What do we mean by Biblical Inerrancy?

[ByFaithAlone]

My church has recently been doing a Bible study on the book, "Misquoting Jesus," which addresses the problems with the multitude of copies of Christian writings during the early Christian church. Although most of these changes were most likely made with the intentions to make the Bible more accurate and complete, there are some issues with biblical innerency that the Christian must deal with. With that I will propose a few questions for discussion....

1. With these errors that can clearly be seen in a variety of documents across several centuries, what do we mean by biblical innerency?

2. How should we as Christians address the issues of inaccuracies in the Bible?

3. With the variety of different translations and models of the Bible, which do you personally find useful to your life?

Thanks

[Guest]

My church has recently been doing a Bible study on the book, "Misquoting Jesus," which addresses the problems with the multitude of copies of Christian writings during the early Christian church. Although most of these changes were most likely made with the intentions to make the Bible more accurate and complete, there are some issues with biblical innerency that the Christian must deal with. With that I will propose a few questions for discussion....

1. With these errors that can clearly be seen in a variety of documents across several centuries, what do we mean by biblical innerency?

2. How should we as Christians address the issues of inaccuracies in the Bible?

3. With the variety of different translations and models of the Bible, which do you personally find useful to your life?

Thanks

What we generally mean is, that the original documents, the ones the original human authors wrote, from Moses (Genesis) to the apostle John (Revelation) were enspired by God, and without error.Biblical inerrancy does not extend to the copies (whether ancient manuspripts or modern bibles) we have in our posession today. However, what we have today is sufficiently accurate that we are confident that they represent adequatelay, God's original intent, and no doctrine has been lost or changed. This is not wishful thinking, but is backed up by evidence pn a number of levels. Anyone who doubts that, has not done there due diligence in studying the issue.

You might find the following article infromative:

http://carm.org/iner...spiration-bible

[alien224]

My church has recently been doing a Bible study on the book, "Misquoting Jesus," which addresses the problems with the multitude of copies of Christian writings during the early Christian church. Although most of these changes were most likely made with the intentions to make the Bible more accurate and complete, there are some issues with biblical innerency that the Christian must deal with. With that I will propose a few questions for discussion....

1. With these errors that can clearly be seen in a variety of documents across several centuries, what do we mean by biblical innerency?

2. How should we as Christians address the issues of inaccuracies in the Bible?

3. With the variety of different translations and models of the Bible, which do you personally find useful to your life?

Thanks

Personally I believe people put way to much time in worrying about what translation says what. Is it correct? etc. Read, pray and follow what God says to do. No matter which version and how many man made mistakes are made through translations God's word will never lead you in thee wrong path.

But like I said that is just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt.

[Guest shiloh357]

My church has recently been doing a Bible study on the book, "Misquoting Jesus," which addresses the problems with the multitude of copies of Christian writings during the early Christian church. Although most of these changes were most likely made with the intentions to make the Bible more accurate and complete, there are some issues with biblical innerency that the Christian must deal with. With that I will propose a few questions for discussion....

1. With these errors that can clearly be seen in a variety of documents across several centuries, what do we mean by biblical innerency?

2. How should we as Christians address the issues of inaccuracies in the Bible?

3. With the variety of different translations and models of the Bible, which do you personally find useful to your life?

The problem with the whole arguement of "changes" that occured in the NT down trhough the ages, is that such arguments are based on myth. Ehrman's arguments has no basis in historical or manuscript reality.

For the New Testament, we have around 25,000 Greek NT manuscripts some complete copies and others only in fragments, but at each point where comparisons can be made, these copies are in complete agreement. There are 5,000 Greek NT parchments that were circulated to various congregations, and around 20,000 quotations from 2nd and 3rd century extra-biblical documents. These quotations agree with the actual NT parchments and they are so numerous that if we didn’t have the actual copied manuscripts, the entire NT could be reproduced from those extra-biblical quotations except for a couple of obscure portions.

We have the ability to compare ancient manuscripts with those that are more ancient. We can not only compare the existing Greek copies of the NT with each other ,but we can compare them with the extra-biblical quotations as well, and what we find is that the texts have an amazing uniformity of agreement. When we compare them more recent texts, we find that the argument about "changes" to the text simply doesn't hold up. Bart Ehrman is promoting what amounts to a conspiracy theory about the Bible that has no basis in reality. He feeds off of general ignorance of the manuscript evidence that we have. The accuracy of the Bible is nothing less than astounding and there is more evidence for the accuracy of the Bible than there is for an other ancient document, hands down.

The sheer number of manuscripts speaks to reliability, because the more there are, the more comparisons can be done to look for variants to look for mistakes or attempts to altar the text. The more you can compare, the more you can be assured of what was actually written. Furthermore, when you consider the thousands of texts that were circulating prior to end of the 4th century, it would have been difficult for a few copyists to purposefully or accidentally alter the texts. There would simply have been too many reliable manuscripts in existence for such a fraudulent attempt plausible. Errant scribes would have been noticed immediately. It would be like a modern historian attempting to omit or alter the events surrounding the assassination of JFK. It simply could not be done due to the over abundance and preponderance of reliable historical records. I would say that one of the biggest mistakes that atheists and other skeptics make is that they are not readily aware of just how much many copies of the NT letters were in circulation during the first and second centuries. Many of them parrot what they hear from others who are themselves not very learned in the area of biblical manuscript evidence. For that reason, conspiracy theories about the origins of the Bible are legion in atheist/skeptic circles.

What do we mean by inerrancy? Inerrancy does not require a strict adherence to all rules of grammar or historical and semantic precision. It does not exclude the use of figures of speech or any kind of literary genre. It does not require verbatim exactness when the New Testament cites Old Testament passages. It does not require that any literary sources used by the biblical writers also be inspired or inerrant. Inerrancy also provides no guarantee that any account given in Scripture is exhaustive.

Inerrancy simply means that if the Bible says it happened, it happened. The authors do not have to give every detail nor do they have to agree with one another verbatim. So variations in the text do not automatically mean that the text is in error.

[Zemke]

Excellent answer shiloh, Thanks. I use the NASB because it is a word by word translation and I've been told the amount of manuscripts used was more than previous translations. You seem to have the ability to shed some light on the truth of this. I also have a Greek and Hebrew parallels KJV to help at times.

[He giveth more grace]

What we generally mean is, that the original documents, the ones the original human authors wrote, from Moses (Genesis) to the apostle John (Revelation) were enspired by God, and without error.Biblical inerrancy does not extend to the copies (whether ancient manuspripts or modern bibles) we have in our posession today. However, what we have today is sufficiently accurate that we are confident that they represent adequatelay, God's original intent, and no doctrine has been lost or changed. This is not wishful thinking, but is backed up by evidence pn a number of levels. Anyone who doubts that, has not done there due diligence in studying the issue.

You've got it! Very well done.

[ByFaithAlone]

Shiloh... just want to say that you are officially amazing... love your explanation. Thanks!