In response to a reader question, I’m going to be beginning a short series covering some of the fundamentals of Christianity (and, by extension, Christian life).  Today I’ll be talking about the topic of inerrancy, and what the Bible teaches about the subject.

All the word “Inerrancy” means is that something is without error. If you hand in your math homework and all of the answers are correct, your math assignment is inerrant.    In the case of the Bible, “inerrancy” is the belief that the Bible was communicated and written down just the way God said it in the first place.  The Bible itself states this in 2 Timothy:

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16, ESV)

Here we have the apostle Paul stating that all Scripture is “breathed out by God”.  In other words, it should be treated as if the words on the page are God speaking directly to us.  There is no mention of passages that we might want to exclude, or passages that would be profitable with a little bit of revision - it states clearly, “all Scripture”.

Of course, at the time of Paul’s writing “all Scripture” would have meant the Old Testament, and would not logically have included Paul’s own writings.  But the book of 2 Peter affirms that Paul’s writings have the same standing as the Old Testament:

“And count lthe patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters.  There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” (2 Peter 3:15-16, ESV)

By stating, “as they do the other Scriptures”, the author of 2 Peter is stating that Paul’s writings are also, in fact, Scripture.  The statement wouldn’t make any sense otherwise.

This teaching comes with a qualifier, however.  Let’s look at it again, “the Bible was communicated and written down just the way God said it in the first place.”  The key here is the phrase “in the first place”.  It’s widely accepted that Moses wrote the first 5 books of the Bible (except the part at the end of Deuteronomy where Moses dies, which would have logically been finished by somebody else - possibly Joshua).  God spoke to Moses, and Moses wrote.  We believe that what Moses wrote was inerrant.

It’s always possible that further copying of the Hebrew and the process of translating the Hebrew into English could produce errors.  That’s why many Biblical scholars are so focused on the discovery of ancient manuscripts - if we have more and older copies of the text, we can be more confident of what the text originally said.  In fact, according to “A General Introduction To The Bible” by Norman Geisler and William Nix, the amount of New Testament text that’s open to any real dispute is only about 400 words - none of them critical to any core teaching of Christianity.

This desire for the best possible text is also why Bibles aren’t typically translated by a single individual. Most Bible translation are the work of a committee of experts in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic that spend a large amount of time reading, re-reading, discussing, and agreeing upon a good translation for each word or phrase. Biases on the part of individual translators are more likely to be weeded out by the intense review process. Thus our English Bibles aren’t inerrant, but the conservative translations are very reliable and trustworthy for in-depth study.

This only serves to reinforce our confidence in the basic belief that the Bible we have has been well-preserved through the ages, and that we can trust it to be free from error.

In my next post, I’ll be handling a topic closely related to inerrancy - infallibility. Stay tuned!