‘Behold, the Lamb of God’s
ide o amnos tou
theou
College Study
8th teaching
9.17.2012
“the Inerrancy of Holy
Scripture”
PART IV of the Divine Attributes
of Holy Scripture
As we come to the end of our list of 7 divine
attributes of the Bible, we come to the topic of Biblical inerrancy. Of all the
things we have established thus far: that the Bible is unique, that the Bible
is authoritative, that it is perfect and unified, the supernatural Word of God,
tonight’s topic is a big one. Biblical inerrancy is one of the most strongly
criticized aspects of the Bible, and yet one of the strongest proofs for the
Bible.
So, biblical inerrancy is our topic. Here’s how our
study will break down:
1. What is inerrancy?
2. Is it necessary?
3. The basis for inerrancy
4. The extent of inerrancy
5. Historic belief in inerrancy
6. Evidence for inerrancy
7. What does it mean for us?
Part I:
What is inerrancy?
“Truly, the Bible doesn’t address everything, but…
it is true of everything it addresses.”
The word inerrancy means without error. Thus, if we’re talking about the Bible being without
error, we’re saying that the Bible has no errors, faults, lies, deceptions or
false statements of any kind. We are saying that the Bible is true, that
everything it says is true and that what it says to be true really corresponds
with reality. We’re saying the Bible doesn’t affirm anything that is contrary
to fact. The Bible only declares
facts.
A great way to understand how the Bible is inerrant
is to remember Jesus. We’re told that Jesus knew no sin, but that God made Him
sin for us so He could take the punishment we deserved. Jesus lived a morally,
ethically, sinlessly perfect life and He was fully man and fully God.
Like Christ, inerrancy is claiming that the Bible
has no errors, that it is, without sin, in a sense, though it is a book with
both human and divine attributes. Christ, though He became a man, sinned not.
The Bible, though written down by men, erred not. It had no errors as Christ
had no sin. See the comparison?
Part II:
Is it necessary?
So now we know inerrancy means. Now we know what we
mean by biblical inerrancy. But is this really important? Should this even be
considered an essential of the Christian faith, a fundamental doctrine? Is it
necessary that we believe that the Bible has no errors?
Let me say that this is no tiny point to get swept
under a rug. To claim that a book which took over a thousand years to write,
which had numerous authors, which was written in different several languages in
several different geographical locations has ZERO errors is quite a statement.
As we’ll see, it really is quite a statement.
A book entitled The
Battle for the Bible by Harold Lindsell, the author makes the claim that
losing the doctrine of inerrancy of Scripture was the thread that would unravel
the church. Now think this through. What this man is claiming is that
disbelieving the inerrancy of Scripture means a slippery slope into liberalism,
atheism and losing one’s faith.
And if we think about it, this is true! If we come
to allow ourselves to believe that this story or that story was added to the Bible, that the words of
men are mixed in to it all, or that there are downright errors and
contradictions in the message and teachings of the Bible, then we will
eventually have no basis for deciding which is true and which is false, and
then we shall have no basis for believing any of it at all.
Then reading “Thus saith the LORD” will have just
as much impact on our lives as reading a joke on the inside of a bubblegum
wrapper.
This is where many modern atheists and agnostics
find themselves. Pre-believing that there are many errors in the Scriptures,
they find no reason to believe in it.
So make no mistake, the claim of biblical inerrancy
is an important one. If it’s true, then the Bible is the Word of the God and is
to be trusted and obeyed, it is worthy of your attention and devotion and
memory. But if it is false, then the Bible is the biggest hoax of history, the
worst deception of any kind and it is just a collection of fairy tales, and
Christianity has all been in vain.
You see then, that biblical inerrancy
is a hugely important issue.
Part
III: The Basis for Inerrancy
But hold on a minute, does the Bible ever use the
word inerrancy itself? Should we
believe the Bible is inerrant if it never makes that claim?
In fact, it does make the claim that
it is truth and not error, though it doesn’t use the word inerrant.
For example the Good Shepherd once said when He
prayed for His disciples, “Sanctify them
by Your truth. Your word is truth.” (John
17:17). Evidently, Jesus Christ believed that the Bible was true. He
believed that the Scriptures were inerrant.
Perhaps the belief was limited to the New Testament
era. Oh? Check out Psalm 119:160, “The entirety of Your word is truth, and
every one of Your righteous judgments endures forever.”
Besides internal
claims that the Bible is all truth, or error-less, there is external proof
that the Bible is inerrant. We can use our brains! Yippee!
Reasonably, we can look at it this way:
1. The Bible is the Word of God
2. God cannot lie or make an error
3. Therefore, the Bible cannot lie or make an error
This is the implication of Scriptural
errorlessness, and the weight of the argument lies in either of the two
premises. If the Bible is really the
Word of God and if God cannot err,
then it follows automatically and logically that the Bible cannot err since it
is the primary product of God.
So does this argument stand up? Does it hold its
weight?
We’ll we’ve already looked at some
incredible proofs that the Bible really is just what it claims to be: the true
breathed-out words of God Almighty. What are some proofs that the Bible is the
Word of God? Remember SPAM?
But what about the second statement?
Can God lie? Or is God morally perfect?
There are again both internal and
external proofs, proofs inside the Bible and outside of it. Really, there’s
proof then from both the Special revelation and the General revelation.
From observing the Bible, we’re told that God is
truth (John 14:6). Truth to God is
not like truth is to man. With human beings, we can use truth or not use truth.
You might say a man is truthful or another is a liar. Human beings lie all the
time, when it suits us, when we feel like it, when we think it might be better
than telling the truth, or when we don’t want to get in trouble or look like an
idiot.
But with God, truth is a part of His nature. He can
no more deny truth than He can deny Himself. Truth began with God. It exists as
a part of Who He is.
Titus 1:2, “God, who
cannot lie…
Hebrews
6:18 says that “…it is impossible for God to lie…”
In the Old Testament, after the children of Israel
had come out of Egypt and were headed for the promised land, their story
crosses paths with an interesting character: a prophet-for-hire by the name of
Balaam. Now Balaam had accepted a business proposal to curse Israel from a
local king who wanted to get rid of them. The story is almost comical watching
Balaam try again and again to curse God’s people, yet every time he opens his
mouth, the curses come out as blessings, and he ends up blessing Israel instead
of cursing them. That story is found in Numbers
22-24. In Numbers 23:19, this bizarre prophet-for-hire speaks out saying “God is not a man that He should lie, nor a
son of man, that He should repent.”
Paul the apostle in Romans 3:4 writes “Let God be
true and every man a liar.”
God does not lie because He cannot lie. He is
incapable of sinning, incapable of lying, incapable of making any kind of
error, because He is morally perfect truth.
Now as for external
evidence, let us harken back to one of the 3 classical arguments for the
existence of God. What were they again? The cosmological, the teleological and
the moral arguments. Specifically, the moral argument states that:
1. Every law implies a Lawgiver
2. There is a moral law
3. Therefore, there is a moral Lawgiver
We don’t have time to get into the nitty gritty of
the argument, or prove that a moral law which binds all humanity but which
humanity does not obey, whether such a moral law exists or not. If you’d like
to know more, I’d advise you to check out the notes I put up on the Facebook
group page for our first study of the existence of God.
But what the moral argument is stating is that
since there is a moral law, there is a Lawgiver who is moral. Simply put, to
claim that something is wrong means that there must be something right against
which that something wrong is compared. C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Chrsitianity puts it this way: “My argument against God was
that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of
just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of
a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it
unjust?”
Our experiences of God’s General revelation, His
revelation through the physical world, shows us that because there is injustice
there must be an ultimate justice. The One who gave us the moral law of our
consciences which says to us “hey, don’t lie to your parents about where you’re
going out tonight” is the One in whom exists moral perfection. A moral law
implies a moral Lawgiver. The moral law implies that God does not lie.
So let us examine our argument for inerrancy again,
now that we’ve proven the two premises:
1. Since the Bible is the Word of God
2. And since God
cannot lie or make an error
3. Then therefore, the Bible cannot lie or make an
error
Part IV:
The Extent of Inerrancy
Again, it’s cool that everything we’ve been
studying is building upon itself. We’ve just referred back to our first study
with the moral law. Now let’s think back not so far to when we were discussing
the topic of Inspiration.
Inspiration again is the method through which God
transmitted His message to the human authors who wrote it down in a human
language in a book we now call the Bible. We know that this method, however it
worked, was accurate enough so that it can be said of the Bible that it is the
Word of God.
Now inspiration only took place in the original
writing of the original manuscripts of the biblical books. Inspiration
immediately began when the human author began to write the book and inspiration
immediately ceased when the human author finished writing the book.
For example, Paul was an inspired author of the
letters to the Corinthian church, the Galatian church and the Ephesian church.
But not all of Paul’s letters were inspired by God. If he happened to ever have
had written down a shopping list, it certainly wasn’t inspired by God in the
same way that God breathed His words into him upon the written of Holy
Scripture!
Now inerrancy is directly tied to inspiration,
because remember we’ve just made the point that inerrancy is the automatic and
logical assumption if the Bible is God’s Word and God Himself cannot lie. So
when God gave to these authors His words through the process of inspiration,
God’s nature and the process of inspiration coming directly from God kept the
original manuscripts from error.
Therefore, the extension of inerrancy applies only
to the original manuscripts and not to the copies of the originals.
But wait a minute, you may say, this is no good!
After all, we do not possess the original manuscripts. They may truly be lost
to time. They may have been captured or destroyed. So what good is it to say
that the originals were errorless if, as far as we know, they don’t exist.
Well, a couple things:
First off, it is not beyond possibility to find an
original manuscript. We possess manuscripts which predate the Bible’s
manuscripts (not the stories, but the actual writings). We have ancient texts
that are older than the Bible. For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain
portions of Scripture dating as far back as approximately 400 BC. But we
possess older manuscripts like the Egyptian Book of the Dead (dating approx.
1550 BC), or the Akkadian Code of Hammurabi (dating approx. 1780 BC), or the
Epic of Gilgamesh (dating approx. 1900 BC).
Considering we have much older texts, it is not
beyond reason to think that someone could discover an original manuscript for
the Bible much older than the copies we already have.
Secondly, we have adequate proof to believe that the Bible
is God’s Word and that God cannot lie, and therefore the original inspired
Scripture must have been errorless. But at the same time, we must admit that
the biblical copies have errors in them. Most of these errors are typographical
or numerical in nature and all of them are rare in occurrence. But there are
enough copies of the original manuscripts that we can compare them and see the
degree of accuracy and have no doubt as to what the message of the original
text was.
I pulled the following quote from Wikipedia, which
is not exactly a Christian website. But check this out: “The New Testament has been preserved in more than 5,800 Greek
manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other
ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Ethiopic and Armenian. Even if the
original Greek versions were lost, the entire New Testament could still be
assembled from the translations. In addition, there are so many quotes from the
New Testament in early church documents and commentaries that the entire New
Testament could also be assembled from these alone.”
Bruce Metzger, who was a biblical scholar at
Princeton Theological Seminary is quoted as saying “The more often you have copies that agree with each other, especially
if they emerge from different geographical areas, the more you can cross-check
them to figure out what the original document was like.”
And there are thousands of copies of the New
Testament alone, not to mention the 10,000 plus copies for the Old Testament.
That’s a lot of copies against which accuracy can be compared and a clearer
picture can be gained of what the original document actually said. And there
are more copies of the Bible than of any other ancient writing.
We do not have the original manuscripts of the
Bible, but we certainly have the original text
of the Bible.
One final note I’d like to make on the accuracy of
the copies, and how these preserve the original text.
I recently read an article about a pretty huge
undertaking a Jewish man began. He wanted to correct every error in the copies
of the Hebrew Bible to form one definitive version.
The article had the headline Israeli scholar overhauls Hebrew Bible to correct errors; first time in
500 years. This article was published on August 8th, 2012. Let
me give you a series of quotes to summarize the article: “For the past 30 years, Israeli Judaic scholar Menachem Cohen has been
on a mission of biblical proportions: correcting all known textual errors in
Jewish scripture to produce a truly definitive edition of the Old Testament.
His edits, focusing primarily on grammatical blemishes and an intricate set of
biblical symbols, mark the first major overhaul of the Hebrew Bible in nearly
500 years. Looking at thousands of medieval manuscripts, the 84-year-old Cohen
identified 1,500 inaccuracies in the Hebrew language texts that have been
corrected in his completed 21-volume set. The final chapter is set to be
published next year. According to Jewish law, a Torah scroll is considered void
if even a single letter is incorrect or misplaced. Cohen does not call for
changes in the writing of the sacred Torah scrolls used in Jewish rites, which
would likely set off a firestorm of objection and criticism. Instead, he is
aiming for accuracy in versions used for study by the Hebrew-reading masses.
The errors have no bearing on the Bible’s stories and alter nothing in its
meaning. Instead, for example, in some places the markers used to denote vowels
in Hebrew are incorrect; or a letter in a word may be wrong, often the result
of a centuries old transcription error.”
What I thought was tremendously interesting and
important as far as what we’ve been discussing is that for all of the errors he
found in the Old Testament, some 1,500 errors or inaccuracies, none of them had
anything to do with the message and meaning of the text. Rather they were all
typographical errors.
There is great proof that the Bible you hold in
your hands, as translated from earlier copies of a missing original, still has
all the meaning and all the message that the original text had.
Next week, we’ll continue our study of inerrancy…
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