There’s a current movement among certain religious people to claim that they take the Bible seriously by accepting that it is without error. By this they mean literally.  They claim the meaning is obvious if you are seriously reading it.

I am going to do my best to summarize what I have learned about this topic both in my seminary training and from things I have heard and read about since then.  I have been swimming in this space for the past few years as well as what I learned in seminary over 10 years ago, but I am sure there is more that I haven’t run into yet.  I asked Chat GPT to supplement this and I will sprinkle that in when appropriate.

Feel free to skip this section if you have already done your own analysis.

Those who claim inerrancy believe that the human authors of each of the books of the Bible were each divinely inspired and managed to capture exactly what God wanted in each book and that God is all knowing and all powerful, so God is consistent. There are several problems with that. The first is that the Bible is “multivocal” – meaning that the various authors speak with various voices that are not totally consistent. They do contradict each other – for example, there are two creation stories in Genesis and two stories about Adam and Eve.  People who believe in inerrancy tend to blend them together, ignoring the differences. But we need to ask, which one is true? 

Another issue is that, while each of the many Biblical authors may have written down what they believed that God wanted them to, they each wrote from their own context and experience and to a different group of people. The books were written over thousands of years by a huge variety of people at different stages of Israel.  Some books seem to have pulled together what the different traditions said, hence the two creation stories and the two Adam and Eve stories I just mentioned. An editor appears to have stitched together the different stories, perhaps because different parts of Ancient Israel valued each one. Scholars have even named the different authors. Some books in the Old Testament were written to help make sense of traumatic experiences such as the exile to Babylon.

This lack of consistency is also true in the New Testament, where the stories of Jesus’s ministry are different in each gospel. There are even two different versions of Mark, one with and one without the women at the tomb. The stories in Acts differ from those that Paul wrote in his epistles. Paul’s letters were written to the different communities he had ministered to, each of which had different problems. Different contexts and different sense making, which all colored what he wrote. And other people may have written in his name, which was common to do at the time. There are still arguments going on about whether Paul wrote the books Timothy and Titus.

Those contradictions and inconsistencies are ignored, or an attempt is made to pull together all the different narratives using verbal gymnastics.  The typical Christmas pageant at a church often compiles all the birth narratives into one, but that’s not what is written. Those who believe that a woman’s role in the church should be limited ignore verses that mention female leaders in the Bible, in both the New and Old Testaments. Those who believe that the Bible condemn homosexuality have their favorite verses but ignore other parts.  (Note: It is ironic that King James who commissioned the King James Bible is said to have been homosexual himself based on how he favored different men in his court. But the translation he ordered is most favored by those who support an anti-gay interpretation.)

When confronted with two parts that seem to say different things, they dance around trying to make them fit. I’ve tried that once, and I didn’t get anywhere, the person just came up with a convoluted way to fit them together.  Those who favor inerrancy may resort to saying that that particular part should be interpreted metaphorically, contradicting their original allegation that the Bible should be interpreted literally.

Further, there were many other books written by early Christian believers that were not included in the final texts.  Different denominations have chosen different configurations of books, Catholic Bibles include books that are not in the Protestant Bibles (but may be in the Protestant Apocrypha) and the Orthodox Church has Bibles that are different still, all chosen by different councils.  Recently, we have discovered the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary and many others, which were not chosen by the various Councils that developed the final list. Was that because they weren’t inspired by God?  How did they know?   Why aren’t they all consistent?  Is God only inspiring some of them?

Another problem with the inerrancy belief is that the texts we have now in our current Bible are that they are all translations of the documents that they had at the time. But those aren’t the originals. The first Hebrew torah was the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the original Hebrew.  Hebrew fragments have been discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls. We are not reading the source documents, because they do not still exist. Everything has been translated.

When you dig into translation practices, you discover that every time anyone translates a document from one language to another, they use their best judgement to capture the meaning and flavor of the text. All translations involve interpretation. Plus, because the Hebrew documents that they translated from did not have any punctuation or vowels, those who translated it had to do even more interpretation. Further, many different versions of the original documents have been discovered. And some translations have additions, omissions and edits in order to further their particular theological agenda.    Again, perhaps you might think that the translators themselves were all inspired by God, but then why are they different? Which one is inspired by God? How do you pick?

Even back in Jesus’s time, there were translation issues.  The quotes from the Old Testament that the gospel authors attributed to Jesus were from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, but Jesus would have probably quoted the Aramaic or the Hebrew, but full versions of those have been lost to time. Would they have been translated the same way with the same meaning?  We don’t know- we don’t have the originals.

A further issue problem is that this belief in inerrancy is very recent.  The believers who quote it are operating in a system that is less than a century old and ignore the interpretations and beliefs that are older than that.  They don’t recognize the long history of different interpretations of the Bible in the past two millennia. They don’t recognize those that were used to support slavery in the slave states. They don’t recognize that what they are doing is an interpretation of the Bible, they think they are being literal, but don’t recognize how their own context affects their interpretation, much less the context they are in.  They are blind to the effect of context, the same way fish are blind to the fact that they swim in water.  Further, they would bristle at the word “interpretation”.

They make choices of what parts of the Bible to ignore, which was used to great effect by Rachel Held Evans in her book, “The Year of Living Biblically”.  When she decided to take the advice for women in the Bible literally, such as living in a tent for a month in her front yard, she highlighted that no one takes everything in the Bible literally. Those passages are ignored as is anything that disagrees with what they believe.

So, there are lots of reasons to doubt that any one person’s interpretation is exactly correct.  In actuality, the person saying the Bible is inerrant is actually saying, my interpretation of the Bible is the correct one.  In effect, they are saying, “I am the authority, trust me.”

Ironically, while they say that God doesn’t speak to us today in any other way than the Bible (that is the canon of the Bible is closed) they are saying that they have heard from God.

I am sure there are other criticisms of the Bible that I am missing, but I will stop here.