Introduction

The title of this post may sound strange, whether you’re a believer (a Christian) or not because, whether or not you personally own one, you have almost certainly seen this thing called a “Bible”.

Most likely, if you own one it is either bound in faux or genuine leather, usually fairly thick, and often has gilded pages, and—if you’re lucky—it has thumb indexes. Some can be cheap, costing on a few (US) dollars, and some can be incredibly expensive, costing hundreds of dollars, like my dream Bible (insert chef’s kiss here).

So, the question—at first glance—might seem somewhat nonsensical.

Lately, I’ve been working my way through the recently released volume Misusing Scripture (Rutledge, 2023), which is subtitled, “What Are Evangelicals Doing With the Bible?”. In fact, if you have been following the blog over the last month or so, I produced a rather in-depth series responding to Josh Bowen’s (aka Digital Hammurabi) chapter found there. Well, I kept reading and I found even more material that needs to be addressed.

So, you’re probably wondering, what was it that caught my attention and warranted the Triggerman treatment?

Its the second chapter of the volume, which contains an essay by one of the editors of the volume: a professor of history at the University of Northern Iowa by the name of Kenneth Atkinson. His chapter: “The Error of Biblical Inerrancy: The Bible Does Not Exist!”.[1]

The Issue of Definitions

Atkinson begins his chapter by looking to define his terms, noting how important it is.[2]

The first term that he sets out to define is the term “evangelical”, which he gets from a fellow historian by the name of Bruce Babbington, who defines the term along four lines: biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism.[3] These terms are, one can surmise, each represents a distinct focus on central aspects, such as biblical authority, the atoning work of Christ through his death on the cross, the necessity of conversion, and that there is a continuing outworking that follows. Fine, no disagreement.

Atkinson writes,

Of all the items in Bebbington’s list, none is more important than the first. It is the foundation of his remaining three items. If, as he notes, spiritual truth is found in the Bible, then this must mean the Bible is superior to all other books since it alone contains God’s revelation.[4]

I’m willing to, at least in technical terms, say that such a position is provisionally correct. The Bible—which refers to the collection of books and texts which contain and convey the beliefs and teachings of the Christian faith, aka Scripture—is superior, but only in terms of priority. In fact, being Reformed in my theology, I affirm of necessity that Scripture alone is sufficient and authoritative for all matters of faith and morals, as it is the only thing (collectively speaking) that is “inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16, CSB). So, when someone, like me, speaks of Scripture in terms of authority it is the ultimate authority.

Now, I am also willing to admit that there are a number of myths—even outright falsehoods—that many evangelicals believe about the Bible that often create more problems than they solve, many of which I’ve spent time working through here on the blog, of which this post is going to join, specifically in regard to their relationship to an affirmation of inerrancy.

Biblical Inerrancy vs Textual Reliability

There is no doubt that one of the places where a belief in inerrancy can suffer the death of a thousand cuts is when it comes to its interface with the either the content of the text or the transmission of the text. Both form the backbone of Atkinson’s argument against inerrancy, which is evidenced when he writes,

The problem is that what Christians and non-Christians call the Bible is a recent creation that constantly changes based on the discovery of new manuscripts. Therefore, it cannot contain the eternal unaltered word of God.[5]

Here, again, I think that there’s a definition that is being assumed that isn’t being stated, and I think it’s for the term “Bible”.

A fairly common atheist meme is one that has a picture of a Bible in it, with the question, “If your Bible has the word ‘version’ in it, how accurate can it be?” At the heart of Atkinson’s rather bold assertion is that atheist question.

The question, is answered by understanding what the word “version” means in regard to translation methodology and sources. This means that one can have a very good translation of a text, but the text can be corrupted. The question is, how do you know that the message in the text hasn’t been changed?

A growing problem today, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence-driven technologies, is that it is becoming very difficult to determine whether an image or audio or text has been manipulated to alter its content or its context. Indeed, our dependence on video has now become increasingly suspect given how quickly and easily it is to manipulate audio or tweak a visual image. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that actual eyewitnesses to events are more and more required.

The question for Christians, when it comes to how we know that we can be confident that we have the final and authoritative word of God on a matter, is that we have a text that has been transmitted through time. But it’s not that the text was written down once on stone tablets and then passed along on through time. Sometimes we think it would be nice if that’s what actually happened. Instead we have a text that was written on things which wear out easy and require maintenance to be preserved and transmitted.

This fact, for critics like Atkinson, seems to pose a problem, especially when he notes that, “The list of alternative manuscript readings in the footnotes to the Novum Testamentum Graece, the reconstructed Greek text used as the basis for all modern English Bible translations, contains more words than the actual biblical text.”[6]

What’s funny is when you push back on the claim to actually get them to describe what the differences actually are or why they matter, you will often get a rambling, sputtering incoherent response before your interlocutor points over your right shoulder and yells, “Squirrel!”

That’s not to say that there aren’t some readings that can have an impact on the meaning of the text. But the simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of textual variations are matters of spelling, omissions or additions of articles, and word order variations. That is to say that the vast majority of textual variants don’t actually impact the text, and the ones that do…well those are the ones that we can worry about. For more details on the topic, check out this post featuring a presentation by New Testament textual scholar Daniel Wallace.

Now, what does textual reliability—that is to say our certainty about what the text says—have to do with whether or not the text is inerrant, that is to say about whether or not that the text is true?

To Be Continued in the Next Post…

Notes

  1. Kenneth Atkinson. “The Error of Biblical Inerrancy: The Bible Does Not Exist!”. Misusing Scripture: What Are Evangelicals Doing With The Bible?(Ed. Mark Elliot, Kenneth Atkinson, & Robert Rezetko). Rutledge. 2023. p.79-94
  2. Ibid, p.79
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Ibid, p.80
  6. Ibid, p.88 (citing Bart Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus)