christian@topaz.UUCP (03/29/87)
I would like to comment on the response by Larry to Vasu's list of Biblical "contradictions". In general I have little problem with Larry's specific responses. However I'd like to point something out. In many cases, Larry agreed that the text as we have it now has errors. He conjectured that these errors were due to scribal mistakes. In the past, when I have proposed that errors were natural when dealing with human witnesses, I got I Tim. 3:16 thrown back at me. It is not entirely clear to me why scribal errors are OK, but the sorts of errors I mentioned are not. As far as I can see, the difference is that Larry's proposed errors were in the history after the stories were reduced to writing, whereas the errors that I proposed seemed to be at an earlier stage. (Actually, I have never said precisely where I thought they happened. In fact I'm not convinced that I can tell. But the errors that are easiest to document would probably have happened during the time when the stories were passed on verbally, i.e. in the stage between the original eyewitnesses and the composition of the Gospels or other books that we have now.) First, it is not clear that the distinction is even meaningful. There is some tendency in recent scholarship to see the processes that caused the three gospels to diverge as the same kind of process that caused the various text families to diverge. Indeed we have no real way of knowing at what point in the process the text got written down. It is even possible that for a period verbal and written transmission coexisted. This is particularly likely for the OT text, where the written form was to some extent just a mnemonic aid for people who were assumed to know the text. It is very unlikely that for either the OT or the NT there was a specific time when one particular text was written down that we could declare to be the official inerrant one. Second, arguments based on I Tim 3:16 would seem to apply to the text as we see it. This passage says that the Bible is appropriate for use by the Church. It is claimed that in order to be useful, it must be error-free, and QED, the Bible is error-free. We are to assume that this happened by God's providential guiding of the authors. I find this interpretation of I Tim incredible, because it combines the text with what I believe is an unwarrantted assumption: namely that the Church can only carry on its affairs if the Bible is completely free of error. It seems to me that errors in textual transmission have exactly the same consequences for the Church as errors during the verbal transmission of the story. Indeed, there is no way to tell them apart from our perspective, except scholarly conjecture. So if God agreed that the Bible could only be useful if it was completely error-free, he would have had to have guided its transmission, as well as every other part of the process. The fact that he did not seems to indicate that he disagrees with you about the requirement for superhuman accuracy. As far as I can see, the fundamentalists agree with me in all practical senses. It is obvious that there are minor errors in the Bible. The decision we have to make is whether these errors are of a kind to discredit its major claims. We both agree that they are not. The question is whether it makes any sense to go beyond this to assert the inerrancy of a text that we can never actually see and which may never have existed in the first place. I don't see how this claim can possibly do anything useful for the Church. However it can certainly do harm. It does harm by casting doubt on whether Christians are capable of making sensible evaluations of the truth of their claims.