Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Biblical Inerrancy

  • Bible Translation and Fundamentalism from a Wesleyan Perspective

    Dennis Bratcher, of the Christian Resource Institute, has an exceptionally good article on neo-fundamentalism, with a focus on the TNIV and Bible translation, looking particularly from the Wesleyan tradition. (He is Nazarene). There has been a frequent tendency amongst Wesleyans to borrow theology from the Calvinists, but not to go as far on certain points. I would note also that sometimes Wesleyans who are not part of the charismatic or pentecostal groups borrow some theology back from those sources, often without careful consideration of how it all fits together.

    I have encountered people with cobbled together theologies made up of mismatched elements from the Calvinist, charismatic, and Wesleyan traditions. Now often United Methodists are loose enough about their theology to make it sort of work. But Bratcher calls on Wesleyans to at least ask how this might be view from a Wesleyan perspective.

    I’ll leave the rest to him. Go and read.

  • Reading Part 6 (On Inerrancy)

    I somehow got the idea that the inerrancy series to which I linked yesterday was in five parts. A comment from the author let me know that I was wrong on that point, and how I got the idea I do not know, consider that the statement “*Part 6 will conclude with reflections on why the doctrine of inerrancy is important.” occurs at the end of the notes to part 5. But such is life in the blogosphere.

    You can now read part 6, and it does tie the package together. I would like first to quote portions of the author’s comment to my previous post here to set the stage. After gently reminding me of the sixth part, he said:

    I don’t want to give the impression that some people, such as yourself, are “too far away” to connect with. This was a paper I wrote for seminary last year, and given the space limitation I had to narrow down my argument rather strictly. To engage every possible position on inerrancy was not possible within the scope of the paper, but I believe I had something original to say to those who claim some sort of “limited inerrancy.”

    This is a good point which I did note. Now I don’t find that the premises he lists at the beginning of part 6 catch me. When he says “The Bible’s claims about its own integrity are a matter of faith and practice” as the second premise, I’m not sure I’d agree, but then I’m truly not one of the limited inerrantists whom he is addressing, and thus I might not evaluate that statement properly. I reject inerrancy in all its forms and I have problems with the term “infallibility” in many contexts. I’ll write more about that below.

    I have been frequently shocked by positions held by people who do claim to accept inerrancy. There seem to be people out there who profess some form of belief in inerrancy who are more liberal in their handling of the scriptures than I would be able to accept. One of these points is the late dating of the book of Daniel, which I have grave difficulties reconciling with inerrancy. I commented on this point in Earnest Lucas’s fine volume in the Apollos Old Testament Commentary series, in which he doesn’t specifically affirm a 2nd century date for Daniel, but does argue that one can affirm inerrancy and yet hold to a late date. I’m supposed to be the liberal on this issue, and I accept a mixed dating, with a historical Daniel and some fairly old stories supplemented by later Hebrew additions.

    You said “it’s a bit odd to use either a proof-texting approach or the approach of systematic theology to determine what the Bible must be.” I’d like to clarify that the argument I presented makes no claims to what the Bible must be (or must not be). My argument is more modest in that I’ve only argued what the Bible claims to be. Whether or not the Bible is what it claims is an entirely different point, and I’ve yet to present any argument regarding that.

    On this point, I understand the objection to my comments, but in the broader picture, the doctrine of inerrancy seems to me to result from systematic theology more than it does from observation of the Bible. In fact, the claim of inerrancy produces a considerable effort in explaining those elements of the Bible that don’t appear to fit the picture. I’m not only talking about explaining errors or reconciling contradictions, but also looking at the process. The synoptic gospels, for example, display signs of copying from one to another. The simplest explanation for stories with slight variations is that they are the same story remembered or passed on with slightly different details. The doctrine of inerrancy forces one to explain how the details really worked. An extreme version of this is Lindsell’s explanation of the cock crowings and denials that reconciled the stories in the gospels. Now one can’t be absolutely certain that Lindsell was wrong, but it seems very improbable that he was right. (I see a reference to this here. I don’t have a copy of The Battle for the Bible on hand to check the accuracy of that reference, however.)

    My preferred approach is to sit down with the Bible and ask, “Just what does this book appear to be, and what does it appear to do?” Having gotten a start at answering that question, I will move on to what precisely it is, and then I have some basis on which to interpret and apply statements such as 1 Timothy 3:16-17 (which winds up being very important in my view of inspiration as well) or 2 Peter 1:20-21.

    Welll, I started this post with “Biblical inspiration” fatigue, as in I’ve written way too much on the subject recently. But I should still say something about what I do believe. (Note that this is not in response directly to Roger’s series. I simply feel that I should make a positive statement to connect with any criticisms, thus giving people equal opportunity to criticize my views.)

    First, I do not think a doctrine of scripture, apart from a more general doctrine of how one discovers God’s will is likely to be valid. That is sort of like a view of how a house will be laid out sole by expressing the accuracy of the measuring tape. In such a case the measuring tape can be 100% accurate, but it’s practical accuracy is limited by the people who receive the information.

    This leads to my second point, which is that as human beings, we are always speaking of God’s word as we receive it. God’s word in God’s mind is always true and absolutely accurate. If we believe that God is infinite, his word in his mind is also without perspective, or perhaps more accurately with absolute perspective. We, on the other hand, never comprehend something without perspective, and those moments in God’s presence that simply hint at God’s absolute perspective are overpowering.

    Third, I hold that this perspective issue applies to the prophet who initially receives the revelation as much as to any other human. He will not absolutely comprehend the message, and based on recorded statements in scripture as well as observations of the written product, I see no validity in the idea that God’s inspiration involves dictation. (Now please don’t assume that I think inerrancy necessarily involves verbal dictation. The vast majority of inerrantists I know do not.) My particular point here is that the prophet understands and expresses the message as a human, and thus the received communication is itself limited. I would argue further that the received message is imperfect, but I have little time to follow that trail.

    Fourth, this results in the possibility of error at any stage of the transmission other than the thought in God’s own mind. The possibility of error applies to everything that is communicated because everything communicated goes through a human mind, is then copied by a human mind, and is later interpreted and applied by a human mind–all imperfectly.

    Inerrantists of my acquaintance accept that interpreters are all fallible, and certainly fallible in faith and practice as well as history and science. They accept that copyists may have made errors, though they would maintain those are few and of small import. I simply extend that one more step. Any human mind that transmits the word of God will do so in a limited way, i.e. imperfectly.

    So why read and depend on the Bible? Well, first, I don’t “depend on” the Bible as such. But generally this question tends to make me crazy. I depend on potentially fallible materials in my daily life. I am a fallible person who makes imperfect decisions, many of which I now know, from the eminence of 50 years (!) to have been really, really bad. I deal with imperfection. It is important to me that God is perfect, but I see no need for any human to be perfect.

    Now the Bible is a core element in my reception of God’s word, but by itself it is words on paper. I must bring all elements of God’s revelation together in order to have the faintest prayer of a chance of getting anything right. And that “prayer” of a chance is precisely what I do have. For me the Bible comes in a Spirit-filled community and is guaranteed to me not by the factual content of the text, on which I may change my mind in the next several seconds, but rather on the Spirit and the community with all the gifts and wisdom that God can give us. Even so I know that we will be in error from time to time.

    But even more importantly, I think we spend most of our times in the questionable areas, things on which we can quite reasonably disagree, while most of our actual problems come in areas on which we know what is right, and yet aren’t doing it. But again, that’s another point.

  • A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy

    Since I have staked out a pretty firm position as an opponent of Biblical inerrancy, I was interested in the series A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy on The A-Team Blog. The series comes in five parts:

    1. Part 1
    2. Part 2
    3. Part 3
    4. Part 4
    5. Part 5

    Some might expect me to go into a blow-by-blow refutation of such a post, but having recently written on it extensively in my book When People Speak for God (though that wasn’t my central topic), I really only want to call attention to it and highlight a few points.

    This series is well written and very clear, though some may be concerned that the author has covered a great deal of ground in large leaps. That is, however, the nature of essays and blog posts as opposed to multi-volume works on systematic theology. He defines inerrancy as he sees it very clearly. I suspect he would not include someone like me who denies inerrancy completely in the group he was addressing. As he notes:

    Even though the paper states so, I would like to make it clear that my argument is directed to those Christians who hold that the Bible is inerrant only in some areas (such as faith and practice), but not all areas in which it makes affirmations.

    Since I don’t view the Bible, as such, as inerrant in any area, perhaps I’m simply too far away from his point of view to connect at all. The standard difficulties occur. First, as I argue in my book (p. 16ff), it’s a bit odd to use either a proof-texting approach or the approach of systematic theology to determine what the Bible must be, when we have the Bible itself which we can examine, asking questions like just how it came together, how the prophets or other authors got the words that they wrote, how much those words are impacted by the surrounding culture, and so forth. The text of scripture itself tends to deny the results of systematic theologians; the Bible simply doesn’t operate the way they seem to think it should. How, for example, should one believe that all the words in the Bible are the words of God when the Bible clearly identifies many of them as the words of other people, often people who should not be believed? I know that sounds like an unsophisticated response. The inerrantists are sure to point out that they are not so stupid as to assume that when the inspired writer says that Satan, for example, says something, that must be true. It must, of course, be true that Satan said it. But even so that points to the Bible being something quite different than “the words of God” and suggests a more sophisticated approach.

    Second, the procedure of taking any Biblical text and applying it to all of the Bible, such as the usage of the favorite 1 Timothy 3:16-17, is questionable at best. Roger, our A-Team blogger, avoids this, but only partially, claiming that 1 Timothy 3:16-17 would apply to the Old Testament. I assume then that he would extend that application to the New Testament in forming his doctrine.

    But the process of canonization was not complete, even for the Old Testament at the time 1 Timothy 3:16-17 was written, so the assumption that the statement can be applied to the entire corpus of scripture is just that–an assumption. It happens to be an assumption that I would tend to agree with, though I understand God-breathed differently, but it is an assumption nonetheless. And would I agree with it in reference to the same canon? That is hard to tell.

    I would point out also that it is not primarily textual criticism that has brought inerrancy into question, but in one major way I think it should. In general, other higher critical methodologies are more of a challenge to inerrancy, as is historical study of the ancient near east. Because inerrancy as commonly defined applies to the autographs, textual criticism doesn’t really impact that definition.

    Or does it? I find it very odd that inerrantists claim that in order to have authority the Bible must be 100% without error. Even a slight error as the original author writes that autograph is fatal. Yet “essential accuracy” is what is required of those versions of the Bible that we have today. So apparently if manuscripts of the book of Acts differ by 10%, as the western text does from the Byzantine and Alexandrian texts, that’s OK. It’s textual variation. Through textual criticism we know what the text was to a very high degree.

    Now that is an assumption as well, because we have applied generally good principles of textual criticism and come up with the text that we have, but what about the poor early Christians who had the wrong text. Was it important that various Christians had differing texts for the book of Acts? Generally, inerrantists tell me know, pointing out that the variants are not doctrinally important. That’s a questionable point in itself, but is not critical here. The argument is that as long as it wasn’t done by the author, that 10% variation is not important. Even though it’s important that there was an inerrant autograph somewhere, nobody actually needs that inerrant autograph in order to have the truth–according to the inerrantists own arguments. I admit I just don’t get that argument.

    So let’s take a specific variant. According to 2 Kings 24:8 Jehoiachin was 18 years old when he began to reign. According to 2 Chronicles 36:9 he was 8. Now I like this variant because it is so obviously trivial. But it’s an interesting one from the point of view of inerrancy. In both Chronicles and Kings we are probably dealing with a compiler/editor who created the autograph. According to the doctrine of inerrancy, this variant is unimportant if it is the result of a copyists error. But supposing that the compiler of Chronicles, the one more likely to be wrong in this case, actually slipped up and wrote eight rather than eighteen in the autograph. Would that invalidate the truth of all of scripture? I find it astonishing that one can suggest that it’s critical if the error was made by the author, but unimportant if made by a copyist. The result in terms of the Bible I read, is the same.

    Obviously, I’m brushing past huge amounts of the argument in the series. I did want to call attention to it, however, because I think it’s a good summary of the other side on this issue.

  • Pope Benedict XVI on Creation-Evolution Controversy

    My sister e-mail me a link to this article on to me via e-mail.

    Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries — particularly the United States and his native Germany — between creationism and evolution was an “absurdity,” saying that evolution can coexist with faith.

    The pontiff, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said that while there is much scientific proof to support evolution, the theory could not exclude a role by God.

    Now while I agree that there is much evidence for evolution (I think “scientific proof” is a poor use of terms), I have to say that I don’t think the debate is an absurdity. For folks like Dr. Kurt Wise (author of Faith, Form, and Time, who believes as an article of his faith that he must take Genesis 1-11 as accurate scientifically and historically, it does make a difference. I might call him bullheaded, but I shouldn’t call him stupid. Given that one assumption, the debate isn’t absurd, because from his point of view, the Bible must be false if evolutionary theory is true.

    I don’t have that same problem, because I don’t understand the Bible as a whole, or Genesis 1-11 in particular in the same way that he does. Yet while I continue to have a very low regard for scientific arguments in favor of young earth creationism, as I’ve indicated in several recent articles, and I object to young earth creationists identifying their one interpretation of Genesis as “the Christian faith,” it is obviously quite possible for people with substantial IQs to disagree.

    From the point of view of Catholic Biblical interpretation, it may, in fact, be absurd to come to a problem. I know that my wife, who was raised Catholic, never even saw this as an issue. I lack the knowledge of Catholic doctrine to comment intelligently on that fit. One assumes that Pope Benedict does not suffer from that deficiency, and that one can take his statement that the argument is absurd from that perspective as fairly definitive.

    The primary debate, however, is not between Catholic theologians. It is rather between Christian fundamentalists and some conservative evangelicals and other protestants for the most part. And there we have a simple divide.

    Tim LaHaye, in his book How to Study the Bible for Yourself states as his first rule of hermeneutics (p. 159), “Take the Bible literally.” In my copy of his book I have circled that statement and simply written “WRONG!” And there’s the key point of the debate. I don’t like the literal-figurative continuum as a single way of discussing how to take Biblical meaning. I prefer to discuss the types of literature involved, and what one might expect to get from those particular forms. As commonly understood, however, “literal” generally means “in the most concrete sense possible,” thus suggesting 7 literal 24 hour days, and accurate recording of all generations in the genealogies, for example. “Taking the Bible literally” in that sense of the word will result in support for young earth creationism.

    The controversy is real, and not absurd, however shocking certain positions in it may seem to any one of us.

  • Links on Biblical Inspiration

    A discussion of my book When People Speak for God is taking place on the Compuserve Religion Forum. At the same time, Amazon.com has dropped the price to $12.23 ($17.99 suggested retail).

    I have also just written some notes on Justin Holcomb’s book Christian Theologies of Scripture over on my Participatory Bible Study blog. While this book didn’t have an impact on mine, as I received my copy too late, I consider it an excellent resource for those interested in studying the inspiration of scripture.

  • Linking my own Stuff/Book

    I’ve been a bit delinquent here on Threads for the last week or so. There’s a good reason for that. My next book, When People Speak for God is near the final step and should, in fact, go to the printer on Monday. The way we do things, that should mean availability for people to get actual copies (I’ve got definitions on the brain) about 10 days later.

    I want to link to a couple of posts I’ve done elsewhere, but first just a note on the book. This isn’t new and original material. I have written several essays that I published on the web in my pre-blog days, and a number of additional blog entries since then. I also tend to discuss Biblical inspiration, the gift of prophecy, God speaking to people, and people claiming that God told them certain things when I’m teaching in person. A number of readers on of the internet material have suggested I get it in print, as reading 50-60 pages at a shot on the internet annoys them. Those who attend my classes often ask me for something they can read for more information on what I teach about inspiration. Thus far I’ve referred them to URLs, often an unsatisfactory option.

    Print-on-demand technology allows me to create a book such as this for what appears off-hand to be a relatively small audience. My original plan was to collect the essays, write a couple of connecting or explanatory notes, add topical and scripture indexes, and publish. Ah, the wishful thinking! I may be the boss but I’m an incredibly cruel and evil boss. Thus when I looked at the collected essays I said to myself, “This won’t do at all. Get thee to work!” (Note that the archaic language is not an indication of divine inspiration.)

    A few months of off and on work later, the resulting volume is 276 pages (243 pages + front matter, glossary, topical and scripture indexes), and based on word counts I’m guessing it’s about 1/3 new material. The backbone is my essay Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy, which you can check out on the web. Added to this is material on the modern gift of prophecy, and practical considerations for handling the situation when someone claims divine authority for their words. You’ll find almost all the existing material in this book (bar the 1/3 new stuff) if you add to that the Biblical inspiration category on this blog and on my Participatory Bible Study blog.

    To my non-Christian friends I would simply note that if you’re looking for a book in which I argue for divine inspiration, this isn’t it. This book only discusses that issue peripherally. It is strongly rooted in the Christian tradition. I do argue against the doctrine of inerrancy from within the Christian tradition and discuss a number of related issues. I simply don’t want somebody to think this book is something it’s not.

    I’ll probably blog more about that down the road. In the meantime, I wanted to point out that while I’ve neglected this one, some of my blogs have been active.

    On my wife’s devotional blog I posted this entry yesterday, reminding all those of us who are Christians that we may be the one and only “translation” of the Bible that some folks may read.

    The Running Toward the Goal podcast offered Elgin Hushbeck’s latest, titled Irrational Nobility. It includes some arguments that may annoy non-Christian readers. Elgin would enjoy it if you went and argued with him. You can also check out the transcript of that program here if you prefer reading to listening.

    On my Participatory Bible Study blog, I posted on what the author of Hebrews believed was a difficult message. Elsewhere I’ve been just as quiet as I have here.

  • Pious Assertions About the Bible

    There is a whole category of assertions about the Bible that I call “pious,” that reflect people’s desire to respect the Bible and uphold its authority, but that are often inaccurate and poorly considered. I would ask whether a statement can be truly pious and respectful if it is also not true. My suggestion is that we consider carefully whatever statements we make about the Bible to be certain that the reflect what the Bible actually is and its purpose in the Christian community.

    For example, there are exaggerated statements of obedience. “I do everything the Bible says,” someone announces. Do they really? That’s quite unlikely. There actions are probably more nuanced than that, but it just sounds so good to claim that you do everything the Bible says. Every theological position I know of has some element to limit certain commands to particular times or places, as well they should. But further very few of us, at best, could claim to always carry out God’s will for us in everything, can we? Perhaps we should say something more like, “I do my best to obey God’s commands as they apply in my life” or “I do my best to follow God’s will with his help or strength.” That sounds more like respect, combined with honesty.

    A second category is those statements that treat the book almost like a person. At our daughter’s wedding the little Bible boy was a fairly lively individual. He was carrying my very most favorite Bible, a Cambridge NRSV with wide margins, two markers, and decent sized print. I have a number of full sets of sermon notes in the margins of that Bible. My daughter wanted him to carry it. During rehearsal, he grabbed it, folded it over backward, and started beating the altar rail with it. May I say that it got on my nerves? But my distress was due to my love of books, and to my desire to have that particular book in good condition, not out of fear that God might be angry at the mistreatment of the book. I have encountered people who are afraid to mark their Bibles, write in the margins, or even carry them under tough circumstances. There’s the standard admonition to put the Bible on the top of any stack of books. But the bottom line is that your actual Bible is still just ink and paper. It’s the divine inspiration, the message, that is holy, and that will not be damaged even if the original is flushed down the toilet.

    Finally, there are the bad analogies. My favorite is the “boy scout manual.” Whenever someone gets that saintly smile on their face, and tells me that the Bible is just like the scout manual, I am pretty sure they’ve either never read the scout manual or never read their Bible–usually the latter. The Bible is actually almost, but not quite totally unlike a scout manual. I say “almost” because the Bible is a book with paper, ink, covers, and so forth. Après church has a good post related to this here (HT: Wayne Leman of Better Bibles Blog).

    The problem is what I call the “Sunday School” answer. We know we’re supposed to respect the Bible as God’s Word. We know it’s important. But often in the modern Christian community we don’t actually know what’s in it, so we can’t make our own accurate statements of why it’s important to us. Thus we use just any comment that sounds pious and respectful, so we can appear to respect the Bible without the effort of digging into it.

    For me, the Bible is an important companion as I commune with God. Over the years my times of prayer and Bible study have become more and more blurred. That’s because I see prayer as communion with God, and I see Bible study in the same way. God speaks to me through the Bible. My understanding of his will is enlightened by the Bible.

    There’s a good old statement that does well for me: Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light for my path. — Psalm 119:105

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – Summary and Conclusion

    This is the conclusion of my multi-part series responding to Bart Ehrman’s book, Misquoting Jesus. Here are links to the earlier portions of this series:

    In chapter 7, The Social Worlds of the Text, Ehrman discusses how the social situation in the early church shaped changes that were made to the text. In particular he discusses the status of women, and mentions several instances of textual change that relate to it. Amongst these are Junia/Junias in Romans 16:7, and the prohibition for women teaching in 1 Corinthians 14:33-36.

    Next he discusses the relationship of Christians and Jews. Some alterations in the text make the Jews look bad. By the 2nd century, Christians were a separate religion, and often engaged in polemic against Judaism.

    Finally he discusses paganism and apologetic alterations to the text. He provides numerous illustrations in each case.

    One of his major points in this section is to show how the scribes were human beings whose world shaped the way in which they transmitted the text, and thus to some extent the text itself. When you hold a Bible in your hands, you hold the complex product of numerous people, each of whom have had a small part in shaping the text you will read.

    Conclusion

    It is in the conclusion that a differ significantly from Ehrman’s view. In technical terms, he is certainly expert, and he displays that expertise throughout the book. As a popularizer, he is clearly one of the best. I have not seen a clearer explanation of the basics of New Testament textual criticism for the non-scholar.

    The fundamental difference in our conclusions results not from the content, but from our starting points. I begin with the view that inspiration is something that happens to people, and that people express that inspiration in various forms, including text. While a person experiences God, individually or in community, the expression of that experience is distinctly human.

    Ehrman seems to accept the standard evangelical view of Biblical inspiration that assumes that God’s breathing of scripture is essentially the impartation of data to be expressed in words.

    How radical are the changes?

    If you see inspiration as involving the impartation of data to be accurately expressed in words, and expect those words themselves to be divine, then the alteration of such words must come as a shock. This is the experience expressed by Bart Ehrman in his conclusion. He sees the changes as radical and important because they alter the words, and to him the words are the vehicle of inspiration, or in the end of the lack of it.

    For me these changes are not nearly so radical, because I assume that the writers chose their own words, and in most cases their own facts. Thus alterations are interesting, but neither shocking nor dismaying. If one studies a broad enough basis of the text, one can get to who Matthew, Luke, John, or Paul really were, and to me that is the key to inspiration. God spoke to the community through these people in a special way and I want to get to know them.

    One quotation will illustrate this point:

    In particular, as I said at the outset, I began seeing the New Testament as a very human book. The New Testament as we actually have it, I knew, was the product of human hands, the hands of the scribes who transmitted it. Then I began to see that not just the scribal text but the original text itself was a very human book. This stood very much at odds with how I had regarded the text in my late teens as a newly minted “born-again” Christian, convinced that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God and that the biblical words themselves had come to us by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don’t have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it, since the words God reputedly inspired had been changed and, in some cases, lost. . . . (p. 211)

    I would like to point out one other thing, however, and that is that those who argue Biblical inerrancy, with or without verbal plenary inspiration, as it applies to the autographs do need to respond to the issue of the relevance of such inspiration. What is the importance of the inerrancy of a document we do not possess? If we can deal with 98% accuracy in the Bibles we actually have, why would the discovery that the autographs were also only 98% accurate suddenly be a devastating blow to the authority of the Bible?

    This is why it seems to me that the doctrine of inerrancy of the autographs is more a doctrine about God than about the accuracy or authority of God’s communication. What the doctrine says is that God is perfect. Certainly, I can agree with that. But that still seems irrelevant, because the issue is how well did human authors comprehend what God revealed to them?

    Dependence on Scholars

    On one last issue I think that Ehrman makes a particularly good point. I have heard many people express either the desire to be completely independent of Biblical scholarship or even the feeling that they are independent. Sometimes these are people who do not even read the source languages, much less work with the manuscripts to determine the text. When we consider context, the history and culture that stands behind the text, many more specialized fields come into play, and nobody is able to be proficient in all of those areas. All of us are dependent at some point on the scholarship of others.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus IV

    . . . in which I respond to chapter 3.

    This response will be brief. This chapter is excellent. If you’re a Bible student of any variety, buy Misquoting Jesus and make sure to read chapter 3. While I have read many of the things presented here before in more technical works, this chapter is an exceptional job of popular writing by a scholar. You will enjoy the stories, and you will understand the transmission of the Biblical text much better. You could only get this kind of information elsewhere in fairly technical works.

    The first and major part of the chapter deals with editions of the Greek New Testament and how scholarship moved from simply using whatever manuscripts were available to building a text based on the best manuscripts and creating references of the variants in various manuscripts. When I studied Textual Criticism at the undergraduate level, I was required to take several verses and work from available photocopies of manuscripts to create a critical text of that passage. That was a truly revealing experience for me. Ehrman will help you get some of that feel.

    After that, he presents a section on the types of errors found in various manuscripts, starting with inadvertent copying errors and continuing with intentional changes. The examples are brilliantly selected and clearly presented.

    Recall that one of the basic arguments that Ehrman has with some other textual scholars is that he tends to think that more errors are intentional than some do. This is a matter of degree. Ehrman is not way out of the field, and most errors are fairly easy to classify. This chapter will give you a good idea how scholars accomplish their work.

  • God Delusion and The Bible

    The major complaint that I have about the treatment of the Bible in The God Delusion is that it is somewhat superficial. Particularly in the section on the Old Testament, Dawkins merely points out problems that we should recognize as real with scriptures. (For another approach see Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?.) I would say that someone who can read Judges 17-21 or Numbers 31 without serious concern has a problem with their moral compass.

    Passages such as those are a key reason why I do not look at the Bible using the “boy scout manual” metaphor. The Bible is almost completely unlike a boy scout manual or the instruction book for your car or an appliance. It is, instead the story of people experiencing God. (See my essay Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Authority.)

    I do not believe the inspiration of the Bible can be successfully argued outside the concept of the community. That doesn’t mean that there is nothing that can be said for or against. It simply means that acceptance of the Bible as a source of authority, and appropriate use of it must occur in a community of faith.

    One might expect that this would be an area in which I would spend the greatest portion of my time, since it is my specialty, but it would be hard for me to emphasize enough how un-earthshaking Dawkins’ arguments about the Bible actually are to me. They do bring up a serious point in terms of Christian education, however. There are many, many Christians who don’t know about these things and have never taken them into consideration in their own understanding of the Bible. They loudly proclaim that they keep every command in the Bible and do everything the Bible says, but very fortunately they don’t actually do that.

    Preachers and teachers who don’t want to deal with the difficult questions have a tendency to read only those portions of scripture that are easy to understand and will comfort the congregation. Some versions of the lectionary, for example, leave off the last two verses of Psalm 137 in reading because they will obviously disturb some members of the congregation, or don’t appear to fit with the rest of the reading. But one needs to face the fact that the did fit to the original author.

    I have blogged on this topic before: Slavery and the Bible, Biblical Decision Making, Slavery and the Bible Condensed, and The Danger of Unchanging Truth.

    One last thing, and this is addressed more to my fellow Christians, especially moderates and liberals, than to Dawkins or other atheists. It is not sufficient to tell someone that they should not take the Bible literally. There are many varieties of not taking the Bible literally. Take Numbers 31, for example. If you say not to take it literally, you might be suggesting that the story never happened, or that it did happen, but that Moses imagined God’s commands, or that the entire story was intended as an allegory (meaning what?), or perhaps that it’s historical but not normative. Again, I’ve blogged on this before here and here.