Getting back to some of our discussions of late, I want to talk a bit more of our expectations of the Bible. Included in that, I guess, are our expectations of inspiration or of the results of inspiration.

One common view is that every detail mentioned in the Bible must be precise or the Bible can’t be considered to be an inspired book. One verse that fuels that view is Matthew 5:18: “I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” In the language of the King James, Jesus says that jots and tittles are important, that every stroke of the Law must remain unchanged. (In my experience, this is a key passage for King James Onlyists, who argue that every word must remain unchanged. None of them tell me why that doesn’t apply to the Tyndale version or the Bishops’ Bible; apparently version inspiration skipped from the Textus Receptus to the KJV)

From this stems the view that every scientific fact mentioned in the Bible must be 100% true, every historical detail must be 100% accurate, every geographical description must be 100% precise.

In my view, this is an attempt to make the Bible something that it never declares itself to be nor was intended to be. God wasn’t trying to teach ancient man modern science. Jesus can call the mustard seed the smallest of all seeds without obliging Christians to argue with the scientists who can point to numerous smaller seeds. Jesus was speaking within what those people knew and understood.

In the same way, because the thrust of the Bible was not to provide a historical record but was instead to teach religious truths, we can have varying accounts of the same incident. Take, for example, the description of the setting of one of Jesus’ miracles, as seen in three different gospels:

“And as they went out of Jericho, a great crowd followed him. And behold, there were two blind men sitting by the roadside, and when they heard that Jesus was passing by, they cried out, “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!”” (Matthew 20:29–30)

“And they came to Jericho. And as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”” (Mark 10:46–47)

“As he drew near to Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. And hearing a crowd going by, he inquired what this meant. They told him, “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.” And he cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”” (Luke 18:35–38)

If we just read these three accounts as they are, we have to deal with some interesting things. Just on the location and number of blind men, we get no agreement:

Matthew: Leaving Jerusalem, two blind men
Mark: Leaving Jerusalem, one blind man
Luke: Entering Jerusalem, one blind man

If we want to force the Bible to be precise in every detail, then we have to do some gymnastics here. Maybe Jesus was entering new Jericho as he left old Jericho (yes, I’ve heard that one argued). Maybe there were two men, but Mark and Luke just chose to speak of one of them. Maybe these are three separate incidents in which almost the exact same thing happened.

Or maybe we need to accept that the intent of Matthew, Mark and Luke wasn’t to write a history book or a biography, but a gospel. Maybe we need to adjust our expectations of the Bible and its content.

As much as I hate to validate a tangent, the comment thread from yesterday touched on something important. Interestingly enough, Patrick Mead has been writing on the same subject: how should we understand inspiration?

Patrick explains in yesterday’s post:

When I was a boy and up until I was in my late 20s I only heard one version of how we got our Bibles. I was told that every single word came directly from the mouth of God (via the Holy Spirit). There was no input from the human writers. They were merely stenographers for the Spirit. As an illustration of this my father and other ministers would bring up the story of Balaam’s donkey. “God didn’t just give that donkey an idea and let him express it in his own words” they would say. And they said that the exact same mechanism was involved in writing the Bibles – Jeremiah, Peter, Paul, and Amos all wrote down what they were told to write, word for word.

I have talked with many people who think that the Bible was dictated, word for word, by the Holy Spirit. Any perceived humanness is the Spirit’s attempt to make the Bible more understandable, they say.

Patrick does a good job of reminding us that this view of the Bible arose with fundamentalism in the 19th century. It is a child of modernism, an attempt to make the Bible fit the scientific method.

So what do we expect of this holy book? If it is inspired, what does that mean? Terms get tossed around like inerrancy and literality. Patrick describes the Chicago Statement on inerrancy:

It says, in part, “Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individuals’ lives.” It goes on to state that the Bible’s words came directly from God and are, therefore, completely moral and without error in everything it affirms – historically, scientifically, and theologically.

Is that what inspired means? Does every detail in the Bible have to be correct for the Bible to be inspired? I have some thoughts on the subject, but I’d like to hear yours. How much room for “human error” is there in the text of the Bible?