Bible Inerrancy Poll #2

What if I believe that, in the original autographs, the Bible is totally true and inerrant. However, over time it has become imperfect, and God has given us the Quran to correct those imperfections. Doesn't that satisfy the Baptist belief requirement? It's easy to believe that the originals, which nobody has and nobody can see, are good and moral and perfect, but who the heck knows what they said?

 

manchester: “What if I believe that, in the original autographs, the Bible is totally true and inerrant. However, over time it has become imperfect, and God has given us the Quran to correct those imperfections. Doesn't that satisfy the Baptist belief requirement? It's easy to believe that the originals, which nobody has and nobody can see, are good and moral and perfect, but who the heck knows what they said?

This is actually a good question, one that clearly demonstrates the need to bolster and clarify the assertion that Scripture is “inerrant in the autographs.” A further statement is needed in order to affirm the basic reliability and maintained inerrancy in the copied documents that have been preserved and perpetuated, even though any one of them might be “imperfect” in places.

As Richard Bentley long ago (ca. 1715) observed, the aberrancies of any single MS are overcome not by speculation, but by comparison with other MSS that override such aberrancies:

“The real text of the sacred writers does not now (since the originals have been so long lost) lie in any single MS..., but is dispersed in them all. ... It is good ... to have more anchors than one; and another MS. to join with the first would give more authority, as well as security...A third, therefore, and so a fourth, and still on, are desirable, that by a joint and mutual help all the faults may be mended." (Bentley, Remarks on a late discourse of Free-Thinking, section 32).

 

Ed, have you stated your position on this, or would you rather not until the poll is finished?

 

Thank you Ed. I voted the same way. I believe that all faithful translations are inerrant.

It is obviously important that we continue to evaluate which new translations are faithful. With more and more translations the number of unfaithful translations will increase.

I use "The Message" as one of those. Do you agree?

This may sound off the subject, but I think it is getting to the heart of your questions. I won't go further with it.

 

So you're saying that a "faithful translation" has in EVERY case made the proper choice (1) of the original Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic words to translate and (2) that it's translated it so that the exact meaning is conveyed (no loss of meaning in translation). And that if either of these criteria fails even once then the translation is not faithful, and thus errant. So tell me which one is the INERRANT one, please! Absolutely ridiculous, and similar to KJVO people. If you want to see differences in both of these criteria in every single translation available, it could be done, and thus only ONE or NO translation is inerrant by definition. I'd like to know which one is the inerrant one!

Yours,

Bluefalcon

 

You misread me. I assume there is NO perfect translation due to the inability of humans to choose inerrantly the correct Greek words, e.g., out of at least 200,000 variants in the NT Greek manuscripts every time and then to translate them correctly. The latter is more possible than the first, but even still not probable.

Yours,

Bluefalcon

 

You misread me. I assume there is NO perfect translation due to the inability of humans to choose inerrantly the correct Greek words, e.g., out of at least 200,000 variants in the NT Greek manuscripts every time and then to translate them correctly. The latter is more possible than the first, but even still not probable.

Yours,

Bluefalcon

 

Learn Greek and then you're only 1/1000th of the way there! No, really, it is God's Word that is perfect, not the words that have been added to/subtracted from/altered in God's Word. If a translation has included words in the latter category, then its translators have unwittingly mixed imperfection with perfection. As for my answer to your question, I think it's best to educate our constituency to this matter of fact rather than allow them to keep on thinking that this or that translation is the undefiled Word of God in their hands, when in fact any translation is anywhere from 90-99 percent based on perfection, with 1-10 percent imperfection comprising the rest of the base. This is just the base, and errors of translation or, what you mentioned, living words coming/going out of use, may more or less complicate the issue after the relative perfection of the base text has been decided upon.

Yours,

Bluefalcon

 

Why is it so hard simply to say that translations can be "generally" or even "exceedingly" "accurate and reliable"?

This then would beg no questions regarding a theoretical 100% perfection in human-based efforts to render the word of God into English.

And by this standard, I would suspect most formal equivalence translations (at least) would fall into about a 99% level of accuracy regarding the rendering of their underlying base text.

(Now the issue of the base text remains a different issue, with about 5%-10% difference among versions, depending upon what NT book you happen to be looking at).

 

Ziggy, what you say is fine with me. It just seems that if people who are uneducated to the facts pick up any two different translations and start comparing, they'll see that the strong word "inerrant" cannot be applied to both (because of the many differences mainly in the text used to translate). I'm pretty sure you'd agree that's why the strong word "inerrant" is only talked about in terms of the autographs of Scripture. I'm of the persuasion that the strong word "inerrant" should be kept to the autographs only and not watered down to include all "faithful" translations or some other breed, as some seem to hold to on this board.

Yours,

Bluefalcon