have a logical and practical answer that has nothing to do with sin) We have to establish the existence of sin but people seem to need to completely define it there and then, and ignore the rest of Scripture.
The view of God evolves from a tribal God through a National God to a very personal one who is available to everyone. During the process views of God change. God is very much more accessible in the beginning, even visible to a lesser or greater extent. Clearly this is not the case now, so do we just dismiss the stories of God’s appearances as fantasy or take them in the context of the faith of the time?
Biblical criticism is a topic that can take a lifetime to understand so it seems a little naive to think that we can dismiss it with Sola scriptura.
Richard
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I am curious as to why you asked this question about inerrancy. It certainly stimulated a lot of conversation.
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Something that has long fascinated me is that back in the first several centuries different churches had different versions of the canon yet they didn’t consider that as an issue worth dividing over. They also had levels of confidence within the canon, the best example being the difference between the homolegoumena and the antilegomena, the universally accepted New Testament books and those that were disputed, with the practical difference being that doctrine wasn’t to be founded on the basis of any of the antilegomena but only on the basis of the homolegoumena.
Thinking again of the infalliblility issue as far as councils, I note that the only promise of infallibility that I can find in the scriptures is where Jesus promised the Apostles that the Holy Spirit would guide them into all truth. Since it was a promise made to the group, and that group was the leadership of the church, then the promise applies when the complete leadership of the church agrees together. But that condition hasn’t been possible since the split at Chalcedon, which I’ve concluded was not a proper decision since it was forced by the emperor and was thus not a decision reached after prayer and study and discussion and was not in fact a decision about substance but about vocabulary: both sides believed the same about Christ, they just had different perspectives because they were concerned primarily with different heresies – and thus they wanted language that firmly excluded the heresies they were fighting. So I think the last time that the promise held was at Ephesus in 431.
Which canon-setting group would you consider infallible, if any?
The Council of Carthage around 397 AD set the Roman Catholic canon. It includes the apocrypha.
The Protestant canon is smaller and did not exist until about 500 years ago.
The Ethiopian canon is larger and includes the Didache and other books.
The Armenian canon did not include Revelation until 1000 AD
The Church of the,East canon predates all those and excludes the NT books that Eusebius listed as disputable.
How would a person decide one of these groups were infallible in their setting of a canon and the others were misled?
Like you (if I understand you correctly), we can’t assume there was infallibility in any canon-setting group,
Fortunately, all the canons include the good news of Jesus Christ.
But I think any canon that includes Revelation or 2 Peter is not appropriate.
We were never promised a perfect set of documents; we have a perfect Savior.
I tend to think of scripture as good enough to serve the purpose God intended. This makes sense since the Bible is accommodated and God didn’t see fit to preserve inerrant copies of the Bible and yes, canonization is questionable on a few books as well.
Most stories in the Bible seem to tell me something similar. None of the people seemed perfect but in the end God’s will was accomplished through them.
I’m interested in your canonization breakdown. Can you recommend any sources outlining the basis for these beliefs?
Vinnie
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This is good:
https://www.amazon.com/Canon-New-Testament-Development-Significance/dp/0198269544
And this is helpful:
Check out the different tabs
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I have Metzger’s work on Canonization. It was informative to me to see what was considered scripture to early authors.
It would help if we could actually date the Muratorian Canon. Your linked Website lists 200 CE (presumably). Others out it in the second half of the second century for quite obvious reasons but there is a significant scholarly push for a more nuanced date viewing it as a 3rd or 4th century work.
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As I thought about the conversation this morning, I’m impressed that we, and I don’t mean this to refer to you and me specifically, but Christians can disagree about a whole host of errors, and even the canon of Scripture.
The thing I find perplexing is how after having a basic familiarity with the Old and New Testaments, that the New Covenant would still be drawn into question or not even spoken about by those who are a Christian.
This incredible gift that God has given us, his promise to forgive our sin and to be our righteousness, does not depend on an inerrant text. I believe that the Bible is a covenant document, and it has been amazingly preserved, whether you want to believe it as being of the highest standard and without error is a choice that each of us is free to make.
I am just personally glad that the Church should not ever be given the power of the sword. Maybe when Jesus returns that will change, but until then, I too am still a work in progress. And my kids, and my friends. So I am very grateful for the Lord’s patience.
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No, but being able to put women in their place, telling homosexuals they are sinners and serving as absolute justification for whatever ideology someone is peddling certainly does depend on it. Loving Jesus, repenting of your sin and feeding the poor do not.
I think the trouble is many people are also full, post-enlightenment Westerners and even though its logically not true and irrational, the sense of “all or nothing” holds sway. If the Bible has errors that means to many people it was not written by God. We can blame evangelicals and fundamentalists for a lot of this because it is many of them who push this view and bend over backwards to explain what the rest of the world sees as an obvious error in the text. If its not written by God then why on earth would we believe any of its supernatural claims (talking snakes, asses, people rising from the dead walking on water etc.)? I also think its extremely legitimate for people to ask: If the Bible has errors and problems like every other book, what makes it special? If it gets science wrong like every other work, if it exaggerates numbers and engages in literary creative literary conventions, why should I trust it? If someone can write a book in someone else’s name and straight up “lie” about it and it finds it way into the canon, what do you tell them? These are not easy questions but this knowledge is background knowledge in scholarship today.
The evangelical posture has been to deny and explain it all away. Since so many of us see right through this, we are left in no man’s land as many of the Church’s greatest minds and those most eager apologists of all are answering all the wrong questions because they refuse to admit errors in the Bible.
I see the Bible as a living, centering document. It is an accommodated and fallible record of God’s dealing with a group of people and more importantly to me, a record of his incarnation. He uses this text to speak to and save us. He inspired it but did not override the author’s personality or tendency to make mistakes. My faith is in God, not in the Bible. Yes, that God is revealed to me through the Bible but its not an all or nothing thing. I am a follower of Christ. Not a follower of a historical reconstruction of Jesus but the transforming and risen Jesus who is very much alive and brings forgiveness and grace to sinners. I identify as a Christ-ian, not a Bible-ian.
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A record of God’s covenantal dealing with people.
We are all sinners, and we all disagree about what is actually sin.
Nowadays, you are free to find another church down the street, and you are free to characterize them as much as you suppose they are of you.
They do indeed have a major share of responsibility on the evangelical situation today. But I think it’s also just a human tendency in general to be in love with easy and simplistic ‘black and white’ world views. And appropriately so for young children. They need a dependable (and more-or-less accurate) exposure to formative guidance about life before being introduced to nuance and grey areas that maturing adults are expected to be able to handle and account for in reasonable ways. It’s good that a young child is instilled with the notion “busy highway over there = danger; stay away” and “my yard over here is a safe place to play, well within my parents’ sight”. Black and white. But the day will come when the growing adolescent or young man will need to be able to navigate the highway safely. And that will be good too (and in fact not good if he doesn’t!).
It seems to me that Jesus was trying to help the Pharisees and scribes of his day “grow up” a little. As in … “You all do realize that there was a spirit behind this law, don’t you? - and that you should hopefully one day be able to rise up into that higher calling (fulfillment) and not just think that the letter of the law was God’s last word to you.” But a lot of fundamentalists today are just stuck back on the letter again - even if it is “letter 2.0” … it still then shows a failure to register the original point Jesus and Paul were making about “letter 1.0”.
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Just read a wonderful and recent (2023) scholarly journal article by Joel Marcus (well known scholar and teacher at Duke Divinity School) in NTS (New Testament Studies) and it takes a look at “The Enigma of the Antithesis” which are the “you heard it said but I say” of Matthew 5 (sermon on the mount)
Right after saying he has not come to abolish the Law, Jesus says several things which appear to put a fence around the Torah and then several more which create significant friction. They go well beyond fencing the Torah. After surveying solutions he feels don’t work very well Marcus writes:
We are left then with the paradox with which we began this study: the Matthean Jesus affirms his consonance with the Mosaic Torah (5.17–20) but also qualifies or denies it (5.21–48). How can this contradiction be resolved—or, if not resolved, explained?
He resolves this by looking at what Ezekiel and Jeremiah do with the idea of punishing one’s children for the sins of the father and also what the Deuteronomist does to an earlier code.
The first thing to note is that it is not unusual for legists in traditional societies both to revise inherited laws and customs and to insist that they are not changing a thing. In fact, that is exactly what a legist needs to do if his society operates with the idea of a once-and-for-all revealed divine law.64 All societies change, and with these changes comes the need to change the law, but how does one do that if the law, coming from a divine source, is deemed eternal and hence irrevocable? **One answer is to affirm that the law has not changed, but has merely revealed a previously hidden aspect of itself65—has been, to use Matthew’s word, fulfilled.**66
A paradigmatic example of this sort of revisionism occurs in Deuteronomy, which restricts sacrifice to one locality, ‘the place that Yahweh will choose’ (Deut 12.14; cf. 12.5, 14.25; 15.20; 26.2). This revokes the previous Israelite practice of sacrificing anywhere, which is enshrined in the Covenant Code of Exodus 20.22–23.33.67 As Bernard Levinson has pointed out, the Deuteronomic text shows signs of being a self-conscious revision, since God in Exodus promises that he will bless the worshipper who sacrifices ‘in every place’ (בכל־המקום) where the divine name is mentioned (Exod 20.24),68 but the ;)בכל־מקום( ’Deuteronomist rephrases this as a warning against sacrificing ‘in every place rather, one is to sacrifice only ‘in the place (במקום) that Yahweh will choose’ (Deut 12.13–14). The use here of the phrase ‘in every place’ in a context having to do with sac- rifice conjures up the Exodus text, yet in a way that reverses its sense. Astonishingly, how- ever, a few lines after this drastic revision, the author adds a stringent warning to keep the law exactly as it was delivered once-and-for-all to Moses, neither adding to nor sub- tracting from it (Deut 13.1 [ET 12.32]).69 The author, then, revises the Exodus text in a striking way, even prodding attentive readers to notice the revision by employing its key phrase, at the same time that he insists on the Law’s unchangeableness.70 The Matthean Jesus, similarly, revokes the Pentateuchal edicts on divorce, oaths, and retribution, yet insists that he is not altering a jot or tittle of the Law.71
Levinson’s other premier example of inner-biblical revisionism also has interesting parallels with the Matthean Antitheses. As part of the earliest biblical version of the Second Commandment, Yahweh warns that he is ‘an impassioned God…visiting the ini- quity of the fathers upon the children, to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my com- mandments’ (Exod 20.3–5).72 This warning is substantially repeated in Deuteronomy’s ver- sion of the Second Commandment (Deut 5.9–10), but the author appears to have been uneasy with the idea of transgenerational punishment, and two chapters later he repeats the warning but alters its terms, saying that Yahweh ‘does not delay’ but requites the sinner ‘to his face’ (Deut 7.9–10). Although the language recalls that of the Second Commandment, both ‘to his face’ and ‘he does not delay’, coupled with the omission of the reference to the sinners’ progeny, subvert the notion of transgenerational retribution and substitute the idea of immediate punishment of the sinner. As Levinson puts it, ‘[T]he homily so fundamentally transforms the original as to revoke it’,73 yet does so in such a way that the revocation presents itself as ‘a studied series of annotations to the original doctrine’.74 Just so, those Matthean Antitheses that revoke Pentateuchal regulations and principles present themselves as a series of annotations to the Torah, which Jesus fulfils rather than destroys.
An even more radical rejection of the Decalogue principle of transgenerational punish- ment occurs in Ezekiel 18.1–4. Here the prophet quotes a proverb (משל) that, according to him, is being bandied about in Israel: ‘Fathers eat sour grapes and their children’s teeth are set on edge.’ Ezekiel rejects this proverb, declaring that henceforth it will have no fur- ther currency in the land; rather, ‘The soul that sins, [only] it shall die!’ (Levinson trans. alt.). Although most of the language is different, the proverb seems to echo the Second Commandment, since the two traditions share not only the principle of transgenerational punishment but also the resonant vocabulary of ‘fathers’ and ‘sons’.75 But a radical distan- cing is also being accomplished, since a core biblical principle is not only being rejected but also ‘devoiced’ by demotion to the status of a proverb.76 **Similarly, in the theses of Matt 5.21–48, Jesus repeats Mosaic commands but does not identify them as such; they are simply things that were ‘said’ (ἐρρέθη) to ‘the ancients’—it is not said by whom— and seem no longer to be definitive.**77
Marcus even points out a few Rabbinic parallels:
Such audacity, however, is not unique to Matthew in Jewish history. There are striking parallels in the literature of the rabbis, who also struggled with the issue of how to change the Torah while affirming its continuity.83 Indeed, it is ironic that many New Testament scholars are nervous about affirming that Jesus or Matthew (or Paul or Mark) abrogated the Torah, but some ancient rabbis had no qualms about speaking positively about its abrogation either by the Old Testament prophets or by themselves. One example occurs in a Talmudic passage discussing Ezekiel’s reversal of the Second Commandment, which was analysed in the previous section:
R. Jose ben Ḥanina [a second-generation Amora] said, “Our master Moses decreed …)ביטלום( four sentences against Israel, but four prophets came and annulled them Moses said, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children.” But Ezekiel came and annulled it (ביטלה): “The soul that sins, [only] it shall die!” (b. Mak. 24a)84
He also refers to something Hillel did. He concludes with:
These are radical acts of legal revision, comparable to what we saw in the previous sec- tion in the cases of Deuteronomy and Ezekiel. But radicality has its limits. Christine Hayes points out that there is a distinction between overturning positive biblical laws (i.e., for- bidding what the Bible permits) and overturning negative biblical laws (i.e., permitting what the Bible forbids). The latter is a far more radical exercise, and is relatively rare even in tannaitic sources and the Yerushalmi, not to mention the more conservative Bavli.88 Similarly, the Matthean Jesus never abrogates a negative biblical regulation; rather, Antitheses 3 (on divorce), 4 (on oaths), and, in a way, 5 (on retribution) overturn positive laws, that is, forbid what the Torah permits. Even more significantly, Matthew elsewhere elides the one clear instance in which the Markan Jesus abrogates a negative biblical law (Mark 7.14–23, which annuls the laws of kashrut).89
Still, the most significant point is that both the rabbis and the Matthean Jesus assert an authority to annul the letter of the Mosaic law, even if they often do so in convoluted ways that require careful attention to perceive the annulment. The issue between the Matthean ‘scribes discipled by the kingdom of heaven’ and the proto-rabbinic ‘scribes and Pharisees’, therefore, was probably not whether or not the Torah could be overruled, but who had the authority to overrule it, and why. The Pharisees claimed the right to do so on the basis of their oral tradition, the power of which rested on their acknowledged position as the most popular and influential Jewish sect (cf. Josephus, J.W. 1.110–12; 2.162, 166; Ant. 13.288; 13.400–1; 18.15).90 The Matthean Jesus claims the right to do so on the basis of his eschatological, messianic authority, which restores the pristine intention of the divine Law, which Moses had (inadvertently?) obscured (see Matt 19.4–9). In the mind of Matthew, then, the Antitheses are not an instance of ‘seconding Sinai’ but of cor- recting it."
I have a PDF if anyone wants to read the full article.
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And sometimes when you bend over backwards you see something that you didn’t see before in the text: Genesis 7, Hebrews 9:7 and 1 Timothy 2:14.
I’ll add that nothing helps you grow up as much as recognizing where God’s Spirit is working today. As in visible manifestations among those who are being filled with the Spirit. Like what happened at Azusa Street.
The summary of the Law that shall never pass away was uttered by Jesus. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
If you want to read the NT so this no longer applies to sexual ethics between consenting adults, then that’s on you. And if God visits your church, I’ll take more than a passing notice, especially if I live next door and can see what’s happening for myself.
And like what happened at Azusa Street, God so often always works with imperfect people, that it will also be interesting to see where it leads. How long did Jesus tolerate polygamy? So yeah, growing up into a mature believer means a number of perplexing things.
This is perhaps a reflection of a search of controllable safety. When something is strictly what is written (letter) and what has been told to us by people we respect, we can feel we understand it (to some level) in a way that gives a safe structure to the surrrounding reality and try to control our environment based on what the letter tells. Stepping outside of this narrow interpretation and worldview is stepping outside of the subjective feeling of safety and control.
Maybe there is a need for a reformation, a return to what the early Christians believed and were teaching.
They believed in the teaching of Christ as told by the apostles of Jesus. Scriptures (Hebrew Bible) were accepted as authoritative mainly because they believed that the scriptures (prophets) told about the coming Messiah, Jesus Christ. The writings we know as the NT were trusted because they contained teaching of the apostles, either written by an apostle or a person who had learned the teaching from an apostle. (This is how I have understood what has been told about the early Christians.)
This view of the early Christians (followers of Jesus) gives an explanation of why the library of books we call ‘the Bible’ is so special.
And it isn’t even that blacks or whites disappear for us when we’re older. Of course we still need and strive for control, or at least some control in our mature lives too. The mischief is when somebody shuts out everything except black and white, and tries to force their reality through that filter. There is still plenty of clarity to be had even after allowing - even generously allowing - for exceptions and grayscale.
The other great mischief of our moment, is when somebody won’t identify what is black and white by name and prefers the grey.
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