Why should I believe the Bible is inerrant?

Question

Starting with an open mind, why should I believe the Bible is inerrant? After all, we don't really know who wrote its parts, or when. Some say it was created from previous documents or traditions. We don't still use iron age technology, so why believe in an iron age book?

Not only that, but there are other holy books. What is it about the Bible that makes it more reliable than, say, the Vedas or the Koran?

If I'm going to start putting complete faith in a book which was written under unknown circumstances by people unknown I will need a very very good reason to.

Answer 1

Who do you say JESUS is? . .. if JESUS is GOD . .. and we have it by the ressurrection that JESUS IS GOD . .. then . .. then . . . JESUS saying that he has come to fulfill that which was written about him is an endorsement of the Bible. JESUS commissioned the Apostles to write and gave them THE HOLY SPIRIT to do so. JESUS is spoken of in the old testament, and comes to Earth to fulfill these things.
JESUS IS THE WORD OF GOD . .. THE BIBLE IS THE WORD OF GOD . .. knowing scripture is to know JESUS . ..

Believe for the sake of THE SON OF GOD who was crucified died and was buried and on the third day rose again in fulfillment of Scripture . ..

Isaiah and other prophets spoke of JESUS thousands of years before JESUS came, and JESUS told us what would be thousands of years before it happened . ..

That should help you to believe, with all the signs, wonders, and miracles that JESUS worked to show he had power and authority on Earth . .. and to top it all off JESUS rose from the dead on the 3rd day . ..

-LOVE your neighbor as yourself.
Amen.

Answer 2

While I appreciate the above answers, it is not quite so complex in my mind. As I have studied, read, taught, and - on rare occasion - preached the contents of the Bible in a fundamentalist church, it became apparent to me that there were things that just made no sense and could not make a serious claim to being 100% inerrant, 100% accurate, and 100% truthful. There are many examples, but a very good general rule of thumb is if a passage or verse has no verifiable single answer, but has multiple valid answers, ( which we create with our minds ) then the Bible cannot 100% inerrant. Because, in the case of multiple valid answers, for the Bible to be 100% inerrant and 100% truthful ALL valid answers must be correct. How does that work??

Answer 3

Your question is, "Why should I believe he Bible is inerrant?" And the simple answer is that you should not. The easily document-able history of its writing will show you that we do not have the original words. Not even copies of copies but many iterations and translations later are the best copies we have to work from. And the widely accepted King James Version is FAR from the best of these.

IF Jesus was all he claimed. Then the words he had to say would be well worth reading. It is a shame we do NOT have them.

The best work on this that I have found is a book titled MISQUOTING JESUS. It follows the history accurately and is written by a real Bible scholar. Not just somebody that believes everything because he is supposed to. Get the facts. They are available.

Answer 4

This is an excellent question. First, wouldn't you believe if there is a God, then wouldn't He reveal Himself to his creation?
So in looking at the holy books, which can pass tests? The Bible is accurate in history, even though it isn't really a history book. The Bible is accurate in science, in what it says, even though it isn't a science book . It has made claims of things many years ago such as life being in the blood, that no one could have known when it was written. So far, everything I have seen is true, so why wouldn't it be for God?

Answer 5

because every other religion has rules and regulations. Jesus rejected the wise (Luke 10:21). Jesus FREED us from sin (and, therefore, rules). The man condemned to death who was not baptized (I heard he wasn't baptized from a friend) and who could do no more deeds was taken to heaven over the religious scholars.
P.S. I'm Protestant (a form of Christianity). The reason I want to say this is because, in my opinion, there seems to be regulations (that aren't even in the Bible) in the Catholic Church. My side wouldn't make much sense from a Catholic stand point. Unfortunately, allot of Churches are adding on pointless regulations. My Church pressures my dad into forcing the family to wear nice clothes (ironically, I heard that a Catholic Church [most likely near my Church] doesn't do that in the least). It is important to know that the modern Church isn't necessarily right.

Answer 6

Man, this is tough. If a Christian answers you, we're told that we're preaching. If we give bible verses, we are criticized.

However.....
Yes, there are other Holy Books.
Followers of those faiths believe them.

I believe the Bible. I believe part of it is allegorical/symbolical.
I believe the New Testament; I believe that God sent His son Jesus to die for our sins so that we would no longer be held captive by the sacrificial laws of the OT.

I have no proof, just as there is no proof for The Big Bang.

I won't tell you why you should believe. I don't preach.


All I can tell you is that He helps me every day, and knowing Him is cool.
I am not bound to any horrible rules of conduct.
All I do is love Him, others, and myself.
I treat other people the way I want to be treated.

Answer 7

If you start with an open mind you will know with total certainty that it is not, because it is trivially easy to find contradictions within it. A contradictory text cannot be inerrant.

Answer 8

The Catholic Encyclopedia states Bible is Skeptic and Concocted
A. THE FORMATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON (A.D. 100-220)
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03274a.htm
The idea of a complete and clear-cut canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning, that is from Apostolic times, has no foundation in history. The Canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations, and which did not reach its final term until the dogmatic definition of the Tridentine Council. ("Canon of the New Testament")
There is a lot of confusion about the earliest existing texts of the Bible. The oldest extant manuscript of the Bible is believed to be the Codex Vaticanus, (preserved in the Vatican Library), which is slightly older than the Codex Sinaiticus (preserved in the British Library), both of which were transcribed in the fourth century.
As for the story of Jesus, there were at least 50 gospels written in the first and second century CE. Four of them (Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John) were included in the official canon during the fourth century CE and are found today in every Bible. All of the original copies of the gospels were lost. What we have now are handwritten copies, which are an unknown number of replications removed from the originals.
Rudolf Bultmann, a prominent 20th-century professor of New Testament studies writes about the life of Jesus:
We can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary; and other sources about Jesus do not exist. (Bultmann 8)
Why Word Inspired by God (Bible) has three genealogies of Jesus pbuh.
How could the "inspired words" of God get the genealogy of Jesus incorrect (See Matthew 1:6-16 where it states 26 forefathers up to Prophet David, and Luke 3:23-31 says 41 in number). Or for that matter, give a genealogy to Jesus who had NO father?

There is difference of centuries between II Kings 19:1-37 and Isaiah 37:1-38.Why both has same verses.
See II Kings 19:1-37, now read Isaiah 37:1-38. Why is it that the words of these verse are identical? Yet they have been attributed SAME WORDS to two different authors, one unknown and the other is Isaiah, who are centuries apart; and yet, the Christians have claimed these books to be inspired by God.

What is According to:
Christians boast about the Gospels according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke and according to John. However, if we think about it, there is not a single Gospel according to Jesus himself. According to the preface of the KJV (King James Version) new open Bible study edition, the word "Gospel" was added (see below) to the original titles, "According to John, according to Matthew, according to Luke and according to Mark." Incidentally, why does every "Gospel" begin with the introduction According to. Why "according to?" the reason for this is because not a single one of the gospels carries its original author’s autograph!

Luke never met Jesus pbuh, Is the gospel of Luke really a hearsay.
If you read Luke 1:2-3, you will learn, as I did, that Luke (who was not one of the 12 disciples and never met Jesus) said that he himself was not an eyewitness, and the knowledge he gathered was from eyewitnesses, and not as words inspired by God. Incidentally, why does every "Gospel" begin with the introduction According to. Why "according to?" the reason for this is because not a single one of the gospels carries its original author’s autograph! Even the internal evidence of

Was ‘Gospel according to Matthew’ was not written by Matthew, according to Bible?
Matthew 9:9 proves that Matthew was not the author of the first Gospel which bears his name:
"And as Jesus passed forth thence, He (Jesus) saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and He (Jesus) saith unto Him (Matthew), follow me (Jesus). And he (Matthew) arose, and followed Him (Jesus)." Without any stretch of the imagination, one can see that the He’s and the Him’s of the above narration do not refer to Jesus or Matthew as its author, but a third person writing what he saw or heard - a hearsay account and not words inspired by God.

Did Pagan Constantine contribute in writing the word of God?
It is worth noting, and well known throughout the religious world, that the choice of the present four "gospels" of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) were imposed in the Council of Nicea 325 CE for political purposes under the auspices of the pagan Emperor Constantine, and not by Jesus. Constantine’s mind had not been enlightened either by study or by inspiration. He was a pagan, a tyrant and criminal who murdered his son, his wife and thousands of innocent individuals because of his lust for political power. Constantine ratified other decisions in the Nicene Creed such as the decision to call Christ "the Son of God, only begotten of the father."

Answer 9

The sad thing is ... many people blindly believe, without question, that some white man in the 4th century walked around speaking English, preaching about God and Jesus and writing a book with parchment and qwill, like Harry Potter does, and said much the same as preachers in modern day do! No!

* People lived in mud and brick houses with no windows.

* they spoke Aramaic, (which sounds a lot like Arabic).

* they had black hair and bushy, unkempt black beards. There was no electrolosis back then.

* they ate out of wooden and clay bowls with their fingers. (they saved the silverware for soirees and company).

* they pooped in a pot in the corner of their one room hut and just put a cloth over it to keep the flies out. There was no Fabreeze back then.

* half of them had no teeth by their late twenties.

* they were ALL uneducated and only knew their trades.

* they bathed infrequently because they hadn't invented the bathtub yet.

* the dirt streets they walked on in bare feet and animal skins tied to their soles are still there today, centuries later.

* for generation after generation, ancient Christians passed the story of Jesus down until, many centuries later, someone got the idea to write it down.

* they didn't have anything to write on back then (and there were no stores to go buy paper), so they wrote on sheepskin peeled off dead sheep, scraped of fat and veins, dried in the sun and then written on with brown paint and a stick.

* the only one who could do the writing was a "scribe" and the tellers of the stories had to wait until they had one before they could write anything down. Scribes were few and far between and there was no 1 800 number you could call to get one.

* eventually, over the centuries, all the stories that were told, were embellished, made up, halfassed remembered and written down by hundreds of different scribes on chunks of dried, smelly animal skin.

* this "book" was the size of a 20" flat-screen TV by the time they had written HALF of the bible.

* many egotistical, haughty men had a hand in telling the stories of the long, long, long dead Jesus and John the Baptist, and getting them written in the animal-hide book.

* the bible was written, revised, rewritten, lost, found, erased and rewritten, lost again, found and added to, embellished, interpreted, disagreed with and revised over and over and over and over again for centuries, by hundreds of different "human" men.

* many, different times it was rewritten with new rules and commandments that allowed the church at that time to control the people with an iron fist. Many of the men changing the bible were sanctimonious, women-hating, in-bred, assexual eccentrics who ruled the land like Nero did.

* the Church has always had a vested interest in controlling the masses to do their bidding and keep the money rolling in.

It would be nice if Jesus had looked like a long-haired Matthew McConnaughy, spoke perfect English and was clean and kind and virtuous .... but it just isn't so. That's the Jesus they want you to believe in. There is absolutely no way we, today, could possibly know what really happened to Jesus, what his life was like, if he was like no other man ever recorded in human history or ... if he was a real human man with human emotions, thoughts and dreams.

Now, I don't want to burst anyone's bubble here, because I remember when my Christian bubble was burst ... and it was a shocking revelation to me that all I had been fed by the church was a bunch of "possible scenarios" ... but I got over it. And today, I'm the happiest, funniest, most content and altruistic agnostic you'd ever want to meet!

It didn't hurt to become a free-thinker. .... it was just uncharted territory for me and it took me years to develop my own belief system without the help of the invaluable Internet. Nowadays, if you find you have any doubts about the "church" and its guidebook, the bible ... there are many new paths to explore that do not require you to tithe, genuflect or show up every Sunday. And if you question the church, then you can also question the existance of a "devil" who will getcha if you stray from the flock! lol

This, by the way, is just my own personal POV. And, as a free-thinker, I didn't have anyone preach it into me; I just learned it myself. It would be nice if you got to do that yourself some day. I think it would smarten the world up if more people broke from their "religion club" (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, etc.) and tried to reason things out themselves using a little common sense. I did, and I reccommend it highly!

Answer 10

I appreciate you wanting to keep an open mind. It is certainly true that many view the Bible as a dusty book written by a bunch of unknowns eons ago. You commented on the fact that we do not use “iron age technology.” A university professor, Gerald A. Larue, seems to have agreed with the context of that comment. He said: “The views of the writers as expressed in the Bible reflect the ideas, beliefs, and concepts current in their own times and are limited by the extent of knowledge in those times.” The Bible, at 2 Timothy 3:16, claims to be a book inspired by God. Now, if that is so, we should expect it to be free from mistaken views which prevailed at the time its various parts were written. So, does the Bible withstand examination in the light of present knowledge?

In answering this question, please keep in mind that, with the progress of knowledge, humans constantly must adjust their views to conform to new information and discoveries. The Scientific Monthly once observed: “It is too much to expect that articles written in some cases as [recently] as five years ago could now be accepted as representative of the latest thinking in the areas of science with which they are concerned.” But the Bible was written and compiled during a period of some 1,600 years, and was completed nearly 2,000 years ago. Is it accurate today?

When the Bible was being written, there was speculation regarding how the earth was held in space. Some, for example, believed that the earth was supported by four elephants standing on a big sea turtle. How about the Bible? It simply stated: “[God] is stretching out the north over the empty place, hanging the earth upon nothing.” (Job 26:7) More than 3,000 years ago the Bible correctly noted that the earth has no visible support, a fact that is in perfect accord with the more recently understood laws of gravity and motion.

Regarding the shape of the earth, The Encyclopedia Americana says: “The earliest known image that men had of the earth was that it was a flat, rigid platform at the center of the universe. . . . The concept of a spherical earth was not widely accepted until the Renaissance.” Some early navigators were afraid they would sail off the edge of the flat earth! But, then, the introduction of the compass and other improvements made possible longer ocean voyages. These “voyages of discovery,” another encyclopedia explains, “showed that the world was round, not flat as most people had believed.”

But way before such voyages, in fact, about 2,700 years ago, the Bible said: “There is One who is dwelling above the circle of the earth, the dwellers in which are as grasshoppers.” (Isaiah 40:22) The Hebrew word chugh, translated “circle,” can also mean “sphere,” as such reference works as Davidson’s Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon show. Other translations, therefore, say “the globe of the earth” (Douay Version), and “the round earth.” (Moffatt) Thus the Bible did not reflect the mistaken flat-earth view prevalent at that time.

Regarding the origin of the universe, the Bible states: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1) But many scientists said this was wrong; that the universe had no beginning. However, pointing to newer information, astronomer Robert Jastrow explains: “The essence of the strange developments is that the Universe had, in some sense, a beginning—that it began at a certain moment in time.” Jastrow here refers to the now commonly accepted big bang theory. He adds: “Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same.”

Over the centuries there has been great ignorance on matters of health. A physician even observed: “Many superstitions are still believed by large numbers of people such as, that a buckeye in the pocket will prevent rheumatism; that handling toads will cause warts; that wearing red flannel around the neck will cure a sore throat,” and others. Yet he explained: “No such statements are found in the Bible. This in itself is remarkable.”

It is also remarkable when you compare hazardous medical treatments used in the past with what the Bible says. For example, the Papyrus Ebers, a medical document of the ancient Egyptians, prescribed the use of excrement to treat various conditions. It directed that human excrement mixed with fresh milk be applied as a poultice to lesions that remain after scabs fall off. And a remedy for drawing out splinters reads: “Worms’ blood, cook and crush in oil; mole, kill, cook, and drain in oil; ***’s dung, mix in fresh milk. Apply to the opening.” Such treatment, it is now known, can result in serious infections.

What does the Bible say about excrement? It directed: “When you squat outside, you must also dig a hole with [a digging instrument] and turn and cover your excrement.” (Deuteronomy 23:13) So, far from prescribing excrement in medical treatment, the Bible directed the safe disposal of sewage. Up until the present century the danger of leaving excrement exposed to flies was generally not known. This resulted in the spread of serious fly-borne diseases and the death of many people. Yet the simple remedy was on record in the Bible all the time, and it was followed by the Israelites over 3,000 years ago.

During the nineteenth century medical personnel would go directly from handling the dead in the dissecting room to conducting examinations in the maternity ward, and they would not even wash their hands. Infection was thus transferred from the dead, and many others died. Even when the value of hand washing was demonstrated, many in the medical community resisted such hygienic measures. Doubtless unknown to them, they were rejecting the wisdom in the Bible, since Jehovah’s law to the Israelites decreed that anyone touching a dead person became unclean and must wash himself and his garments.—Numbers 19:11-22.

Repeatedly, the Bible’s historical record has been substantiated by the uncovering of new information.
At one time all known ancient sources also differed with the Bible regarding Belshazzar. The Bible presents Belshazzar as the king of Babylon when it fell. (Daniel 5:1-31) However, secular writings did not even mention Belshazzar, saying that Nabonidus was king at the time. So critics claimed that Belshazzar had never even existed. But ancient writings were found that identified Belshazzar as a son of Nabonidus and coruler with his father in Babylon. For this reason, evidently, the Bible says Belshazzar offered to make Daniel “the third ruler in the kingdom,” since Belshazzar himself was the second. (Daniel 5:16, 29) Thus the Yale University professor, R. P. Dougherty, when comparing the Bible book of Daniel with other ancient writings, said: “The Scriptural account may be interpreted as excelling because it employs the name Belshazzar, because it attributes royal power to Belshazzar, and because it recognizes that a dual rulership existed in the kingdom.”

Can you trust the Bible? If you really examine what it says, and do not just accept what some people say, what some people claim the Bible says, you will find ample reason to trust it. There is much more evidence to offer but this response is already way too long. Suffice it to say, keeping an open mind and examining the Bible closely will show you evidence that the Bible was indeed inspired by God."

All of the above was taken from the publication cited below.

Hannah J Paul