Redefining the Uncomfortable Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy
Brett Palmer, © 2009
When popular books are published, criticizing long-held Christian beliefs, and these books hit the New York Times Bestseller list, apologists tend to circle their wagons. These guys are amazing, often living in a close-knit world all their own. Apologists are, if nothing else, a creative bunch. Such is the case with an apologetic response to Bible scholar Bart Ehrman's popular book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why." The response, written by Timothy Paul Jones, attempts to do damage control in the wake of Ehrman's excellent study of the many textual issues with the New Testament that call into question the fundamentalist doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Among other things, Jones would like to promote a redefinition of standard biblical inerrancy so that he --and fellow Christian apologists who follow Jones's lead--can ignore certain features of the Bible which clearly show that the text is not wholly infallible.
We may first want to ask, who is Timothy Paul Jones? Why should we pay any attention to what he writes about Bart Ehrman? And, who is Bart Ehrman? Why did what he wrote solicit a response from someone like Jones? Is Bart Ehrman someone important enough to have caught a figure like Jones's attention and should any of us care that Jones took notice of Ehrman's work? Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He attended the ultra-conservative Moody Bible Institute as well as Billy Graham's alma mater, Wheaton College. He finalized his education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Ehrman is best known for his critical examination of Christian texts and the origins of Christianity [1]. Timothy Paul Jones is the senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills, Tulsa, Oklahoma. He graduated with a degree in education from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary [2]. As I see it, Jones has not traveled far from the comforts of his own theological backyard while Ehrman details in his books his journey from fundamentalist believer to agnostic and critic of fundamentalist Christian thought. Ehrman's breadth and depth of expertise is noted in the works he has authored, translated and edited. I'm not exactly sure what possessed Jones to challenge Bart Ehrman nor why we should seriously consider his take on biblical inerrancy. But consider it I will, only because I found Ehrman's work compelling when I first read it and Jones's discomfort with the doctrine of biblical inerrancy rather transparent in his book when I first ran across it in my local library. That, and the fact that Jones's definition of inerrancy is at odds with a vast number of believers who hold to the literal truth of the Bible: every word of it.[3]
Recall that in my article regarding biblical inerrancy I defined this doctrine as the firm belief that the Bible contains no errors (inerrant) of fact: historical fact, scientific fact, or theological fact. Indeed, a full one-third of Americans hold that the Bible is literally true in this way. That's a staggering number, given that the population of the United States is over 300 million. This isn't a tiny fragment of an isolated portion of American society that believes in biblical inerrancy and all of them would disagree strongly with Jones's definition of inerrancy which we will consider shortly. Total inerrancy of the Bible is a very widely-held belief. When pressed to explain such tall tales as the Jonah story, firm believers in biblical inerrancy follow in the footsteps of Inherit the Wind's honorary Colonel Matthew Harrison Brady who declared regarding the man who was swallowed by a great fish to skeptic Henry Drummond: "I believe in a god who can make a whale, and who can make a man, and make both do what he pleases." There is no miracle too large that a biblical inerrantist cannot credit the work to this god.
But there are certain features of the Bible that point to errancy that are nonetheless undeniable. Some believers in the Bible's authority would likely enjoy what one-third of American Christians maintain: the total inerrancy of Scripture. But they must feel somehow compelled to acknowledge --however reluctantly-- that regardless of the strength of their faith, errors nonetheless exist in certain features of the Bible. And it is one of these features that apologist Timothy Paul Jones examines in his book against Bart Ehrman. That undeniable feature is the many textual variants that exist between ancient manuscript copies of the New Testament. We know without question that there are differing copies of the gospel of Mark that have come down to us through the centuries, for example. Some of these copies close the gospel at chapter 16, verse 8. Other copies have extended endings. This is a simple, undeniable fact. We also know that there are differences with stories between gospel accounts in the versions of the gospels as we have them today. For example, was the woman who was issuing blood cured by her faith alone or only at Jesus' command? Mark 5:25-34 and Luke 8:43-48 say that it was the mere act of the woman touching Jesus' garment (Mark 5:27) --or just its fringe (Luke 8:44)-- demonstrating her faith alone that cured her (Mark 5:34; Luke 8:48). As soon as the woman touches Jesus' clothing, she is healed. Jesus plays no conscious role in her healing according to Mark and Luke. Jesus is unaware of who is cured merely by touching his clothing in Mark's and Luke's account, until the woman shyly reveals herself to him. However, Matthew differs and assigns the healing directly to Jesus' involvement. While in Matthew's version (Matthew 9:20-22) the woman still reaches out and secretly touches the fringe of Jesus' cloak, she is not instantly healed and Jesus feels no surprising "power surge" drain from him as he does in Mark and Luke. In Mark and Luke, Jesus is stunned by the woman touching his garment and draining him of his curative powers and has no idea who reached out to him until the woman exposes herself in the crowd from which she had been a part (Mark 5:30-33; Luke 8:45-47). Matthew, however, has the woman touch Jesus' garment and Jesus turns immediately around and sees the woman. It is when he sees her that he utters the famous phrase: "Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well." (Matthew 9:22) And, it is only then that the woman is cured. Matthew is not even clear if the woman had come out of a crowd, either, which is likely why Jesus can immediately identify who touched him. She was the only person who wasn't there before (in Matthew's version, Jesus, his disciples and an unnamed "leader of the synagogue" are the only ones mentioned as having just left the tax collector's house where they had been eating and are said to be on their way to the synagogue leader's home to cure his sick daughter when the woman issuing blood appears. There is no mention of a "crowd" in Matthew's gospel pressing in upon Jesus as is mentioned in Mark and Luke). Matthew appears to lack the crowd which confused Jesus in the other two gospels (John's gospel completely lacks this story).
While not a faith-shattering example of error (nonetheless, apologists across the centuries have worked to explain away this discrepancy), the different gospel accounts of how and when the woman issuing blood was cured nonetheless points to an error in the text. If the reader cannot see the error, consider a more modern context: Consider a woman with a medical affliction. After twelve years of suffering, she is suddenly cured. Three friends hear her story and repeat it in letters to other friends. Two of the friends tell the story of the woman and explain that when the woman arrived at a certain clinic, she felt herself healed as soon as she touched the doorknob of the doctor's office. The doctor was surprised to examine her and find nothing wrong and her affliction totally gone. The third friend tells the story that the woman was healed after she visited the clinic and was given an injection by the doctor. He examined her following the injection and declared her affliction cured. Clearly, the stories don't agree and one would be correct to say that at least one of them is in error of the actual facts of the event. Was the woman cured merely by touching a doorknob or was she cured by receiving an injection? It seems an important detail to get straight! In the case of the New Testament story of the woman with the issuance of blood, all three versions of the tale are included and the totality of the scriptures containing them is considered inerrant. Clearly, however, they are not. One (or even all) of the versions of the story is not an accurate description of the event (if we grant that the event had any historical validity at all). One of the accounts is in error.
So, how does Timothy Paul Jones get around these clear errors? How can he say the Bible is inerrant while still acknowledging there are errors? As he admits,
...copies of the New Testament documents differ from one another in thousands of instances...Does everything in Scripture and in the biblical manuscripts agree word for word? ...The answer to that question will always be a resounding no. (pp. 31-32)
He can claim inerrancy of the Bible by redefining inerrancy. He takes the uncomfortable definition of inerrancy as describing something as "free from error" of any sort and only assigns inerrancy to a certain feature of Scripture: a feature which cannot be subject to testing for error. It's a neat little trick, but before we examine it, let's look at some neutral definitions of inerrancy. These definitions are not beholden to denominational or doctrinal constraints.
From dictionary-reference.com:
From Merriam-Webster:
From Webster's:
From The American Heritage College Dictionary 4th Ed.:
From The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 4th Ed.:
From The Oxford American College Dictionary:
In the hands of Christian apologists --as it is with a great many things-- conventional definitions of words are altered to suit doctrinal agendas. In Jones's case, he has deferred to an obscure source for his preferred definition of "inerrancy". He quotes from What You Should Know About Inerrancy written by Charles Caldwell Ryrie and published through Moody Press in 1981:
The inerrancy of the Bible means simply that the Bible tells the truth. Truth can and does include approximations, free quotations, language of appearances, and different accounts of the same event as long as those do not contradict.
I was unaware that Charles Caldwell Ryrie, whom I'd never heard of until reading Jones's book, was an authority on how to define biblical inerrancy. But, apparently, Timothy Paul Jones is following Ryrie's lead and reviewers of Jones's book --other apologists like Craig Blomberg of the conservative Denver Seminary, Robert Yarbrough of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Gary R. Haberman of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and D. James Kennedy, televangelist-- all apparently have fallen in to line behind him. Ryrie is the final word on inerrancy. But Ryrie is merely another product of evangelical schooling. He is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and also taught there as well as at the Philadelphia College of Bible. A number of Ryrie's other books were also published by Moody Publishers. Jones did not venture very far outside his comfort zone to extract a definition for "inerrant."
Regardless, Jones expands on this co-opted definition of biblical inerrancy. As noted earlier, Jones admits there are errors in the Bible. He doesn't believe the Bible needs be world-for-word inerrant. In fact, the Bible touches on a lot of subjects. The Bible discusses issues relevant to biology, geology, psychology, economics, politics, ethics, prophecy, theology, etc. And, regarding all these things, in addition to word-for-word copies of biblical texts, it would appear that Timothy Paul Jones (using Ryrie's loose definition of inerrancy) allows to Bible to make errors. Indeed, Jones's definition of inerrancy only pertains to the "truth" that God intends to convey in an otherwise error-prone text. Jones notes,
Though they may have been imperfectly copied at times and though different writers may have described the same events in different ways...the biblical texts that are available to us provide a sufficient testimony for us to understand God's inspired truth...(p. 32)
And,
The ancient manuscripts were not copied perfectly, yet they were copied with enough accuracy for us to comprehend what the original authors intended. (p33)
It would appear that apologists signing up for Ryrie's definition of inerrancy will allow various copies of the biblical text to have thousands of copyist errors, providing ample evidence that God did not supervise the inerrant transmission of this otherwise inerrant "inspired truth." Apparently, God can inspire "inerrant truth" but can't inspire inerrant transmission. These apologists also seem not to care if different accounts of the same story appear within the bindings of the Bible (the healing of the woman issuing blood is but one among many examples of such discrepancies). Using Ryrie's loose definition, are these apologists as generous with the numerous errors of historical and scientific fact made by the biblical authors? Errors can exist, it seems, so long as they do not detract from "God's inspired truth"; whatever that is.
And, according to apologists like Jones, not only can there be inerrancy in the midst of error, but inerrancy is self-defined! In an "exercise" called "Think About It" on page 33 of his book, he instructs readers:
What do you believe about the New Testament? Is the New Testament inerrant? If so, what does inerrancy mean to you? In a journal, record your own beliefs about the New Testament.
Inerrancy, then, is subject to belief. If you believe the New Testament is inerrant, define what that means. For Jones, obviously, it means some non-verifiable "truth" is transmitted without error through textual variations, conflicting stories and outright contradictions in Scripture. But, Jones asks, what does inerrancy mean to you?
How does Jones arrive at his assertion that the Bible is inerrant in its message, but errant in its transmission (and, apparently, errant in a variety of other ways as well)? My website, and hundreds of others like it along with books, magazine articles, etc. all point out the failure of the Bible to be not only errant in its transmission and internal agreement, but also historically and scientifically in error. How, in the face of this failure of biblical assertions that we can check (transmission, internal harmony, history and science), can someone still maintain that the Bible is inerrant in matters that we cannot check (theology, the so-called "truth" of God's inspiration)? Of course we can't, and that's the point of Jones's preference for Ryrie's personal definition of inerrancy rather than the standard definition. Webster's, et al, all quite plainly define inerrancy as being something without error; as a thing incapable of being wrong. But, the Bible is wrong. It's wrong about a whole variety of things including how the earth, oceans and sky formed. The Bible is errant about how humans and animals appeared on the planet. It errs regarding the existence of some magical garden in some mythical past. The Bible makes a false assertion regarding a global flood and how human language developed. Scripture is totally mistaken about the number of people a small region like the eastern Nile delta could sustain in the ancient past. It apparently is wrong about how Canaan was settled by proto-Israelites. The Bible is famously erroneous regarding the shape of the earth and the composition of the sky. The holy texts mistakenly assert that a man was swallowed by a giant fish and survived three days in its belly. It cannot decide whether a woman was healed of her illness by magical clothing and her faith alone or at the command of some itinerate preacher. And the list of errors goes on and on. The Bible overflows with errors. But, there is no error, according to Jones and crowd, with "God's inspired truth" revealed through all these errors, and in spite of them. To understand this truth, the Bible is "sufficient." It ain't perfect, but it's sufficient! Now how the hell would they know?
If reasonable people are going to devote their worship to a supposed supernatural, super powerful being they have every right to expect something more from that entity than a document that is a slave to scribal errors and the ignorance of eras in which it was composed. They have a right to expect such a document to be centuries, if not millennia, ahead of its time. They have the right to expect a divinely inspired work to contain no errors whatsoever. No copyist errors. No errors of historical fact. No errors of scientific fact. If this deity can inspire a perfect original document, it follows that this deity can inspire perfect copies. No exceptions. If a deity cannot have stewardship over the copies of his text, and these texts are demonstrably in error, what reason do we have to believe the originals were not in error as well? After all, we have no original copies of these texts to make such a claim of inerrancy in the light of errant-ridden copies. Reasonable people should expect this divinely inspired document to accurately describe nature, and not to erroneously describe the shape of the earth or the composition of the sky. While the book may contain stories of miracles, those miracles must nonetheless be supported by details that conform to the laws of nature. In other words, there is nothing wrong with a story about how a sea was parted by a deity but the number of people who crossed the muddy divide must be believable and conform to the constraints the land and the conditions of their living imposed upon them.[4] Prophecy must not be open to multiple interpretations, be clear, and largely free of mythical animals as stand-ins for kingdoms and empires. Use the names of the kingdoms and empires themselves so that all doubt is erased about for whom the prophecy is directed. And prophecy should be free of pseudo-science like numerology; it the name of a man is intended, use it. [5] Verification of prophecy must be plain and there can be no doubt that any prophecy in this document was written well in advance of the prophesied events and not after them.
Does this mean reasonable people have the right to hold high expectations for determining the character of any supposed deity and the sort of literary work he may inspire? Yes, I think they do. But that is probably because we've been told this deity has high standards for us. I think it reasonable that the same criteria used to evaluate the clarity of my own written work --clear and precise writing, correct factual claims-- are the automatic criteria to judge a god's work. And not just any god's work but the supposed God, Yahweh, of the biblical text who is described to us as the foundation for all things. If this divinity, this Yahweh, created us in his own image, then he is a reasonable creature to whom we can expect reasonable actions. If a work ascribed to a deity fails to meet the reasonable basic standards used to evaluate every other truth claim, then this book, this Bible, said to be of divine origin, is just another scrap of literature not unlike thousands of others from antiquity borne of the fallibility of mere mortals. But for Jones and crowd, this book is "sufficient" evidence of a superior divine creature. It is "sufficient" to require them to turn their minds over to its claims and demands. How low their standards must be for this divinity and how easily they give in to worshipping it.
NOTES
1. Bart Ehrman's works include (note subjects and publisher):
2. Timothy Paul Jones' works include (note subjects and publisher):
3. "While there are different views as to what extent the Bible is inspired, there can be no doubt that the Bible itself claims that every word in every part of the Bible comes from God (1 Corinthians 2:12-13; 2 Timothy 3:16-17). This view of the Scriptures is often referred to as "verbal plenary" inspiration. What that means is that the inspiration extends to the very words themselves --not just concepts or ideas-- and that the inspiration extends to all parts of Scripture and all subject matters of Scripture (plenary inspiration). There are some people who believe only parts of the Bible are inspired, or only the thoughts or concepts that deal with religion are inspired, but these views of inspiration fall short of what the Bible itself claims. Full verbal plenary inspiration is an essential characteristic of the Word of God." Link Return to text
4. See my articles on the Exodus population, beginning here. Return to text
5. Major scholars agree that 666 in Revelation 13:18 is numerological code for Nero Caesar. See page 1298 of the Oxford Bible Commentary. Return to text
SOURCES
Funk, Robert W. (1990) New Gospel Parallels Vol.1,2: Mark. Polebridge Press
Jones, Timothy Paul (2007) Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. IVP Books
Site Contents © Brett Palmer