Continuing from part 1...

The Typical Hypocrisy

Kenneth Atkinson

One of the many tasks undertaken by those who are opposed to the doctrine of inerrancy is that they confuse it with the doctrine of inspiration. This is not to say that inerrancy isn’t dependent on inspiration but that they are not the same doctrine. This is why attacks on inerrancy are often dependent on attacks on inspiration, and more importantly how we get to the text. But it’s not only in getting to the text that is used to attack inerrancy, it’s also what the text says, or more importantly how it says it.

Atkinson writes,

Herein lies the problem for all evangelicals: We cannot use the Bible as our source for contemporary values if we do not know what it says or if its truth claims are based on myths that justify unethical behaviors. This is especially true of the NT, which, like the Old Testament (OT), is a problematic book.[7]

The use of the term “problematic” is a term that I find both interesting and problematic. Not simply because the term simply means, in descriptive terms at least, that it “causes a problem”, but no one ever really says what the problem is or why it’s a problem.

Moreover, when Atkinson says that “[we] cannot use the Bible as our source for contemporary values“, is simply begging the question of “Who says we can’t?” Also, he’s assuming that he’s proven that we do not know what it says. Almost anyone with half of a functioning cerebellum and basic reading comprehension is pointing at the Bible, with drool running down their chin and asking, “Can you not read?”

A chord that is hummed by non-believers is that the Bible–interesting that this doesn’t actually exist–contains “errors”. In fact, according to my count, Atkinson uses the term FOURTEEN times without seeming to understand how he’s using it. Most often he’s using it in terms of historical reliability. However, when you hear a historian make such claims, it serious should make you push back against the assertion, especially when they’re are other historians who make opposite claims, such as Peter J. Williams does here and here.

But let’s assume that he’s also making the moral assertion. If the Bible is, again speaking collectively, a historical document that is simply reporting historical events then to what are you appealing to say that anything that occurred in history was done in moral error? 

Moreover, if you’re going to judge it by our standards, right now, what about in twenty years (speaking optimistically) when someone say that something that you did was in moral error according to those standards?

The vast majority of people who want to sit in judgement of the past seem to forget that at some point in the future that they will be under moral judgement themselves, either by future generations or the Almighty. So, perhaps they should just chill and remove the log from their own eye before they attempt to remove the speck from someone else’s.[8]

When we push such a principle out towards the text, at least in terms of how it has been received, one also is forced to recognize that it wasn’t reproduced on a photocopier machine. For Atkinson, this supposedly poses a threat to inerrancy because the text—in terms of transmission at least—has moments in which it is garbled, thereby making, “[it]…impossible to uncover an original edition of any…book since scribes altered each immediately after its composition.”[9]

Here, again, we have a charge leveled, so what is the evidence? Atkinson gives 2 examples: 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1 and John 7:53-8:11.[10] I would have also thrown the variants of Mark 16:9 and following, but most people know about them.

James White writes about the passage known as the Pericope de Aldultera, 

…[It is] a near certainty that this passage was not originally a part of the gospel of John. Yet the story itself is certainly in harmony with the ministry and teaching of the Lord Jesus. Most feel it was an early oral tradition that was popular primarily in the West and that it came to have a part in John’s gospel over time.[11]

White further notes that this beloved narrative interaction was apparently a well-known insertion in ancient times and is often marked off or otherwise identified as such.[12]

In regard to the 2 Corinthians passage, it appears to be a well-known speed bump in the text of the epistle; however, contrary to  Atkinson’s (mis)reading of P.B. Davis, wherein he rather boldly claims, “was added to the book and was clearly not written by Paul,”[13]; Davis instead says that it is “not possible to determine with certainty… [who is] responsible for placing [2 Corinthians] 6:14-7:1 in its present context”.[14]

The complaint about the Corinthians passage is in regard to its clear, interruptive nature to the logic of the discussion in the epistle.[15] However, there are some who argue that the vast majority of the epistle is itself an interpolation, yet there is good reason to believe that this is simply a strategy employed by the apostle for dramatic purposes to hold the attention of a non-literate culture.[16]

The real question is, Is there any manuscript of Second Corinthians that does not contain the offending passage? We have manuscripts of John that do not contain the Pericope Adulterae, yet we have it scattered throughout other gospel manuscripts.

Speaking for Myself 

As someone who has had to think through my own position on the issues of inerrancy and it’s relationship to inspiration, I am constantly drawn to two distinct perspectives. The first is articulated by the late R.C Sproul, who wrote in his booklet, Can I Trust the Bible?,

The Old and New Testament Scriptures are probably the texts that have reached us with the most extensive and reliable attestation. For more than ninety-nine percent of the cases, the original text can be reconstructed to a practical certainty. Even in the few cases where some perplexity remains, this does not impinge on the meaning of Scripture to the point of clouding a tenet of the faith or a mandate of life.[17]

Also, the late Dr. Michael Heiser, 

…Scripture is the result of divine influence and the very normal human activity of speaking and, by extension, writing (2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:16–21). Writers report events and record feelings. They build arguments. They express themselves in poetry. They use sources. They borrow thoughts. They (or other hands that follow) rewrite and refine what was written. Authors are sensitive to genre, structure, literary devices, word choice, poetic parallelism, and narrative art. There is wordplay, irony, and premeditated structuring of plot. The books we have in our Bible are the result of work and careful thought. Biblical books were not slapped together. No part of any biblical book just “happened” out of the blue.[18]

Both of these thoughts have shaped how I understand inspiration, and subsequently inerrancy. 

The reason why this is important is when we come to speaking of the “autographs” as the grounds for inerrancy from which the doctrine proceeds. This means that one must look at the entirety of the manuscript tradition, not just selected parts of it. This is why I take a more preservationist view of inspiration when it comes to Scripture: that which God intends to communicate to us he will have preserved in the text.

Here, I can use the example of the Pericope Adulterae as a test case: if we find the pericope preserved in the oldest complete manuscripts, wherever it is found, whether it’s found in Luke or John’s gospel, then it is something that God intends for us to possess regardless of where it is found. If it is found in incomplete gospel manuscripts, regardless of where it’s found, then it’s something that is intended for us to have. The fact that it landed in John’s gospel, for whatever reason—be it accident or intention—, is simply irrelevant to whether or not it is original to John, it’s preservation in the text affirms its inspiration as what God has sent forth for, “for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, [and] for training in righteousness”.[19]

The preservationist perspective, I believe, accounts better for the entirety of Scripture as Scripture both in terms of content and context.

Now, perhaps some might just point at such a position and see a sign labeled “escape hatch”. So be it. I don’t care. What I do know is that  Atkinson’s argument against inerrancy is nonsensical. 

It’s based upon someone not knowing the difference between different things and how they relate to one another. It’s dependent on someone not knowing the backgrounds of the subject. It’s also what happens when someone (a historian) gets outside of their subject area and attempts to make an argument about things that they clearly don’t understand (theology).

This fact can best be seen in how Atkinson closes his entry when he writes, 

How evangelicals and other Christians actually deal with and explain away the insurmountable problems posed by the Bible’s missing autographs is beyond the limitations of the present study.[20]

I realize that I am cutting him off mid-thought by quoting this single sentence, I want to rephrase the statement into a question then answer it: How do Christians deal with the fact that the autographs—those things which are truly inspired and inerrant—are lost?

Well, what’s interesting is that he answers the challenge immediately before writing that sentence. We believe that the autographs—and this needs to be repeated—are in the manuscripts.[21]

All of them. 

Period.

Now we can look at the various manuscripts and critique and question what the copyist was doing or what he was thinking because some of the “errors” in the text can be doozies or downright comical, but then there’s other factors that go into the text, both in terms of the copyist’s mechanical skill or knowledge of his material, that can have historical relevance, but they only affect the text as far as it’s witness to its ancestry and not its content.

So, the question of whether or not we have a “Bible”, is answered positively, when we understand what the Bible is, what it’s for, and how it relates to us, where we are, and when we are.

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.80
  2. Matthew 7:1-5
  3. Atkinson, p.88
  4. Ibid.
  5. James R. White. The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations?. Bethany House Publishers. 2009. p.329
  6. Ibid, 328 
  7. Atkinson, p.88
  8. Paul Brooks Duff. “The Mind of the Redactor: 2 Cor. 6:14-7:1 in Its Secondary Context”. Novum Testamentum, April 1993, Vol. 35, no. 2 (p.160-80). Brill. p. 180
  9. Ibid.
  10. George H. Guthrie discusses much of this contention in the “Introduction” of his exegetical commentary  2 Corinthians (Baker, 2015).
  11. R. C. Sproul. Can I Trust the Bible?. Reformation Trust Publishing. 2009. p.33
  12. Michael S. Heiser. The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms. LexhamPress. 2017. p. 209
  13. 2 Timothy 3:16, Christian Standard Bible 
  14. Atkinson, p.92
  15. Timothy N. Mitchel. “Where Inspiration is Found: Putting the New Testament Autographs in Context”. Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 24.3 (2020) p. 83-101. p.98 (cited in Atkinson, p.92)