Re: A profound disturbance found in Yak butter.

At 08:50 AM 5/31/2006, Bill Hamilton wrote:

"For me I can accept the canon because the church fathers who
selected it were historically closer to the events described in the
Gospels. I think it's problematic to ascribe infallibility to them.
However, because many Christians agreed on the canon and because they
were closer in time to the events described (and therefore had access
to more original records) I can accept what they did. .. The status
of Scripture is a difficult issue. You don't want to indulge in
Bibliolatry, neither do you want to pick and choose what is and isn't
inspired. I have come to the conclusion that the inspired nature of
the Scriptures means that the Bible will correctly guide
Spirit-filled Christians who seek understanding prayerfully."

@ I think this is a really good commentary on the subject. ~ Janice

Inerrancy and Human Ignorance

Why We Could Not and Can Not Have Inerrant Copies and Translations of
the Bible James Patrick Holding http://www.tektonics.org/gk/inerrancy.html

Author's Note (7/21/03): This essay you are reading is the most
ancient of those that you will find on this page. It was a reaction
to a single skeptical claim of the sort I found often on AOL's
discussion boards.

Since the original publication of this essay, I have learned a great
deal - and refined significantly the way I look at the issue of
inerrancy. I believe that the original manuscripts of the Bible were
produced inerrant, but it is my discernment that many, many believers
today have a view of inerrancy that could not possibly have been that
of that of the writers of the Bible. They fail to account for
differences in the way ancient persons thought, acted, or perceived
the world. At the same time, Skeptics, too, have the same sort of
misconceptions, basically these:

That, as one writer puts it, inerrancy means that God preserved the
text through the ages and through translations inerrantly. This is
held by no one I know of other than perhaps the King James Only crowd.

That "error" is judged based on 21st century standards of what
constitutes a mistake - when in fact, we ought to judge by the
standards of the day in which the Bible was written. (Hence, for
example, when C. Dennis McKinsey blasts away at passages in Proverbs
as though they were absolute advice, he misses the point; see our
essay on <http://www.tektonics.org/lp/proverbiallit.html>Proverbial
Literature.)

The question that must be asked is, "Would this be regarded as
'inerrant' by the standards of those who originally wrote the text?"
The answer in every case I have found so far is NO -- and the
difficulty is increased because inevitably what the ancients regarded
as a form of narrative art -- within which precision could acceptably
be compromised -- is regarded as an "error" today. Let's now compose
an answer to these presumptions, and make a case for the claim that
logically and practically, it would have been impossible to maintain
an inerrant text through the ages.

A favorite argument of Skeptics today asks: "If the original
manuscripts of the Bible were inerrant, why didn't God preserve their
inerrancy through their copying and translation?" This argument comes
in a wide variety of forms. One of my favorite and earliest skeptical
opponents, Kornform of AOL fame, peppered his replies with peculiar
statements such as this:
The language here (in a passage of the Bible) is somewhat murky. You
would think an omniscient "God" would not suffer from dyslexia, and
instead make things crystal clear to his subjects.

One is tempted to ask whether Kornform had rather too self-inflated a
view to consider whether it was his own comprehension which was the
problem. Similarly, Jim Meritt has written:
This is sometimes called a "transcription error", as in where one
number was meant and an incorrect one was copied down. Or that what
was "quoted" wasn't really what was said, but just what the author
thought was said when he thought it was said. And that's right - I'm
not disagreeing with events, I'm disagreeing with what is WRITTEN.
Which is apparently agreed that it is incorrect. This is an amusing
misdirection to the problem that the bible itself is wrong.

Dan Barker, however, presents the most cogent (albeit still
much-rhetoricized) form of this argument that the author has seen to date:
The problem is not with human limitations, as some claim. The problem
is the bible itself. People who are free of theological bias notice
that the bible contains hundreds of discrepancies. Should it surprise
us when such a literary and moral mish-mash, taken seriously, causes
so much discord?...
Although it is always scholarly to consider the original languages,
why should that be necessary with the "word of God?" An omnipotent,
omniscient deity should have made his all-important message
unmistakably clear to everyone, everywhere, at all times. No one
should have to learn an extinct language to get God's message,
especially an ancient language about which there is much scholarly
disagreement. If the English translation is flawed or imprecise, then
God failed to get his point across to English speakers. A true
fundamentalist should consider the English version of the bible to be
just as inerrant as the original because if we admit that human error
was possible in the translation, then it was equally possible in the
original writing.

One wonders where Barker has acquired someone free of theological
bias - perhaps he defrosted a Neanderthal? There is not a single
human being with bare-minimum mental capabilities who has not formed
some opinion about the origins of life and the universe. Those who
claim to be completely "without bias" in this area are liars, and the
truth is not in them, regardless of what theological camp they are
from. Furthermore, on what basis does Barker determine what a "true
fundamentalist" should believe, and why does the possibility of human
error in translation make an equal possibility the fudging of the
original -- and how has he become omniscient enough to know what an
omniscient deity could or would do? If anything, because there have
been only one set of originals, but an incredible multitude of copies
and translations over the millennia, the odds are inestimably greater
that one would find error in the copies, even if the originals were
not inerrant!

In each of the three above arguments, however, despite their varying
degree of cogency, we may detect two common threads:
    * It is God's fault if translations and copies of the Bible are
incorrect; for God would have the power to preserve inerrancy in them.
    * It is God's fault if varying and/or incorrect interpretations
of Biblical passages are made, because that shows that God did not
make His message clear enough to us.

The basic answer to these charges, which I have recently pointed out
<http://www.tektonics.org/tsr/jerry722.html>elsewhere, is that if
anyone is to blame for the loss of clarity, etc. in the Bible over
the ages, it is we who are to shoulder the blame for losing it. We
can look at a few examples of how this is so, but first there is a
certain practical consideration arguing against the very possibility
of modern, inerrant copies; we will get to that in the next section.

A reader made the point here that while my paraphrases above "are
probably correct for typical Skeptic rhetoric," a more intelligent
version would be, "If God actually is concerned as to whether or not
His 'words' from which not 'one jot or one tittle' (Matt. 5:18) will
pass away, then doesn't the fact that this text fails to meet this
standard tell us something about whether or not this God really does
exist or is really who His word claims to be?" In answer: Though
Matt. 5:18 has often been used as a proof of inerrancy, I think it is
rather an expression related to the Jewish idea of God's Word as
preexistent, and unchanging and has nothing to do with copies on
earth. One could mangle the Scriptures to death, but the original is
still on file in the home office, so to speak. As an analogy, my
prison inmates used to think that if they tore down the signs I
posted rules on, that they could get away with breaking the rule; but
the sign was not the authority -- I was!
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[]

Religious and Philosophical Reasons Why We Don't Have Inerrant Copies

This is the granddaddy of the issues in answering this argument. The
first aspect of it is one that Skeptics themselves should easily see. ...

[SNIP] Click here to continue: http://www.tektonics.org/gk/inerrancy.html
Received on Wed May 31 14:12:36 2006