Permanently Deleted
Tbh biblical inerrancy can range from anything from “The Bible is the most historically and scientifically accurate book in the whole world” to “The Bible is only inerrant in fulfilling it’s intended purpose of revealing God.”
What hurdles have you run into when talking about this with people?
Not a Christian but couldn’t God just ensure the translators do a perfect job? But then there are multiple concurrent Bible versions even in a single language so idk
couldn’t God just ensure the translators do a perfect job?
Perhaps by sending the angel Gabriel to dictate it all word-for-word…
:inshallah:
No, as @Dinkdink already mentioned, it was written down once, by a person we have very good historical records of, it was copied down very quickly, and within less than a generation there were religious authorities preserving its content.
Catholics and Protestants have slightly different Old Testaments, but Sunni and Shi’a have the same canon. There might be lively debate and scholarship about hadith and religious authorities/laws, but not the Koran.
From what I understand, there’s a lot of extant copies of the New Testament from around 200-300 AD, more so than other contemporary Roman historical documents. So you can compare the different versions and mostly figure out what’s original and what was added later, but the real questions are what changed between 33 AD and 200 AD, and how do you translate them from the original languages (different books of the New Testament were written in Greek, Latin, and Aramaic).
The Old Testament is another story, translating ancient Hebrew involves a lot more guessing.
I’m by no means a biblical scholar, but there’s a spectrum of belief from “these are some ancient stories that might have some bearing on modern life because humans haven’t changed that much” to “these are the exact words of God handed down completely unchanged to King James and if you change one ‘thou’ you’re going to hell.” For the second option you have to completely ignore huge swaths of history and scholarship.
I’m much more interested in the history of the bible than the content
That’s a big part of it. Many people have been conditioned to treat the Bible as pure content with no context, with no interest in exploring context at all.
