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WillowOne's Positions

Biblical Literalism and Inerrancy

My Positions

  1. The Bible is a human library, written over roughly a thousand years by many hands with different purposes, and it contains contradictions, failed prophecies and errors of fact. It is not inerrant, and most of it was never meant literally.
  2. Literalism is a modern position, largely a nineteenth-century American one, not the ancient one. Augustine warned Christians against it in the fifth century.
  3. The moment a believer needs a method for deciding which passages are literal and which are not, the authority has moved from the book to the method, and the method is the reader. Everyone is a cafeteria believer; some admit it.

Notes

  1. It contradicts itself. Genesis 1 makes animals before humans; Genesis 2 makes the man first and the animals afterwards to keep him company. Noah takes two of every animal (6:19) and seven pairs of the clean ones (7:2). Matthew and Luke give Jesus two different grandfathers and two incompatible genealogies, one through Solomon and one through Nathan. Judas hangs himself in Matthew and falls over and bursts in Acts. Goliath is killed by David in 1 Samuel 17 and by Elhanan in 2 Samuel 21:19. Jesus is born under Herod, who died in 4 BC, and during the census of Quirinius, which was in AD 6. The resurrection accounts cannot be reconciled on who went to the tomb, what they saw, or where the disciples were told to go (Historical evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus). These are not subtle.
  2. It gets the world wrong. The bat is listed among the birds (Leviticus 11:19), the hare chews the cud (11:6), insects have four legs (11:23), the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds (Mark 4:31), and the Sea in Solomon's temple is ten cubits across and thirty round, which makes pi equal to three (1 Kings 7:23). The authors held the cosmology of their neighbours: a flat earth on pillars under a solid dome with waters above it. None of this is a problem for an ancient text. All of it is a problem for an inerrant one.
  3. Prophecies fail. Ezekiel 26 has Nebuchadnezzar destroy Tyre and leave it a bare rock never to be rebuilt; he failed to take it, and Tyre is a city today. Ezekiel 29 has Egypt uninhabited for forty years; it never was. Jesus tells his listeners that "this generation shall not pass" before the Son of Man comes in glory (Matthew 24:34), and it passed. The prophecies claimed to be fulfilled in Jesus were written to be fulfilled: Matthew's virgin birth rests on the Greek translation of Isaiah 7:14, where the Hebrew almah means young woman and the context is a sign to King Ahaz about an invasion in the 730s BC.
  4. We do not have the text. No original manuscript of any biblical book exists. For the New Testament there are some 5,800 Greek manuscripts containing several hundred thousand variant readings, most trivial and some not: the ending of Mark, the woman taken in adultery, and the only verse that states the Trinity (1 John 5:7) are all later additions. Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus is the standard introduction. The 1978 Chicago Statement on Inerrancy deals with this by locating inerrancy in "the original autographs", which do not exist, making the doctrine unfalsifiable by design (Popper's Razor).
  5. The ancients knew better. Origen read Genesis as allegory in the third century and asked who could be so foolish as to think God planted a literal garden. Augustine, in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, warned that a Christian talking nonsense about the natural world in the hearing of pagans who knew better brought the faith into contempt. Literalism as a movement dates from the fundamentalist reaction of the 1870s onwards, and from 1961's The Genesis Flood, which launched modern creationism. It is not the old-time religion; it is a recent one.
  6. The cafeteria is compulsory. No believer stones their children for disobedience (Deuteronomy 21) or keeps slaves under the Levitical rules, and the believer who says those passages are "cultural" and the ones about homosexuality are "eternal" is applying a filter that comes from outside the book. I apply one too; mine is called Morality, and I say so. The difference is that I do not then claim the book as my authority.

Sources

  • Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005)
  • Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (2009)
  • Steve Wells, The Skeptic's Annotated Bible — https://skepticsannotatedbible.com
  • Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram (c. 415), Book I, chapter 19
  • The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978)

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