Are There Errors in the Bible?

[av1611jim]

God says:
"My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts".
So you go right on ahead and believe in your "imperfect" Bible.
Mine is perfect, without error, contradiction, omission, addition or any other such thing that a mere human can do to it or claim about it.
Maybe some of you will find this overly simplistic. My God never once told me to question the verity of His words.
I said before, I'll say it again, at the risk of sounding redundant;
God is always right. Where there APPEARS to be a problem text, the problem lies not with God, nor with God's inability to protect His words from corruption, but rather with our, your, my, understanding of the passage in question. So when you have a question;
What ever happened to asking God to show you the answer, and then WAIT for it. But by all means, NEVER accuse God of weakness, i.e. (allowing errors).
In answer to the question; "What would it mean if we accepted what God has apparently actually done and accepted that the Bible can contain minor discrepancies of fact?"
(I sure hope the moderator let's me answer honestly)
I believe it means that one has either a) Lost faith in God's word, i.e. Every word of God is pure, Surely the Lord will do nothing except he reveal it to his prophets, (there are so many Scriptures about this very subject.) or b) had his faith STOLEN by some feller in an apostate university class.
In His service;
Jim

 

[HankD]

KJV Nehemiah 7:6 These are the children of the province, that went up out of the captivity, of those that had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away, and came again to Jerusalem and to Judah, every one unto his city;
7 Who came with Zerubbabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Azariah, Raamiah, Nahamani, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispereth, Bigvai, Nehum, Baanah.


KJV Ezra 2:1 Now these are the children of the province that went up out of the captivity, of those which had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away unto Babylon, and came again unto Jerusalem and Judah, every one unto his city;
2 Which came with Zerubbabel: Jeshua, Nehemiah, Seraiah, Reelaiah, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispar, Bigvai, Rehum, Baanah. The number of the men of the people of Israel: .


The groups of people were counted from two different sets which probably intersected with Arah.

HankD

 

[Artimaeus]

"What about___________? (Fill in the blank with anything you don't understand completely or think is in error). Now imagine yourself talking to Jesus when you get to heaven and asking Him that question. Also, imagine that you have based a major doctrine or placed heavy emphasis on the result of "How it MUST be". Then, Jesus patiently explains how it really works and you have to say, "Oh...well, uh...in that case...I'm sorry that I caused doubt among the brethren." Which is more reasonable? (A) A perfect God wrote a perfect book that I can't explain. OR (B) A perfect God wrote an imperfect book that I can explain.

 

[Charles Meadows]

Artimeus,

Good point. We shouldn't feel the need to be able to explain EVERYthing about the bible. But by that same token we should not try to MAKE UP explanations (which are known to be scientifically or historicaly inaccurate) just so we can say, "See no errors!".

 

[Craigbythesea]

Amen! Very well said!

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Originally posted by HankD:
KJV Nehemiah 7:6 These are the children of the province, that went up out of the captivity, of those that had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away, and came again to Jerusalem and to Judah, every one unto his city;
7 Who came with Zerubbabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Azariah, Raamiah, Nahamani, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispereth, Bigvai, Nehum, Baanah.


KJV Ezra 2:1 Now these are the children of the province that went up out of the captivity, of those which had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away unto Babylon, and came again unto Jerusalem and Judah, every one unto his city;
2 Which came with Zerubbabel: Jeshua, Nehemiah, Seraiah, Reelaiah, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispar, Bigvai, Rehum, Baanah. The number of the men of the people of Israel: .


The groups of people were counted from two different sets which probably intersected with Arah.

HankD

I would like for you to please clarify what you mean by two different sets. Are you saying that there were two different migrations from Babylon, both of them led by Zerubabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, etc? Or are you saying that they counted the same people one way in one listing and another way in the other listing?

 

[HankD]

Or are you saying that they counted the same people one way in one listing and another way in the other listing?

Yes Paul that is almost correct. You will see in the phrases of each "Which came with Zerubbabel" 11 names of leaders in one and 12 in the other. There were possibly some missing from one (or added by the other) because of the inclusion/exclusion criteria of the different groups and/or inspired authors.

HankD

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Originally posted by av1611jim:
God says:
"My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts".
So you go right on ahead and believe in your "imperfect" Bible.
Mine is perfect, without error, contradiction, omission, addition or any other such thing that a mere human can do to it or claim about it.

Brother AV1611Jim, I see by your name that your Bible is the King James Version. So I repeat these verses from the King James Version:

Ezra 2:5
he children of Arah, seven hundred seventy and five.
KJV

Neh 7:10
0 The children of Arah, six hundred fifty and two.
KJV


Now you say that your bible, the King James Version is without error, contradiction, omission, or addition.

And you say that in spite of the fact that these numbers would apparantly differ one from another in your Bible.

I can only conclude that for you the words without error, contradiction, omission, or addition do not have the same meaning as they do for me.

Therefore, in the way that you use these words, I also believe that the Bible is without error, contradiction, omission or addition.

However, I wonder just how you would describe a situation in which two different numbers are said to be a count of the same thing. I would say they both cannot be right.

Maybe some of you will find this overly simplistic. My God never once told me to question the verity of His words.

I said before, I'll say it again, at the risk of sounding redundant;
God is always right. Where there APPEARS to be a problem text, the problem lies not with God, nor with God's inability to protect His words from corruption, but rather with our, your, my, understanding of the passage in question. So when you have a question;
What ever happened to asking God to show you the answer, and then WAIT for it. But by all means, NEVER accuse God of weakness, i.e. (allowing errors).

I will never accuse God of weakness. I will accuse men of denying God the strength to accomplish His will by means that men find to be beyond their understanding.

It is beyond the understanding of men that God can use imperfection and weakness to accomplish His will. He can even use you and me to accomplish his will, imperfect though we are.

I acknowledge before you all that in my personal case God allows errors. In spite of my errors God still loves me and even sometimes uses me.

This means it is possible for God to work with an imperfect thing and still accomplish his will

This means we cannot rule out on logical grounds alone that God might choose in His sovereingty to even work through a Bible that contains errors here and there, not related to doctrine.

I believe it means that one has either a) Lost faith in God's word, i.e. Every word of God is pure, Surely the Lord will do nothing except he reveal it to his prophets, (there are so many Scriptures about this very subject.) or b) had his faith STOLEN by some feller in an apostate university class.
In His service;
Jim

I have not lost faith in God's word; I turn to it for guidance in doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness, and progress towards perfection in the Lord, learning from it what constitutes good works; (2 Tim 3:16)

But I do not believe that in the great second exodus from Babylon to Jerusalem that the sons of Arah numbered both 775 and 652. One or the other number is inaccurate at least; perhaps both.

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Nobody has mentioned the simplest way to reconcile the two lists of Nehemiah and Ezra.

Neh 7:5
5 Then my God put it into my heart to assemble the nobles, the officials and the people to be enrolled by genealogies. Then I found the book of the genealogy of those who came up first in which I found the following record:
NASU

In the Nehemiah passage, Nehemiah plainly states he found a record and reports what that record said. So perhaps one could say that the Bible accurately records what the record was that Nehemiah located, but the Bible Inerrancy consists of citing that record perfectly, with whatever flaws that record had.

In the Ezra passage, on the other hand, the Bible asserts the numbers directly, not indirectly, and therefore Biblical Innerancy would apply to the numbers themselves.

How about that for a solution?

 

[HankD]

But I do not believe that in the great second exodus from Babylon to Jerusalem that the sons of Arah numbered both 775 and 652. One or the other number is inaccurate at least; perhaps both.

Criteria Paul.

Nehemiah and Ezra possibly had two ways of determing "jewishness" depending upon the task at hand and/or the reason and authorization for the count.

Some were possibly mixed blood. Jewish converts had to be circumcized and mikvah'd but they were still considered Jews for temple/worship attendance which could be Ezra's (a priest) criteria.

Nehemiah being a "ruler" was only interested in Jews of proven bloodlines.

BTW, this difference still exists between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

http://www.orthohelp.com/geneal/differ.HTM

HankD

 

[Jeffrey H]

Originally posted by Jason Gastrich:
Dear Baptist Board,

I pray you are well, today.

Do you think that you've found an error in the Bible?

I wouldn't recommend "The Message" or similar paraphrases. These type of 'translations' tend to be personal interpretations and are prone to error.

With that said, one is still better off reading "The Message" than a King James Bible that collects dust.

 

[Bible Student]

I have just read most of this topic as presented. I understand that I am not as smart as most of you and that my education would be called into question. To some I would be a foolish and unlearned christian, but with what I have spent much time in reading I must ask the following question to you learned and all knowing scholars.

If there are errors in the Word of God we have today, how then can we believe any of it? It could have all been miss written, added to or changed over the last few thousand years. Whom amoung you are smart enough to prove that the way of salvation is through Jesus Christ, it could be just as much changed or miswritten as anything else. But of course I am just a simple Bible believer who believes the Word of God is the Word of God with out any error.

My Bible tells me the "Just shall live by faith." It saids nothing about faith backed up by human knowledge. If I am to live by faith what do I put that faith in? I will trust the Bible until the day I stand before the Lord Jesus Christ who, according to my Bible, died in my place, was buried, raised from the dead, and sits on the right hand of God.

Just a plain old Bible Believer

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Bible Student, it is not a matter of being inerrant that makes you place your faith in the Bible. Robert's Rules of Order are inerrant by definition, and I defy anybody to find a contradiction in them. For some strange reason, in spite of that inerrancy, it is read by a small minority among the population, and most of them never consult it for the salvation of their souls.

That's because nobody SHOULD consider it for the salvation of their souls.

Beyond mere inerrancy, do you have reason for turning to scriptures for the hope of your salvation? Of course you do. Things like fulfilled prophecy, historically credible testimony from eyewitnesses of God's intervention in human history, and the testimony of God's Spirit within that we should, indeed, heed His word.

Just because I recognize that in some minor places here and there not really related to doctrine and practice there are some occasional discrepancies does not mean the evidence for accepting His word is not just as valid as it is for someone who insists, on theoretical grounds, that it must be possible to explain every one of them away some how some way if we only bend our minds to that task.

God has provided us what we need. We all turn to His word for what we need, that is what He has given us.

 

[HankD]

Just because I recognize that in some minor places here and there not really related to doctrine and practice there are some occasional discrepancies does not mean the evidence for accepting His word is not just as valid as it is for someone who insists, on theoretical grounds, that it must be possible to explain every one of them away some how some way if we only bend our minds to that task.

I object to the phrase "explain every one of them away". This is not my general attitude. My view is that for any given apparent "discrepancy", it is not an error in fact but in our understanding or even an error introduced into the text by the hand of a scribe. Now, our understanding may be obscured because we do not have all the facts, but that is different than an error in the reporting of the facts by the inspired writter.

I feel no great compulsion in explaining these apparent discrepancies except occassionally as in the situation here at the BB. I simply accept the fact that there is an explanation even if I don't presently know what it is.

HankD

 

[BWSmith]

Question for the panel:

If you know where the copyist errors are, why not fix them?

Should it not be your duty to publish the Error-Free KJV (EFKJV), so we can hold the truth in our hands?

 

[HankD]

If you know where the copyist errors are, why not fix them?

That it why we have the TR's.
Elzivir, Erasmus, Stephanus, tried to distill out the correct readings into a singular text.

The problem is that there may be several choices among the variants for any single reading and all will never agree.

This was one of the problems the KJV translators had. Disagreement among themselves as to that choice. They therefore put the most popular reading in the body of the text and the variation in the margin (of the first few editions).

After about 250 years they (and those who followed them) refined the text into what we have now. In 1894/5 FHA Scrivener reconstructed the Greek TR text from the various TR's to match the refined KJV English.

The debatable issue being which text (eclectic or TR or Majority, etc) most resembles the originals.

HankD

 

[BWSmith]

Which brings us full circle: Why do people get a kick out of trumpeting the inerrancy of the text when the experts cannot properly sort through the manuscripts and produce a translation that eliminates the so-called "copyist errors"?

For example, if Elhanan didn't kill Goliath (2 Samuel), but killed his brother (Chronicles), why not change the 2 Samuel text to "fix the error", despite what all the manuscripts say?

 

[HankD]

For example, if Elhanan didn't kill Goliath (2 Samuel), but killed his brother (Chronicles), why not change the 2 Samuel text to "fix the error", despite what all the manuscripts say?

Because, there has to be some credible manuscript evidence even if (such as the case you mentioned) it appears to be a no-brainer.

HankD

 

[Paul of Eugene]

HankD, you could post a Hebrew text. Honest scholarship would require you to sign your name to it and date it. It would then stand on its merits in the scholarly world as the HankD text (rather than the massorectic text or the ?? text) and you anybody who wanted to could base their translation on that text. The KJV only folks, of course, would have your hide; how dare you tinker with the sacred original text?

 

[HankD]

Paul, I honestly don't understand what it is you are asking of me.

FWIW, and if this is what you are asking, and though you asked me not to name it, I endorse/use the ben Chayyim Masoretic text.

Here is a chart of others (ben Asher, ben Naphtali):

http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/17_manuscripts.html

HankD (my signed name on 07/28/2004)