Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Inerrancy Message-ID: Date: 21 Jul 89 09:32:19 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 97 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I'm sort of surprised you haven't ever had a response to your request for Biblical errors. There are a number of sort of standard lists. Some classic ones are: - Gen 4. traces all shepherds and musicians to the sons of Enoch. Unfortunately, Noah's flood destroyed all but Noah's family, and Noah was a descendant of Seth. - In I Cor 10:8, Paul quotes Num 25:1-9. Unfortunately he gets the number of people who died slightly wrong. - In the Resurrection account: Mat: an angel opens the tomb while the women are there. Jesus is not, but will meet them in Galilee. Mark: when they arrive the stone is already rolled away. A young man is there. Jesus is not, but will meet them in Galilee. Luke: when they arrive the stone is already rolled away. Two men dressed in dazzling clothes are there. Jesus is not. Reference to Galilee is somewhat different. John: the stone is already rolled away. Two angels and Jesus are there. - Acts 9:26-30 is very hard to reconcile with Gal 1:16-19. It almost sounds like Paul had heard to account that lies behind Acts and is denying it. This is obviously just a sample. None of these have any doctrinal importance. They just go to show that what we've got is ordinary historical reporting, not some sort of superhumanly accurate reporting. I have yet to see anything in Scripture that says that there are no errors of fact. Just that Scripture may be relied on for our faith. That this implies inerrancy is a deduction based on a supposition that is not itself in Scripture. This supposition is that in order to be useful for faith, we must be able to utilize it without making any decisions. This idea of the way God wants Christians to act seems contrary to everything we know about him. You might want to look at the passages you quoted in more than one translation. I checked a number of translations, and Ps 138:2 doesn't say that his word is above his name in any of them. (Even if it did, it's not clear that it would imply inerrancy in the modern sense.) NJPS comments that the Hebrew of this passage in unclear, so it may be that scholars in different periods guess its meaning differently. 2 Pe 1:16-19 certainly talks about the transfiguration confirming the prophecies (presumably OT) about Jesus. But I don't see where you get that the word is more sure than the voice of God. Again, even if all these passages really said these things, the question is what it means for Scripture to be sure. I'm not arguing that Scripture is inaccurate. Just that it's accurate in the same sense that any human product can be said to be accurate. I agree with you that it is to be seen a both a produce of human work and of God. But as far as I can see, God allowed the biblical authors to operate in fully human fashion. As for the fear that this view somehow robs the Bible of its usefulness, you may want to look more carefully at what the problems really are in dealing with the Bible. Sure, there are people who think that Jesus' resurrection, etc., are all mythological additions. But the view that scripture is "substantially accurate" takes the same position you do on such questions. In fact if you look back over the discussions here and in talk.religion.misc, I think you'll see that the difference between inerrancy and "substantial accuracy" would never have affected the outcome. The real issues in dealing with Scripture aren't claimed errors, but rather differences in how to apply things addressed to 1st Cent. readers to 20th Cent. contexts. The debates over the role of women, homosexuals, etc., aren't really whether Paul's advice is wrong. Rather, the question is whether his advice was tailored to the specifics of the people he was addressing, and would be different in our situation. Inerrancy per se doesn't answer that. The debates over Christian attitudes to the Law again weren't over whether the Bible was authoritative, but over what it said. The problem with strict inerrancy is that anybody who looks at the first three Gospels can easily see that in the literal sense they aren't consistent (just to take an example). Not that there's any significant difference. But that if you try to think of them as tape recordings of the exact words Jesus said, they can't be. Take a look through something like "Gospel Parallels" sometime. (It places correponding passages from the gospels side by side.) The more extreme inerrant position ends up trying to harmonize obviously differing accounts, as in the case of the resurrection cited above. This does Christianity terrible harm. It suggests to people that you can't be a Christian unless you're willing to close your eyes to facts. The level of factual error on the Bible is so low that it would have no significance whatever, if we just didn't try to deny it. There are people who talk about inerrancy, but really seem to mean something else. What they really mean is what I call "immediate applicability". For example, we can take Paul's advice on social issues and apply it to the 20th Cent. without further consideration. This is really separable from inerrancy, because the issue isn't one of error.