"How can I reconcile my belief in the inerrancy of Scripture with comments in Bible translations that state that a particular verse is not 'in better manuscripts'?"
J.I. Packer | posted 10/07/2002 12:00AM
So how does all this bear on the Christian's very proper faith in biblical inerrancy—that is, the total truth and trustworthiness of the true text and all it teaches?http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/october7/31.102.htm
Holy Scripture is, according to the view of Jesus and his apostles, God preaching, instructing, showing, and telling us things, and testifying to himself through the human witness of prophets, poets, theological narrators of history, and philosophical observers of life.
The Bible's inerrancy is not the inerrancy of any one published text or version, nor of anyone's interpretation, nor of any scribal slips or pious inauthentic additions acquired during transmission.
Rather, scriptural inerrancy relates to the human writer's expressed meaning in each book, and to the Bible's whole body of revealed truth and wisdom. Belief in inerrancy involves an advance commitment to receive as from God all that the Bible, interpreting itself to us through the Holy Spirit in a natural and coherent way, teaches. Thus it shapes our uderstanding of biblical authority.
So inerrantists should welcome the work of textual scholars, who are forever trying to eliminate the inauthentic and give us exactly what the biblical writers wrote, neither more nor less. The way into God's mind is through his penmen's minds, precisely as expressed, under his guidance, in their own words as they wrote them.
Text criticism serves inerrancy; they are friends. Inerrancy treasures the meaning of each writer's words, while text criticism checks that we have each writer's words pure and intact. Both these wisdoms are needed if we are to benefit fully from the written Word of God.
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