If I were trying to argue about inerrancy, I would find this to be a major point. I honestly don’t understand the importance of inerrancy. If Isaiah makes a mistake transcribing what he hears from God, however small, it’s a problem, but if the first scribe who copies Isaiah’s work makes a mistake, as long as it’s not doctrinally critical, then it’s OK?

In my view of inspiration, God’s message only remains error free in God’s mind and as God sends it–never as we receive it. We are incapable, whether prophet or not, of perfectly receiving the divine message.

I think that in practice inerrancy is really only a difference of degree from my own beliefs, rather than something fundamental. I think the message is perfect in God’s mind and providentially protected in reception and transmission. Those who accept inerrancy keep it perfect for one step further. But in no case do I get to read perfectly inerrant scripture.

My primary point is that a belief in inerrancy does not necessarily lead to literal interpretation, but rather has very close to the same range of options as I would espouse while denying inerrancy and you have helped greatly in substantiating that view.

I would note that I publish two books, Evidence for the Bible and Christianity and Secularism, written by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr., who accepts the doctrine of inerrancy. I remember one lengthy discussion with him in which we compared interpretations on a number of passages. While we frequently differed in our interpretation, those differences were very, very rarely predicated on our respective views on inerrancy. That discussion would largely substantiate your point on 2nd & 3rd Isaiah, Jonah, and so forth.

I’ll probably add a note at the beginning of the post encouraging people to read through the comments.

I don’t think Jonah is a parable, and I don’t think Second Isaiah and Third Isaiah were written by later authors but by the actual Isaiah. But I don’t think you need to deny inerrancy to hold that Jonah is a parable or that Second Isaiah and Third Isaiah were written by later authors in the Isaianic tradition. I just think you have to make a mistake about the historical background and how such works could be taken in context. I’d say the same about pseudonymity in New Testament epistles and about the dating of Daniel. I hold that inerrancy, combined with a more accurate view than the majority view on historical matters, will lead to conservative positions on such issues. But it’s not inerrancy itself that makes the difference. It’s a judgment on such other issues. I should mention that Craig Blomberg and Tremper Longman have made similar points in published works, and they’re both pretty conservative inerrantists.

I should say that one place this applies in my own thinking is that I don’t think Genesis’ early chapters give a chronological historical account, but I do think they teach what God did without error. Six-day creationists claim my view is at odds with inerrancy, but it’s not, and I don’t think this is a different view of inerrancy. It’s a different view of how inerrancy applies because of a view about how genre works. I don’t share the mainstream consensus about genre with respect to Jonah and Daniel, but I do on Genesis to some extent.

Longman has a view that I think is implausible on the authorship of Ecclesiastes. If you accept the historical and literary assumptions I favor, his view is incompatible with inerrancy. But he doesn’t share those assumptions, and he remains an inerrantist despite a view that I can’t as an inerrantist hold. Robert Gundry does something similar with midrash in Matthew, denying things I think inerrancy requires, but he does so by denying assumptions that I think are obvious, and he remains an inerrantist.

This is really just another instance of the same phenomenon we see with egalitarianism. Some egalitarians (e.g. Luke Timothy Johnson, Paul K. Jewett) agree with complementarian exegesis but deny inerrancy about the moral teaching of the New Testament. Others (e.g. most evangelical egalitarians) accept assumptions about the text that complementarians find implausible or even demonstrably false. Given those assumptions, egalitarians need not deny inerrancy as Johnson does. But he finds them implausible, as complementarians do. Given such a view, it takes denying inerrancy to be an egalitarian. But without such a view, it does not. The disagreement isn’t about what inerrancy means but about other assumptions and views.

I do not mean that there is no impact on the doctrine of scripture, but rather that, since we are not talking about a text that is in our possession, the primary issue is about God and revelation.

In another context I might try to debate that. At the moment, I’m wondering if my characterization is fair.

Now the more variations there are, the harder it is for us to be sure which form is the inspired form that’s inerrant. But that’s not an objection to the view itself as a coherent view. It’s just a skeptical argument about how sure of which reading we should count as the inspired one. But that problem arises without inerrancy. Inerrancy just adds one further claim that there is an inerrant form of the text. Any kind of inspiration view has to allow for an inspired form of the text, though. Peter’s view itself takes the Bible to be authoritative, so there needs to be some form of the text that’s authoritative. Inerrancy adds nothing at all to the issue.

Conservative views on this issue (including but not limited to inerrancy) have always insisted that we don’t have infallible access to the inspired text or infallible access to the correct interpretation of the inspired text. These views go together well. Adding that you think there is an inspired text that’s inerrant and that we can have a reasonable but not infallible means of figuring it out via textual criticism isn’t any more difficult than adding that you think we can have a reasonable but no infallible means of figuring out the meaning of the text through good hermeneutics.

So I’m totally unmoved by this kind of consideration. It doesn’t seem to me to be a serious objection at all.

I think “inerrancy of the autographs” is much more coherent than other versions, but it is indeed hard to pinpoint the moment that something becomes an autograph.

In addition, while you didn’t mention it specifically, there’s the fuzzy line between textual transmission and revision. It’s a bit more controversial, but the western text of Acts, for example, leads one to question whether it is the issue of multiple revisions (a good possibility) or some kind of revision(s).

With this there is the problem that we simply do not have the autographs. Nonetheless, for definition purposes, we have a precise text at a precise point of time, even if we can’t lay hands on the precise text.

Not necessarily. Some scholars suggest that the original authors may have issued different editions of their work in different copies, and that some textual variants go back to these different copies. And, especially in the OT, books may have acquired their final form in a complex and gradual way such that there never was a definitive autograph. So calling the autographs inerrant doesn’t even in principle solve the problem.

The reason I finally put Google ads in my feed was that I have a fairly large number of feed subscriptions compared to my page views, and I put the full text of posts in my feed. I think I’d rather have something like related posts in there as I doubt many people will even look at the ads, but that doesn’t appear to be an option.

I don’t want to become obnoxious about advertising. I get some e-mail devotionals in which the devotional content is perhaps 1/10 of the e-mail and the rest is advertising. On the other hand, I don’t think that having one Google ad per post (over 250 words) in a feed should be that troubling to anyone.

Anyhow, thanks for the concern!

For what it’s worth, I use Firefox, with NoScript installed as a add-on, for safety reasons. It reports 11 scripts on this page, and blocks 4. (When I need to do something, such as comment on a blog, or see a special graphic, I allow the script that makes the process possible.) I didn’t see an add on this page, probably because of the blocked scripts.

I though you might want to know this. I hope that I’m not preventing bread from reaching your table.