Those who claim that the Bible is “inerrant” are clear that this applies to the “autographs,” or original manuscripts, of the Bible. But we don’t have ANY of those original manuscripts. What does that mean for claims that the Bible is “inerrant”? And even if we did have those originals, most of us can’t read the Bible its original languages. Can a translated Bible still be inerrant? In this episode Dan shows why the lack of manuscripts is a HUGE problem for claims to inerrancy, and argues that it’s impossible for a Bible translation to be inerrant. Dive into the episode to find out why.
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Axis Mundi Hey everyone, as always thanks for tuning in to It's in the Code.
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Now we go to It's In The Code.
I'm going to introduce my name.
I'm going to be here by the place.
So again, welcome to It's in the Code, part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
You can always reach me, Daniel Miller Swaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Delighted to hear from folks.
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So please keep those coming.
Still in this kind of deep or deep-ish dive into the idea that the Bible is inerrant.
Why are we talking about that?
We're talking about that because it's part of the broader idea within a certain kind of high-control Christian religion about being biblical or being a Bible church or quote-unquote believing the Bible or whatever.
All themes that I've talked about in earlier episodes on this series.
If you're not a subscriber, I invite you to subscribe and you can go back and check out some of those episodes And got feedback from folks saying, like, you know, say more about this, or explain this, or whatever.
So we've been doing this kind of deep dive here, and last episode we looked at Inerrantist's insistence that not only is the Bible without error, right, but that the without there, right, the without error part, extends all the way down to each and every word of the biblical text itself, okay?
And the logic is this—and they say this, people say it explicitly, this is explicit, this isn't me teasing it out, I'm not decoding anything here, folks, this is just right there on the surface—if we can't be sure that every word of the Bible is what God wanted it to be, we can't trust any of it.
And that's going to be important to remember, because we're going to come back to that today.
I'm really kind of amped up for this episode.
I don't know if people can hear that, but this is one of my real sort of, you know, I don't know, cathartic moments doing this.
We're going to come back to that idea, the importance of claiming that every word has to be from God, okay?
We also saw inerrantist insistence talked about, and again, I never found this convincing.
Even when I was an evangelical, even when I really wanted to be an inerrantist, I was not convinced by this.
that God inspired the biblical writers in such a way that every word is exactly what God wants it to be, but this occurred without God dictating the text, that God didn't just use them as a recorder to say what God wanted to say.
And one of the arguments that theologically conservative theologians— again, I've been reading Millard Erickson, I've been reading Wayne Grudem, two sort of exemplars of contemporary evangelical theology, especially Grudem, I think, who's arguably the more conservative of the two— one of the arguments that who's arguably the more conservative of the two— one of the arguments that people like them give for why this is possible is that the language of the Bible is so
That there really was only a single set of words that could communicate his truth, and Erickson in particular has a whole section on this.
Okay, so that's where we are.
What I want to pick up with today is another element of inerrancy, and this claim that inerrancy goes all the way down to the very words that are used.
Again, this is a claim that means that the Bible is quote-unquote verbally inspired, okay?
And this is a part you can see if you read these theologians.
But it doesn't often trickle down to the masses of conservative Christians who insist on the truth of every word of the Bible.
The Uncle Rons of the world, they may not have heard this.
Pastors don't tend to preach this.
Congregants who are told that the Bible's reliable and can believe it are usually not told this.
And we came across this idea a couple episodes back when I read Grudem's definition of inerrancy.
So I'm going to do that again, and I want you to listen, okay?
Because here's what he says.
He says, Quote, the inerrancy of scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.
End quote.
Grudem's not alone in this.
Erickson says similar things.
Most inerrantists do.
The inerrancy of scripture in the original manuscripts.
Folks, that is a huge qualification.
Why?
Because technically speaking, It means that the doctrine of inerrancy only applies to the original manuscripts of the Bible.
These are known.
I don't know exactly why, but the technical term for these is the biblical autographs, right?
The manuscripts actually written by the biblical authors.
There's already a bit of a misnomer because there's evidence in them that Paul, for example, when he would talk, he would dictate to somebody who would write down the letter for him.
Technically, it was somebody else, basically a secretary writing it, but whatever, okay?
Technically speaking, the doctrine of inerrancy only applies to the original manuscripts.
I'm quoting that directly from Wayne Grudem.
So when an errantist insists, for example, that everything Paul wrote in the Bible was, word for word, exactly what God wanted him to write without any error in the words or the teachings or their meaning or anything else, they mean that this is true for the actual manuscript that Paul or Peter or whomever produced.
Does everybody get that?
I hope you get that.
It's really, really important.
And the odds are that maybe Cousin Lenny—remember Cousin Lenny is our cousin who's in seminary, right?
Cousin Lenny might know this.
He's had to have a systematic theology class, and maybe he's read Grudem or Erickson, he's read somebody like them, and he knows this.
But odds are really high that your neighbor, or your brother-in-law, or even Uncle Ron, who all insist that the Bible is inerrant and true and without error, they probably don't realize this.
They've probably never heard this.
Again, most pastors don't preach this.
And there are good reasons why most people who insist on the inerrancy of the Bible don't advertise this point that they're actually talking about the biblical manuscripts.
Okay?
There are reasons to keep this under wraps.
There are reasons not to preach this to your congregation.
If you're a pastor and you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, there are reasons just not to take too close a look at this.
I'm going to give a couple here.
So the first, then the most obvious one, and some of you know this.
Some of you have been clamoring to hear me say this, so here we go.
Here's the most obvious problem.
We don't have a single original manuscript of the biblical text.
Not one.
You go even further, and most people would say they don't think that those manuscripts likely exist at this point.
So, the insistence that the Bible is inspired and without error, right down to its individual words, only applies to manuscripts that we don't have.
Talk about an article of faith.
Talk about something that is beyond all demonstrable evidence.
There you have it.
Okay, now, theologians know this.
Conservative Bible scholars know this.
And here's how they try to get around it.
They try to get around it by insisting on something that, on first blush, sounds perfectly reasonable.
Millard Erickson does this, Wayne Grudem does this, my seminary professors did this, on and on and on.
They will point out that we do have, in many cases, hundreds of copies of manuscripts that give us a very, very good idea of what the original manuscripts probably said in most cases.
In other words, it'll be like, yes, you're right, we don't have the original one, but we have these ones that were produced later, and we've got lots and lots of different copies, and when you compare all of those, you can kind of tease out what the original likely would have said, okay?
One of my favorite nuggets, I don't actually know that this is true, I think it probably is, I think it's plausible, but apologists and conservative theologians throw this out all the time, and they would say, we have more manuscript evidence for the words of the Bible than for the teachings of Plato.
This is the degree of reliability.
And biblical scholars have also developed complex and sophisticated principles for trying to determine the most likely language of original manuscripts.
When you've got a bunch of manuscripts sitting in front of you and they differ in small ways, what do we think is predominantly what the earliest versions would have said?
And so Grudem says this, he kind of sums up this line of thinking, and he says this, again, I'm quoting Wayne Grudem, for over 99% of the word of the Bible, we know what the original manuscript said.
Let's let that number stand for a minute.
I think it's inflated.
I'll get to that.
But let's just say, okay, Wayne, you're right.
99%!
So, it is true for the vast majority of the biblical text that we do have a very good idea approaching certainty about how the text reads.
Let's assume that Grudem is right about all of that.
Here's the issue.
That's not enough.
That doesn't preserve inerrancy.
Remember, the inerrantists are the ones who tell us that if we can't be certain, absolutely certain, about every word of the Bible, we can't be certain about any of it.
This is all-or-nothing logic.
And this means it is not logically possible to claim that 99% certainty is enough if enough requires 100%.
You can't have it both ways.
You cannot say, if there is any doubt about any of it, we have doubt about all of it, and then say, hey, but we can be good because we've got 99%.
It doesn't work.
Now, to add to that, I think Grudem's claim that 99% is almost certainly too high if we're talking about all the differences between the manuscripts we have.
We think about all the divergences.
I mean, we're talking, folks, down to things like use of articles.
One manuscript will use the article A, and another manuscript will use the article V, right?
You'll have nouns that appear as singular in one manuscript, but they're plural in another manuscript.
You'll get repetitions of phrases.
If you've ever been typing something or writing an email or something and you get distracted or you lose your place or something and you come back and you realize that you repeated a phrase or you said it a couple times, we're talking about that kind of thing.
There are verb tenses that are grammatically correct in some manuscripts, but not others.
There are hundreds, probably thousands of divergences.
Okay?
And the inerrantists will argue.
The Wayne Grudems and Millard Eriksons of the world will argue.
Conservative Bible scholars will argue.
And I've had these arguments.
They will argue that most of those differences are trivial.
And they would be right.
Most of the time, the fixing of a verb tense or something like that, it doesn't change the overall meaning or emphasis of the text.
There's no real doubt about what the author quote-unquote intended to say, right?
But here's the issue.
They would be right if they didn't need absolute certainty about literally every single word.
This is where the appeals to literalism kick in.
That literally every word of the Bible is what God wants it to be.
So if you have doubt about anything, no matter how seemingly trivial it is, again, it's them.
They're the ones who said, if you have doubt about any of it, you have doubt about all of it.
Which means that no discrepancies can actually be trivial.
Okay?
And on top of that, biblical scholars disagree about which of the later manuscripts are accurate reflections of the originals.
When Erikson says 99%, we can be certain that's absolutely false, because not all Bible scholars agree.
They've got these general principles of interpretation, but sometimes they think there's an exception, or you'll get disagreement.
If you read Bible commentaries, you can read about these things.
All we get are approximations.
There is no original text.
There is only this effort to reconstruct what we think the original text was.
Okay?
But we can also go even further than that with this emphasis on the originals and the original manuscripts and why it's significant.
It's a problem because not all of those textual differences are minor.
Some are actually really significant.
I want to give just a couple of the most famous.
I'm not going to do a case-by-case thing, and folks, you can email me in and let me know and be like, this is the one that's always concerned me, or what about this?
I can't march through all of these, right?
But a couple of the significant ones.
Here's one of the most famous, the end of the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament.
In most, and in the oldest manuscripts, the text just ends abruptly when the women who were disciples of Jesus, they come and they see the empty tomb, and basically they freak out and they run away, and that's the end.
It just ends.
Okay?
But there are other manuscripts that add an additional sentence, kind of trying to wrap it up and saying that they went out and they preached the message of Jesus to the world and so forth.
And then there are other manuscripts with an even longer ending.
It's like 11 verses longer.
That adds to the passage and tells about what they did after the tomb and Jesus appearing in his resurrected form and all of this other stuff.
Okay?
Now, the vast majority of Bible scholars would tell us that there's virtually no evidence that either of these endings was original to Mark.
But they will say that means there may have been an ending that disappeared.
We don't know what it is, or it just ended without this.
Okay?
And many conservative Bible scholars try to argue that the longer ending, especially that longer one, is part of the original.
So here we have this point of disagreement.
That we just simply don't know.
This notion that we have absolute certainty about what the original was, we don't.
Right?
Here's another one, and this is the last one, I promise.
This is a famous one, in the Gospel of John, the story of the woman caught in adultery, so-called.
This is one of the most well-known New Testament passages.
It even makes its way into popular culture and popular usage, though most people don't realize that's where this comes from.
But in this story, a woman is caught in adultery.
And it's worth pointing out, like, the text doesn't say anything about anybody else being caught or who her partner was or whatever.
There's, you know, it really reflects some patriarchy and misogyny and so forth.
But a woman is caught in adultery.
She is brought before Jesus with a mob demanding that she be stoned to death.
And in this passage, Jesus famously says, And so when people have heard the phrase, you know, don't be so quick to throw stones, or like, if you've ever sinned, don't throw the first stone, you know, something like that, that's what it's a reference to.
It's an allusion to this Bible passage.
And slowly the crowd disperses because obviously they realize that they're all sinful and they're not perfect and they shouldn't be condemning this woman.
And he tells the woman that he does not condemn her and he sends her on her way.
It's this intriguing passage.
For many people it's this beautiful image of Jesus forgiving and so on and so forth.
Powerful, well-known passage.
There is no evidence that it was in the earliest manuscripts, and it's like 25 verses long.
There is this huge chunk in the middle of the Gospel of John—it's not in the middle, maybe it is in the middle, it's well into the Gospel—that looks like it's been inserted.
And again, while there might be overall scholarly consensus, there's no complete agreement.
And again, especially among conservative theologians and others who want to argue that it is in the original.
Here's the takeaway.
And again, people have done longer takedowns of these things.
They could go and find, I'm sure, hundreds of examples.
Maybe the original manuscripts were inerrant.
Let's say that they were.
It's impossible to prove that they weren't.
Because we don't have them.
I mean, that's convenient for the inerrantists in this regard, is that we don't have them.
So I can't prove to you that the originals weren't inerrant.
In this sense, I've talked about how I think the doctrine of inerrancy is incoherent and so forth.
But in terms of the text itself, we don't have it, so you can't.
But on the inerrantist's own account, the requirement that the Bible has to be accurate right down to the specific words used, that lack of manuscript agreement means that it is impossible to affirm this of any biblical manuscripts or reconstruction of a manuscript that we actually have.
You simply cannot affirm it as inerrant.
Okay?
That's the first thing.
This appeal to inerrancy to the manuscripts is this obvious problem.
We don't have any.
Okay.
Here's another one.
I'm going to dive into this, right?
We're just going to give this, and then I'm going to call it a day because I've got to wrap this up.
But I said that there are multiple reasons why inerrantists don't advertise this point about the autographs, the original manuscripts.
One is that we don't have them.
Here's the second one, right?
And it connects with a lot more people on a concrete level, okay?
The fact that inerrancy is limited to the manuscripts means that no translation of the Bible can actually be inerrant.
And stick with me, because somebody's going to say, or if I was talking to Cousin Lenny, he'd say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That doesn't follow at all.
All you have to do is translate it.
A faithful translation would preserve the inerrancy of the Bible.
Nope!
I'm going to say that's impossible.
And why is that significant?
It's significant because obviously the vast, vast majority of people who read the Bible do it in some language other than Greek or Hebrew.
Even if we did—here's why it's a big deal—even if we did have the original manuscripts, And even if we could be certain about how they read, we read through them and it turns out that those kind of discrepancies and things are all gone.
It's all there, it's clear, whatever.
It would still be impossible to produce a quote-unquote inerrant translation of those texts based on the arguments of inerrantists, okay?
And any of you who speak or read or write more than one language, you'll know this, okay?
And it's this basic point.
First of all, there is almost never only a single way to properly translate a sentence from one language into another.
You don't have to be a linguist to know this.
The even bigger deal is that oftentimes a literal word-for-word translation would be misleading, right?
People use idiomatic phrases that don't translate well, or maybe it's a joke, or maybe you've heard a song, right, that's translated from the original, and if you did a word-for-word translation, it loses the rhythm, or it loses the rhyme, and you have to modify it to carry through some of the import of the original.
And I discovered this way back when I was an undergraduate because I was a biblical languages major.
I've said to people lots of times, studying Greek and Hebrew is part of what moved me away from inerrancy.
It was this issue.
Even if you knew what the text said and had a good reason for adopting a certain text, there were always multiple ways that you could render it in English.
And this is okay because we all recognize that translating isn't about the words.
It's about the meaning or the emphasis or the teaching or whatever that's conveyed in the words.
We all know that what matters in translation is effectively communicating the same idea from one language to another.
So if you're talking about an idiom, you try to find a sort of a parallel idiom that has the same force or another metaphor.
Or if it's a song, you play around with the translation until you can get the idea across And the rhyme and the rhythm and all of that sort of stuff.
Okay?
Sometimes a word-for-word translation can do that, but more often it can't, and often the same idea could be conveyed in multiple ways.
I would say that that's typical.
Sometimes we even get stuck because there's no equivalent way to communicate the idea, but most of the time we manage.
So Cousin Lenny will say that solves it.
Problem of inerrancy is solved.
This is a straw man argument.
Wrong.
Here's the issue.
Inerrantists like Grudem and Erickson, again, two preeminent evangelical theologians, they explicitly deny that inspiration and inerrancy only apply to the ideas or the message or the teachings of the Bible.
There are people who argue, the Bible is inspired, it's a message from God, it has divine teachings, but they will say that means the teaching or the message is inspired, the language that was used, the way that it's expressed, the words that are used were the way that the people receiving that message sought to communicate it, and so forth.
In other words, for them, inspiration doesn't go down to the actual words.
Our inerrantists deny this.
Explicitly, they say that is too weak a form of inerrancy.
Inerrancy has to go down to the words themselves, and that means that no translation can ever be inerrant.
Effectively, accurately translating the ideas, which is what translation does, would not be enough to ensure inerrancy.
For a translation to be inerrant, we would have to have the assurance not just that we got the right ideas, or the right teachings, or the right emphasis, or the point that the author wanted to make.
Nope.
We would have to have the assurance that every single word of the translation corresponds to how God would communicate the same thing in that language.
It's not enough to say, God ensured that every word in the Greek and Hebrew manuscript is what God wanted.
We'd have to say, God ensures that every word in this English translation is what God wants.
That's what inerrant means!
So, evangelicals will try to get around this.
They'll say, and this is relatively sensible, that, you know, those who can't read Greek or Hebrew or don't have access to or the expertise to use technical commentaries on the Bible, they should use reputable translations, they should compare multiple translations in a given language, etc.
Cool, fine.
None of that can preserve inerrancy.
We are back to one of these places where the doctrine of inerrancy actually undermines itself, if we are talking about anything but the original manuscripts.
So, Cousin Lenny or Uncle Ron, they can rail as much as they want about the reliability of the Bible, but the fact of the matter is that an inerrantist's own theology undermines the very possibility of translation.
The concept of an inerrant biblical translation is incoherent.
It can't work.
So, picking on this doctrine from multiple ways, even if one says that it's coherent, even if one accepts that inspiration can go all the way down to the words we talked about last time, that only applies to the manuscripts.
I'm trying to show here that that, again, undermines the doctrine.
We don't have the manuscripts on one hand, and even if we did, the concept of an inerrant translation is incoherent.
There's more to say.
I'm going to say more in future episodes, right?
But I want to start highlighting one takeaway that stands out to me here, okay?
And this is a theme that's going to begin to emerge, I think, as we go further and further along.
One of the impulses behind claims to inerrancy is that the Bible gives us assurance of truth.
We can be assured of the correctness of what it says.
But another piece of this is that this truth is so reliable and so clear that anyone can read the Bible and see it.
This is why you get this emphasis on the Spirit, right?
Regular people, within this view, they can have a kind of immediate access to God through the Bible, and this is a particular articulation of a Protestant principle of sola scriptura and so forth, and the so-called priesthood of the believers would go into all of that.
There has always been a strong popular dimension to the way this doctrine operates.
I said popular, not populist.
People are curious why I make that distinction, email me, I'm happy to talk about it, okay?
There's always been a strong popular dimension to this.
This idea that regular people can have the assurance that they can go to the Bible and they can encounter God through it.
But what we find when we dig into these dimensions of the doctrine of errancy is that this is a fantasy.
Even when somebody goes to their Bible and affirms what they take to be the quote-unquote plain meaning of the text, and they feel that they've experienced God, this wasn't immediate.
It was not some immediate access to God.
It was mediated by hundreds of years of scholarly decisions about what would count as the inerrancy of the text.
It was further mediated by thousands of interpretive decisions that have to be made by translators anytime they translate into some other language.
And that's to say nothing of the mediation through pastors, through parents, through other people reading the Bible and interpreting it and telling us what it means and so forth.
The point is, and we're going to see this more as we move along, the more the difficulties of the doctrine of inerrancy come into view, The more we're going to see how much this supposedly biblical religion comes down to issues of authority and control, which highlights why doctrines of inerrancy are such a crucial component of high-control Christian religion.
They're not the only component.
You can have high-control articulations that do not claim inerrancy.
I suppose, in principle, you could have traditions that claim inerrancy that are not high-control, though I think that that's a tall order.
But the more we dig into this, the more we see how the doctrine doesn't hold up and the mechanisms that are actually in place to sort of shore it up and to make sure people read the Bible in certain ways, the more we're going to see, as we always do, that this is about issues of control, this is about issues of authority.
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