The following article is a typical Evangelical evasion ; accepted
doctrine says
that the Bible is error free, therefore any and all conclusions that one's
"scholarship"
arrives at will always take the view that the Bible contains no mistakes of
substance,
let alone moral failures --viz, God supposedly directing Joshua to
slaughter
the populations of entire city states.
For sure, at least this is what scholarship of my own tells me, most of the
Bible is as
reliable as any ancient book gets. Compared to its competition the Bible is
superior to
just about everything else, especially to the Koran, even if we can
debate the relative value
of a good number of Buddhist sutras since while they are mostly ahistorical
in character
and do play games with history now and then, they are rather different and
mostly
are about human psychology.
But to claim substantive inerrancy for the Bible is ridiculous and more
than anything shows
complete ignorance of the entire range of critical literature about the
Judeo-Christian
scriptures. Just a few examples :
The Book of Joshua has the Sun stand still in the sky for many hours so
that a battle
can be concluded favorably. This is scientifically impossible and rests on
the
false assumption that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
A contradiction is an error and here is a doozy that Atheists like to cite
:
Gen 32:30 states, "...for I have seen God face to face, and my life is
preserved."
However, John 1:18 states, "No man hath seen God at any time..." Both
statements
cannot be true. Either there is an error of fact, or an error of
translation. In either case,
there is an error. --This is from a Free Thought website, but let me
add that the author of
John was making a strong theological point and in the process overlooked
the fact that the OT
--Hebrew Bible-- presents about 20 cases of God walking among human
beings, face to face.
Not getting facts strait is a common problem , for example :
2 Samuel 8:3-4 says "David smote also Hadadezer...and took from
him...seven hundred horsemen..." 1 Chronicles 18:3-4 says "David smote
Hadarezer...and took from him...seven thousand horsemen..."
There are a good number of similar discrepancies in a number of Biblical
books.
Then there are "problems" that are unresolvable, like discrepancies in the
genealogies
in Matthew and Luke, and passages in Exodus that describe the Israelites as
a mixed multitude
needing rules for intermarriage but accepting it as part of the social
order, vs Ezra and
Nehemiah's condemnations of ANY intermarriage, etc
Which is just a modest warm up. The Bible has literally hundreds of errors,
large and small.
Inerrant ? Not a chance. The task is to sort out the false from the true,
even if there is
far more true than otherwise. The Bible is a treasure. But it is not
error free. What
some Evangelicals are willing to concede, that there are trivial mistakes
in some passages
due to copyist errors in the Medieval era, really isn't a consideration.
Even hard core
Atheists are willing to give the Bible a pass on these minor issues. The
problem is that
there are errors of substance in the book, a lot of such errors, and we
need to be clear
about what these are so that we can focus on what is true and good.
Pretense that
the Bible is free from all errors of substance is no different than lying
to one's self
and then lying to others to compound the problem.
Billy
=============================================
Christian Post
March 6, 2012
What to Say When Someone Says "The Bible Has Errors"
By Jonathan Dodson
Most people question the reliability of the Bible. You’ve probably been in
a conversation with a friend or met someone in a coffeeshop who said: “How
can you be a Christian when the Bible has so many errors?” How should we
respond? What do you say?
Instead of asking them to name one, I suggest you name one or two of the
errors. Does your Bible contain errors? Yes. The Bible that most people
possess is a translation of the Greek and Hebrew copies of copies of the
original documents of Scripture. As you can imagine, errors have crept in over
the
centuries of copying. Scribes fall asleep, misspell, take their eyes off
the manuscript, and so on. I recommend telling people what kind of errors
have crept into the Bible. Starting with the New Testament, Dan Wallace, New
Testament scholar and founder the Center for the Study of New Testament
Manuscripts, lists four types of errors in _Understanding Scripture: An
Overview of the Bible’s Origin, Reliability, and Meaning._
(http://www.wtsbooks.com/product-exec/product_id/8193/nm/Understanding+Scripture:+An+Overview+of+th
e+Bible's+Origin,+Reliability,+and+Meaning+(Paperback)?utm_source=jdodson&ut
m_medium=blogpartners)
Types of Errors
1) Spelling & Nonsense Errors. These are errors occur when a scribe wrote
a word that makes no sense in its context, usually because they were tired
or took their eyes off the page.Some of these errors are quite comical,
such as "we were horses among you" (Gk. hippoi, "horses," instead of ēpioi,
"gentle," or nēpioi, "little children") in 1 Thessalonians 2:7 in one late
manuscript. Obviously, Paul isn’t saying he acted like a horse among them.
That would be self-injury! These kinds of errors are easily corrected.
2) Minor Changes. These minor changes are as small as the presence or
absence of an article "the" or changed word order, which can vary considerably
in Greek. Depending on the sentence, Greek grammar allows the sentence to
be written up to 18 times, while still saying the same thing! So just
because a sentence wasn’t copied in the same order, doesn’t mean that we lost
the meaning.
3) Meaningful but not Plausible. These errors have meaning but aren't a
plausible reflection of the original text. For example, 1 Thessalonians 2:9,
instead of "the gospel of God" (the reading of almost all the manuscripts),
a late medieval copy has "the gospel of Christ." There is a meaning
difference between God and Christ, but the overall manuscript evidence points
clearly in one direction, making the error plain and not plausibly part of the
original.
4) Meaningful and Plausible. These are errors that have meaning and that
the alternate reading is plausible as a reflection of the original wording.
These types of errors account for less than 1% of all variants and
typically involve a single word or phrase. The biggest of these types of
errors is
the ending of the Gospel of Mark, which most contemporary scholars to not
regard as original. Our translations even footnote that!
Is the Bible Reliable?
So, is the Bible reliable? Well, the reliability of our English
translations depends largely upon the quality of the manuscripts they were
translated
from. The quality depends, in part, on how recent the manuscripts are.
Scholars like Bart Ehrman have asserted that we don't have manuscripts that
are
early enough. However, the manuscript evidence is quite impressive:
* There are as many as eighteen second-century manuscripts. If the
Gospels were completed between 50-100 A.D., then this means that these early
copies are within 100 years. Just last week, Dan Wallace announced that a
new fragment from the Gospel of Mark was discovered dating back to the
first century A.D., placing it well within 50 years of the originals, a first
of its kind. When these early manuscripts are all put together, more than
43% of the NT is accounted for from copies no later than the 2nd C.
* Manuscripts that date before 400 AD number 99, including one
complete New Testament called Codex Sinaiticus. So the gap between the
original,
inerrant autographs and the earliest manuscripts is pretty slim. This
comes into focus when the Bible is compared to other classical works that, in
general, are not doubted for their reliability. In _this chart of
comparison_
(http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/02/08/earlier-fragment-of-marks-gospel-rumored-to-be-found/)
with other ancient literature, you can see
that the NT has far more copies than any other work, numbering 5,700
(Greek) in comparison to the 200+ of Suetonius. If we take all manuscripts
into
account (handwritten prior to printing press), we have 20,000 copies of the
NT. There are only 200 copies of the earliest Greek work.
* This means if we are going to be skeptical about the Bible, then
we need to be 1000xs more skeptical about the works of Greco-Roman history.
Or put another way, we can be 1000 times more confident about the
reliability of the Bible. It is far and away the most reliable ancient
document.
What to Say When Someone Says “The Bible Has Errors”.
So, when someone asserts that the Bible says errors, we can reply by
saying: “Yes, our Bible translations do have errors, let me tell you about
them.
But as you can see, less than 1% of them are meaningful and those errors
don’t affect the major teachings of the Christian faith. In fact, there are
1000 times more manuscripts of the Bible than the most documented
Greco-Roman historian by _Suetonius_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suetonius) .
So,
if we’re going to be skeptical about ancient books, we should be 1000 times
more skeptical of the Greco-Roman histories. The Bible is, in fact,
incredibly reliable.”
Contrary to popular assertion, that as time rolls on we get further and
further away from the original with each new discovery, we actually get closer
and closer to the original text. As Wallace puts it, we have "an
embarrassment of riches when it comes to the biblical documents." Therefore,
we can
be confident that what we read in our modern translations of the the
ancient texts is approximately 99% accurate. It is very reliable.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
