The preacher announced from his pulpit that the congregation would now sing their old favorite Let Us Bind One Another. As he looked at his congregants he noticed a second-grader tying together the shoe laces of his two-year-old brother. Such are the perils of taking scripture too literally! Biblical inerrancy means that since the human authors and editors of the Bible were led or influenced by God, it follows that the Bible is "the Word of God." It also implies that the writings have been thereby supernaturally protected from error, and that therefore scripture is entirely trustworthy and authoritative. This is the party line of the Protestant fundamentalists. Although the Roman Catholic Church doesn't buy this in toto because of its pragmatic hodgepodge of scripture and tradition, on occasion it did accept it. The First Vatican Council (1868-70) pronounced that the sacred scriptures are the authentic communication from God, saying "they have God for their author." The Second Vatican Council (1962-65), however, wormed itself out of this extreme by stating: ". . . the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching, firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation .... It is not from Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed." Extreme dogmatic points of view can be found in Jewish and Muslim traditions as well. Those books that the rabbis categorized as "defiling the hands," and hence sacred scripture, were highly revered in the last part of the first century. The retired Jewish general, Josephus, for example, wrote a defense of Judaism in his book Against Apion, saying: "We have given practical proof of our reverence for our own scriptures. For, although such long ages have now passed, no one has ventured either to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is an instinct with every Jew, from the day of his birth, to regard them as the decrees of God, to abide by them, and, if need be, cheerfully die for them." Around the same time as Josephus, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria developed his "mantle theory" in which the human authors became possessed by God and lost consciousness as they surrendered to the divine Communicator. The second-century Christian apologist Athenagoras bought the theory, as did that verbal flame-thrower of a Church doctor Tertullian. The Jewish scriptures were of course sacred for Jesus and his followers. The gospels have him mistakenly regarding them as humanly unalterable (Matthew 5:18) and inviolate (John 10:35). Not everyone, however, accepted inerrancy — as we found out in the case of the Roman Catholic Church. The best proof of course is the Bible itself. Here we find the major prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah, as well as the minor prophet Amos, "raising cain" about parts of it being unauthentic. (See Jeremiah 8:8; Ezekiel 20:18,25; Isaiah 9:15-16; Amos 2:4). For example, Jeremiah says "How can you say. 'We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us'? But, behold, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie...." The same holds for the New Testament. The shadiness of the scriptural status of Paul's letters is found in 2 Peter 3:15-16. Luke also acknowledges the errors of the then current accounts of Jesus in his preface (1:1-4), because he says he wrote his gospel to "write an orderly account" of Christian beginnings. There are many references to God in the Bible that characterize him as human. The Old Testament speaks of God's ears, eyes, mouth, lips, arms, bowels, backside and heart. In addition to these physical traits, God is endowed with human emotions: kindness, hate, love, anger. God lives, speaks, hears, thinks, plans, desires, hates, commands, walks, moves from place to place and dwells. And the New Testament continues the anthropomorphisms of the Old — especially when God himself incarnates himself as the God-man Jesus Christ! Are these descriptions in error because, as a great many theologians have pointed out, God is supposedly "pure spirit" and "wholly other" than we sinful humans? Early Christians mentioned above like Tertullian who held for inerrancy found themselves in a minority position. For example, Hippolytus (ca. 170-236) and the great Church doctor Origen (ca. 185-254) denied that the biblical writers lost their free will under the force of divine pressure. One of the fathers of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, scorned the letter of James as an "epistle of straw." And just as the Jews had trouble in deciding whether the Song of Songs should be in their Bible, so did the Roman Catholic Church later have a devil of a time in deciding whether or not to incorporate the book of Revelation into their Christian scriptures. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes is usually credited for launching a rationalist approach to the Bible. In his Leviathan (condemned by the English parliament in 1666), he denied the traditional belief that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, citing passages that could not have been written until after the death of Moses. The next milestone was Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously in 1670, which pointed to various mistakes, contradictions and impossibilities in the Bible — in short, he rejected its inerrancy Thomas Paine in the inspirational spark of the American Revolution, made one of the most trenchant attacks on the Bible and Christianity in his Age of Reason. Robert G. Ingersoll, the famous nineteenth-century "infidel," had this to say about the Bible: "Now they say that this book is inspired. I do not care whether it is or not; the question is, Is it true? If it is true, it doesn't need to be inspired. Nothing needs inspiration except a falsehood or a mistake." One of the cop-outs used by those who are confronted with the many errors in the Bible is that it is only the original manuscripts that were inerrant — and since these have been lost, all the later copies do have errors! Other apologists hold that the Bible "contains" the Word of God rather than is the Word of God. But how can the faithful know what parts of the Bible are trustworthy and what parts are not? How do we know which aspects have to do entirely with salvation and which are "only" matters of history? Often the two — salvation and history — are inextricably intertwined. For instance, if the Cross and the Resurrection are not historical events, of what value are they in salvation? (Paul raised this very question in I Cor. 15:12-18.) Moreover, contrary to the claims of the apologists, archeology does not prove the Bible to be true! Archeologists who have spent many years troweling in the Holy Land have yet to confirm the Exodus and many other crucial so-called historical events and people. Archeologists have never found an axehead that can float, or any of the chariots that ascended to heaven, or Noah's ark — and have actually disconfirmed the Flood itself! Finally, modern man is faced with the historic claim that the Bible is authoritative, and yet when we read it, we find ourselves in such an unbelievable world that even the Guinness Book of Records would reject it. There are references to the physical world like the sun standing still for Joshua, or bodies levitated up into heaven, or demons leaving demented persons to take up residence in herds of pigs. We find myths presented as historical facts — like the Exodus from Egypt, or the creation of the world in seven days, or a heaven that is 50,000 feet or so above Palestine. So on what basis can believers be sure that those portions dealing with salvation are trustworthy? If people are going to pick and choose the parts of the Bible they can believe, they must depend on personal subjective judgment. (This is the trouble with the Bible Jefferson sliced and pasted together.) On matters involving eternal destiny, this is indeed a shaky basis on which to proceed. Today all but the most extreme Jewish and Christian groups recognize the complicated and varied origins of the Bible, and that it contains statements that in any other literary work would be considered erroneous. As the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has said: "If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia." Let us hope that those who believe in inerrancy will soon recognize the force of this statement. Bernard Katz is a contributing editor of the American Rationalist.
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