The Bible is the best selling book of all time, but when it comes to how we are to understand it, particularly when we look at problems and difficulties in the Bible, people start to get squirrelly. Paul penned what has become the most quoted passage in the church about Scripture, saying that Scripture is “God-breathed.” The question is, how are we to understand how God breathed it? My previous post dealt with interpreting Old Testament (OT) violence and genocide in light of Christ. In this post, I want to focus on the nature of biblical inspiration.
Right off the bat, I want to acknowledge that some other Christian sisters and brothers would disagree with me and would answer things differently from what I share in this post. That’s ok. As always, I could be wrong and ignorant about some things. While important, these issues don’t strike at the heart of Christianity. There can be a diversity of thought on these questions, and we can still love each other as brothers and sisters united around fulfilling Jesus' mission.
But I don’t want to pretend that how we answer some of these questions doesn’t have important consequences, and may make a difference over whether someone can come to faith in Jesus or not, or whether they remain a Christian or not. What we believe and the reasons we believe can impact people’s connection with Jesus. The apostle Peter says in 1 Peter 3:15, “…in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect…” Peter wanted his churches to be prepared to talk about why they’re Christians when it comes up in conversations, because that can make a difference in whether God uses us to open up a door for Christ or whether we put a stumbling block in the way of someone following Jesus. I also don’t want to pull any punches when it comes to dealing with the data. This post might be unsettling to some Christians. I’d encourage you to hang with me and read this even if this makes you feel uncomfortable, because I believe we should face truth and that Jesus is the God of all truth. In fact, while some of us may initially come to God through a profound emotional experience, sometimes it’s the intellectual grounding we get in our understanding of God that keeps us tethered to Jesus. I’ll start with a story that showcases this very point, and just like with my last post, it comes from pastor and author Greg Boyd.
Boyd shares in his book Inspired Imperfection that much of his growing up years were spent largely as an atheist/agnostic until he was converted to faith in Christ in a Oneness Pentecostal church as a teenager. God’s love and power became very real to him, and he was a passionate follower of Jesus in that time. When he left for college, however, his faith fell to pieces, mainly because of some faulty intellectual foundations he had received. A critical piece of that was his view of biblical inspiration.
Greg’s pastor had taught that if the Bible is only 99% true, it might as well be 100% false, and said the Bible was inerrant in its history and details. In Greg’s first year of college, he took a class on the Bible as literature. In that class, he was exposed to thoughts on church history and issues in Scripture he hadn’t noticed before, some of them involving mutually exclusive claims in Scripture that seemed impossible to reconcile. His resulting inability to account for errors in the Bible eventually led Boyd to once again become an atheist. While he had experienced joy and deep love and purpose in being a Christian, he had to be honest with himself that if a flawless and perfect Bible was part of the bedrock Christianity was built on, such a notion wouldn’t hold water, and he had to leave it behind. Fortunately for Boyd, he was around a Christian friend who kept inviting him to explore further and to read other Christian theologians and writers. Boyd found Christians who had better ideas and arguments on which they based their faith in Jesus and the inspiration of Scripture, and he reclaimed his faith again down the road. He is a pastor and theologian today, having obtained his PhD in theology from Princeton. He has wrestled for years with how Christians could meaningfully believe in and understand the inspiration of Scripture, and many before him have done the same. Inspired Imperfection contains his more mature thinking on biblical inspiration.
Inerrancy
The notion that Boyd's pastor had imparted to him, that the Bible cannot contain any mistakes or flaws in it, has been called the doctrine of inerrancy. Inerrancy was a teaching articulated in 19th and 20th century America from some Presbyterian ministers, particularly some theologians connected to Princeton Theological Seminary who were part of the Fundamentalist movement that originated there. Some of the main proponents of the doctrine, B. B. Warfield and Charles Hodge, “claimed that Scripture was without error (whether it be physical, historical, psychological, or philosophical) when the precise words of the original documents were considered” (Collins, The Evangelical Moment, p. 43). It was done as a reaction to some excesses going on in the academic study of theology, where some theologians of the day were departing from crucial aspects of historic, orthodox Christianity in their teachings and methodologies. Some had started to deny the virgin birth of Jesus, had turned the resurrection of Jesus into a myth or totally psychologized it, denied Jesus' miracles, and more. Fundamentalists critiqued these excesses and wanted people to get back to the fundamentals of Christianity. Most of the time I hear people use the term “fundamentalist” as a term of derision for people who they think are anti-intellectual and politically fractious, but classic Christian Fundamentalism affirmed five main points:
- The inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit and the inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this.
- The virgin birth of Christ.
- The belief that Christ's death was an atonement for sin.
- The bodily resurrection of Christ.
- The historical reality of Christ's miracles.
I can affirm points 2-5 and most of point 1, though I don't agree with inerrancy language. Like every Protestant, I believe the Bible comes first in how we come to understand God, ourselves, God’s will, and God’s authority, which is what point 1 is trying to lift up. However, the concept of inerrancy proves to be an unfounded assumption that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny as a way of understanding biblical inspiration. It strikes me as a way of trying to impose an outside requirement and assumption onto the Bible that doesn’t actually best make sense of what Scripture is. Boyd cites wise words from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famed character Sherlock Holmes: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts” (Inspired Imperfection, p. 37).
Inerrancy largely flows from an assumption. Since we Christians believe that God is perfect and omnipotent, he naturally would all-powerfully inspire his people to produce a totally perfect set of writings. But what if that is just an assumption and not reality? What if that’s not how God in his sovereignty has chosen for inspiration to work? We should be careful in assuming we know how God ought to work. Jesus, as the bringer of God's kingdom, went quite against the assumptions people had for how the Messiah would operate, and in many ways God's kingdom functions by upside-down, counterintuitive logic. Many religious leaders and people missed that Jesus was God's anointed deliverer bringing in a new covenant and decisively fixing the world's problems of sin and evil. Further, it seems one could make a similar assumption about the church. Since the Holy Spirit is omnipotent and perfect, and the Holy Spirit is inspiring the church, therefore the church should perfectly obey the Holy Spirit, live a wholly Christlike life, and glorify God in all things. I hope I don’t have to twist your arm to see that though the Holy Spirit is inspiring the church, the church is not perfect and does not always follow God’s will and purpose. What is something similar could be at play in how God inspired Scripture?
Let’s dive into some passages of Scripture to get our lay of the land, starting with a look at Jesus and how he used Scripture.
Jesus on Scripture
Pardon me for being a bit laborious, but I think it is illustrative to look at a good number of Jesus’ direct quotations of and allusions to Scripture in the Gospel of Matthew, though I’m ignoring some other Scriptures that the Gospel-writer himself includes. This should give us a fairly representative picture of Jesus’ view of Scripture, which for him would’ve been the Old Testament.
During his forty day fast in the wilderness, Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy three times in resisting the devil (Matthew 4:4, 7, 10) and viewed it as an authoritative message from God for how he was called to live his life, and Matthew records it because he wants us to see it as authoritative for our lives as well and useful for resisting temptation.
Jesus intensifies commands from the Law in Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28, 31-32, and 33-37. He modifies the Law and a traditional teaching concerning enemies in Matthew 5:38-48.
Jesus cites Hosea 6:6 on God desiring mercy instead of sacrifice in Matthew 9:13 an 12:7, and says the Pharisees need to learn the truth of this passage.
In Matthew 10:34-36, Jesus cites Micah 7:6 as foretelling the opposition and divisions within family his followers would face as they evangelize.
In Matthew 11:10, he cites Malachi 3:1 as foretelling John the Baptist's ministry.
Jesus mentions what David and his companions did in eating consecrated bread in Matthew 12:3-4, and further alludes to Numbers 28:9-10 concerning how the priests desecrate the Sabbath by offering sacrifices in the temple and yet are innocent, and now one greater than the temple is here in Matthew 12:5-6.
He pulls from multiple OT passages in talking about Israel’s blindness and inability to understand the Gospel in 13:13-15.
In Matthew 15:4-9, Jesus quotes Scripture and prefaces it with “God said,” as he quotes one of the Ten Commandments from Exodus 20:12 (“Honor your father and mother”) and Exodus 21:17 (“Anyone who curses their mother or father is to be put to death”) then he chastises his audience for disobeying God’s commands for the sake of their tradition, and cites Isaiah 29:13 as exemplifying his audience’s hearts being far from God. In this, we see that Jesus believed the OT Scriptures were a reliable witness in giving us the voice and commands of God.
In Matthew 19:1-12, Jesus cites Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 on God’s desires concerning marriage and engages contemporary rabbinic disputes about divorce concerning Deuteronomy 24:1-4, siding with the School of Shammai's stricter line of interpretation.
In Matthew 19:16-19 in Jesus’ conversation with the rich young man, he tells him to obey the commandments and cites five of the Ten Commandments, along with the love of neighbor commands in Leviticus 19:18, 34, as integral to finding life.
In 21:13, Jesus cites from Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11 as he turns over tables in the Temple, showing that the religious leaders have failed and people have missed God’s purpose for the temple in the first place, even though the importance of the temple would soon pass since Jesus is the new temple, the new dwelling place of God.
In 21:16, Jesus cites the Septuagint version of Psalm 8:2, seeing the praise of children at his entry to Jerusalem as a fulfillment of that verse.
In 21:42-44, Jesus cites Psalm 118:22-23 and expounds on it, viewing the resistance and rebellion of the religious leaders in terms of them stumbling over the stumbling stone mentioned in that Psalm.
In 22:29-33, Jesus gets on to his audience for not knowing the Scriptures well enough when talking about the resurrection and the nature of people’s existence after death, and draws attention to the verb tense used in passages like Exodus 3:6, where God says “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” God did not say "I was," but "I am," meaning that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still exist and he is still their God. Jesus thus makes a grammatical argument from Scripture.
In 22:34-40, when asked what the greatest commandment is, Jesus cites Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, 34 on loving God with all our being and loving our neighbors as ourselves, and saying all of the Law and Prophets (OT) hang on these two commandments.
He goes on in 22:44 to ask a question based on Psalm 110:1, asking how David could call the Messiah “Lord” if the Messiah has David as an ancestor, implying that the Messiah is greater than David.
In 23:23, Jesus upbraids the Pharisees and teachers of the law for scrupulously observing more minor parts of the Law when it comes to tithing herbs and spices, but neglecting the weightier matters of it when it comes to justice, mercy, and faithfulness toward others. Basically, they are only being selectively faithful to the Scriptures and God’s revealed will in them. This also shows that Jesus views some commands of Scripture to be of more weight and importance than others.
In 23:39, Jesus cites Psalm 118:26 as referring to his second coming.
In 24:15, Jesus refers to Daniel’s language about an abomination that causes desolation in Daniel 8:13; 9:27; 11:31; and 12:11 as referring to future events–interpreters divide over whether Jesus is solely talking here about the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, or solely talking about his second coming, or is referring to both simultaneously.
In 24:29, Jesus references Isaiah 13:10 and 34:4 and interprets them to refer to judgments and difficulties that will precede the return of Christ–whether they are literal or metaphorical is debated.
Jesus alludes to Noah's flood of Genesis 7-8 in 24:36-39 and sees it as an example of how things will be at his return, particularly the suddenness and finality of the return and judgment of Jesus.
In 26:11, Jesus references Deuteronomy 15:11 as he comes to the defense of the woman who anoints him with expensive perfume.
Jesus’ multiple references to Passover in Matthew 26 connect to the original Passover in Exodus 12 and other places like Leviticus 23:4-8 and Deuteronomy 16:1-8.
In 26:31, Jesus cites Zechariah 13:7 on the shepherd being stricken and sees it as prophetically foretelling his own suffering and his disciples falling away from him.
In 26:54 and 56, Jesus’ sees his betrayal and coming passion as fulfilling the Scriptures.
In 26:64, Jesus makes oblique references to Psalm 110:1 and Daniel 7:13 as he confesses that he is Messiah and God to Caiaphas the high priest.
On the cross, Jesus cries out with the words of Psalm 22:1 and makes it his own prayer, showing that this Psalm prophetically foretells his suffering and coming resurrection victory and vindication.
This is just one of the Gospels, but I hope this demonstrates that Jesus was someone who was immersed in the Scriptures, who deeply valued the Bible, who quoted Scripture often, and who interpreted Scripture in various ways. He viewed the Bible as coming from God. He viewed some Scriptures as weightier than others. He viewed some Scriptures as foretelling and being fulfilled in his own life and ministry, his death and resurrection, and his second coming. He intensified some commands and edited/fulfilled other commands from Scripture in his role of being God’s clearest revelation and the bringer of the new covenant. He saw Scripture as useful for resisting temptation and staying faithful to God’s purpose. You see a similar approaches for interpreting the Scriptures in other NT authors. Jesus loved the Bible. He does not claim it to be inerrant, but he definitely lives by it, interprets it uniquely for his day, sees it as coming from God, and viewed as authoritative for his own personal life and for the lives of others.
Some Biblical Contradictions and Problems
Now let’s look at some problems and contradictions that occur within the Bible.
A common example involves comparing Matthew’s account of Judas’ death in Matthew 27:1-10 versus Luke’s account in Acts 1:15-19. Did Judas hang himself or fall headlong (perhaps jumping off of a height onto some rocks) and explode? Some try to combine the two accounts and say he hung himself and when he was cut down his insides must’ve burst out. This is possible, and the impulse to harmonize isn't a bad one, though we must confess neither text actually says this and this is an imaginative combination of them both. It further doesn’t resolve the question of who bought the field, Judas or the religious leaders, because the two texts say two different things about who purchased the field. Even more, in Matthew 27:9-10, Matthew says it was Jeremiah who said the price of 30 shekels of silver was set for Jesus in buying the potter’s field, when actually Matthew seems mostly to be quoting from Zechariah 11:12-13. Zechariah is where the 30 shekels and the money going to the potter comes from, while Jeremiah 32:6-12 tells of a story of Jeremiah purchasing a field. Jeremiah doesn’t mention 30 pieces of silver nor does it mention buying a potter’s field. Matthew seems to have creatively combined Zechariah with Jeremiah, and the quote from 27:9-10 is largely not in Jeremiah.
How many women went to the tomb on Easter? John 20:1 only has Mary Magdalene, while the other Gospels have multiple women at the tomb (Luke 24:1; Mark 16:1; Matthew 28:1).
Matthew 28:2 and Mark 16:5 only have one angel appearing to the women on the day of resurrection, while Luke 24:2 and John 20:12 have two angels appearing. How many angels were there?
John 20:1-10 has Peter and John seeing the empty tomb before Mary Magdalene, while the other Gospels have the women seeing the empty tomb first. Who saw Jesus’ tomb first?
Matthew 26:1-13 and Mark 14:1-11 have Jesus being anointed at Bethany with expensive perfume by a sinful woman two days before the Passover, while John has this happening six days before the Passover in John 12:1-11. Two days and six days aren’t reconcilable, and it seems unlikely that in the same place, Bethany, Jesus was anointed two different times by two different women to the exact same complaints from his disciples and he gave the exact same teaching about it after their complaints. Most likely the different sources remember the same event happening on different days, but both can't be right about the date historically.
In Mark 2:25-26, Mark reports Jesus as saying that David and his companions ate the consecrated bread in the days of Abiathar the high priest, whilst the story in 1 Samuel 21:1-6 reveals that it was actually Abiathar's father Ahimelek who was serving as priest when that happened, not Abiathar. Most likely, Mark flubbed the name of the priest as he was writing his Gospel. Matthew (see 12:1-8) and Luke (see 6:1-5) realize this and correct it in their presentation of this teaching in their Gospels, not mentioning any name for the high priest.
1 Chronicles 21:1 says that Satan incites David to take a census of God’s people, which gets him in trouble, while 2 Samuel 24:1 says that God in anger incites David to take a census of the people, which then gets him in trouble with God. God and Satan are about as different as you can get. Which one is true? They can’t both historically be true, but they do showcase different theologies for understanding the census.
In the story of Jesus casting out the demons into a herd of pigs, Mark’s account in Mark 5:1-20 says there was one demoniac, while Matthew’s account in Matthew 8:28-34 says there two. How many were there? Further, comparing those same passages, Matthew 8:28 reports the city as being the region of the Gadarenes, which is based off the town Gadara, while while Mark says it’s the region of the Gerasenes in Mark 5:1, which is based off the town Gerasa. These are two different cities, though they both are located within the Decapolis, a group of Hellenized cities near Galilee that had a large Jewish population but were primarily made up of Gentiles, hence the presence of pig herds. Matthew chooses the city that would’ve been closest to those more familiar with the region by identifying Gadara (six miles from the lake), but Mark chooses what used to be the capital of the Decapolis and the better known city in identifying Gerasa (thirty miles from the lake). More than likely, Matthew is the more precise one here, since Jesus just got out of a boat and they are next to a body of water.
Matthew’s genealogy for Jesus in 1:1-17 says that there are 3 sets of 14 generations from Abraham to Jesus, when the last set actually contains only 13 generations. Did Matthew have trouble counting? Further, Matthew omits three generations in the section from David to Jeconiah, skipping the three offspring that follow Joram (Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah according to 1 Chron 3:11–12). The Gospel writer simply says: “Joram fathered Uzziah” (Matt 1:8). How do you explain the discrepancies in the names and numbers?
A humorous one is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:14-16–“I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else).” Paul is exposing the error in what he has just written and is correcting things as he goes–this is just a reminder that Paul was human like us. He is saying that what he said in 1:14-15 is actually in error and that he did baptize more people, and that he might not be able to remember everyone he baptized in Corinth.
Above is just a sampling–there are many more examples we could show. These discrepancies, errors, and contradictions seem very hard to square away with an inerrantist view of Scripture. Some will claim that if we looked deeper, a solution would appear that would resolve any apparent inconsistencies amongst different Scripture passages. I'm open to that and perhaps we can do that with some passages, but you better be prepared to come up with a lot of solutions (remember that we've just looked at a fraction above), and frankly some "solutions" I've seen aren't very convincing. Some inerrantists will acknowledge that we do have discrepancies and errors in Scripture as we have them now, but will further claim that Scripture is inerrant in the original autographs or documents. I find this position to be unhelpful and a bit evasive, since we don’t have any original documents of Scripture–at best we have copies of copies. It implies that if we could just get the original documents of Scripture in our hands, they would say different things that make all the present problems we wrestle with disappear. I fail to see how this inspires confidence in us being able to trust the Bibles we are reading today that textual critics have done a lot of work to present to us. Also, the chance of all the original documents of the Bible being preserved over 2,000 years and located seems well nigh impossible. If God wanted us to have them and place our faith in such a notion, don't you think God would've preserved the originals for us? Others distinguish what they mean by inerrancy so much that their definition seems to suffer death by a thousand qualifications, and it pushes against the plain sense of what most people think of with the word inerrant. If God wanted to give us a perfect text, then inquiring into it should demonstrate that fact. I don't think it does.
I appreciate what proponents of inerrancy are trying to do, which is to say the Bible is authoritative and is the most foundational and important source for how we come to understand God. I agree that the Bible should be our foundation and our most important source for understanding God, ourselves, others, the world, and the purpose of our existence. That’s a huge part of what the Reformation was about, getting back to Scripture and reforming the church to understand God from its earliest traditions and sources as presented in Scripture. If something can’t be proven or inferred by Scripture, it shouldn’t be required as a necessary for salvation, and if something contrasts with the message of Scripture, properly interpreted, we should leave that belief or behavior behind. I also believe that Scripture on a whole is very historically reliable and is worthy of a sympathetic and serious read. We have good reasons for believing the Bible is a historically reliable book, particularly when it comes to Jesus. Scripture is still God’s word to us regardless of whether some parts end up being totally historical or not, though the historicity of Jesus’s incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection are non-negotiable (see 1 Corinthians 15:12-19). If you’d like further reading concerning the historicity of Jesus, I’d recommend Ben Witherington III’s The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth; it has scholarly bona fides, but isn’t going to take you forever to read. But to hang the authority of the Bible on inerrancy seems to be a bit of an intellectual sinking ship. Even more, I’m not aware of a passage of Scripture that claims Scripture is inerrant.
Biblical Imperfections as a Witness to the Cross
How, then, should we understand biblical inspiration? Is there a way to hold together Jesus' deep reverence for and deference to Scripture, as well as being honest about its flaws, or are these two notions inherently incompatible? Boyd maintains that God inspired the Bible to point us to Jesus as God’s perfect, inerrant word and gift to us, to show us how to live like Jesus, and that even the flaws of Scripture are inspired to point us to the cross of Jesus. In essence, even the contradictions we discover in Scripture can be redeemed and have an inspired purpose that God uses.
Boyd’s premise that some of the imperfections of Scripture can be testimonies in themselves that perfection is only to be found in Jesus. God’s inspiration of Scripture accommodates human limitations, and those limitations are a reminder that God uses flawed and finite people to accomplish his glorious will, a reminder of our need for the grace of Christ in our mistakes and blind spots. And where do we see grace for the broken more than in the cross of Jesus? Thus, biblical imperfections are signposts meant to point us to the cross of Jesus. Boyd thus affirms that he believes all of the Bible is inspired, not just select parts of it, and even says the Bible is infallible, that it does not fail to accomplish God’s purpose. That purpose isn’t necessarily for the Bible to be totally perfect in every detail, or to coerce us into a relationship with God against our will, but to serve as an inspired witness to the Crucified and Risen One, and how we are to know and love and serve him, and to see ourselves as sinners in need of him. “I now had a paradigm that enabled me to trust the Bible to infallibly accomplish all that God intends it to accomplish without needing to deny or to feel embarrassed by the fallibility of the biblical writings themselves” (Boyd, Inspired Imperfection, p. 69). He calls his view cruciform inspiration (p. 81).
While I don’t agree with all of Boyd’s thoughts, I like his overall thesis. It seems to be a much more accurate conception of what Scripture actually is, as well as a better theology of inspiration that avoids the pitfalls of inerrancy, while still taking all of Scripture seriously. God didn't send us a perfect text. He sent us a perfect Savior. God’s perfect, inerrant word is Jesus. Our faith is to be in him, with Scripture as God’s inspired witness to him, even in its contradictions and difficulties.
I wonder if Boyd had such a foundation when he went to college, he wouldn't have felt compelled to give up his faith when he was exploring the intellectual foundations of Christianity. Perhaps now, because of his work and the work of others like him, we who read the Bible today can have a better paradigm for understanding its inspiration, nature, and purpose. Hopefully that will lead to us loving like Jesus and pointing others to faith in Jesus.
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