I’ve written my own take on Inerrancy.

It is an interesting subject and I just want to make the point that we need to keep it simple. Let’s not put the Bible in an Altar. It is not God.

Edgar.

“We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant. However, in determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production. In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of His penman’s milieu, a milieu that God controls in His sovereign providence; it is misinterpretation to imagine otherwise.

So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth. Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must also be observed: since, for instance, non-chronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectations in those days, we must not regard these things as faults when we find them in Bible writers. When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it. Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.”

Copied from this page: http://ovrlnd.com/Bible/Inerrancy.html

The thinking behind the concise “affirmations and denials,” as given by the exposition, is arguably as important as the affirmations and denials themselves.

The Rationality Of Belief In Inerrancy

It’s a bit older, but seems to feel right to me…

What you can take away from those two articles is that when parallel accounts differ in the details or present different perspectives on something, the claim is that those differences ultimately go back to the same events that took place in a way that neither account is false or deceitful. If the accounts are in a different chronological order, then the Chicago Statement is implying that at least one of the two must not have intended to order the account chronologically.

I don’t see how it’s a get out of jail free card. Inerrantists still have to defend how the two seemingly conflicting accounts might both be presenting information that is true and not deceptive or fraudulent given the literary standards of the method of reporting. The claim is not that it automatically amounts to no error simply because they are different accounts. The claim is that such work can always be done, because there are no errors of that sort.

What I am arguing for is that the gospels are not attempting to be historically 100% accurate according to modern standards

Yes, presuming you mean “precise” when you say accurate. The authors of the Chicago Statement would agree, however. They aren’t trying to hold the Bible to the standards of modern scientific of historical writing, and most of the signers have regularly said as much in their own writing.

the Chicago Statement wants to import on the texts.

That’s where I think you’re importing modern categories into the Chicago Statement when they’re trying to do their best to deny that very thing.

On the issue of the day of the crucifixion, I think it’s pretty clear in both Mark and John that Jesus had eaten the Passover meal with his disciples the day before he was crucified. The issue isn’t with comparing Mark with John. It’s what John means when he says it’s the Day of Preparation. One might have thought it was the Day of Preparation (i.e. the day before) for Passover itself, except that Jesus has already ate Passover with his disciples. What’s much more natural in context is that it’s the Day of Preparation for the High Sabbath that happens in Passover week, which isn’t an ordinary Sabbath due to the fact that it’s a festival week. The term in question never gets used for a day other than a day preceding a Sabbath. Since the term ‘Passover’ can refer to the meal, the day, or the week of the whole festival, it’s not strange to read the expression that way.

There’s another reason to take it this way. The point of mentioning its being the day before the Sabbath is to explain why they need to stab Jesus’ side. Otherwise he won’t die before sundown, and they need to take him off the cross before Sabbath starts, especially such a special Sabbath.

People have come up with various answers for other issues as well. For instance, there’s no reason to think Jesus only overturned tables in the temple courtyard just once. John records a much more significant Judean ministry for Jesus, and he would (as every adult male did) be in Jerusalem at feast time several times a year, so why not encounter the priests in the temple doing evil things and get upset at them more than once? It makes much more sense of the very serious opposition Jesus faced from them in the Synoptics that you don’t see as good an explanation for in those gospels.

As for Mark getting geography wrong, I don’t know which particular instance you’re referring to. If it’s the Gadarene/Gerasene issue, there have been a couple proposals that deal with that. There’s a textual difficulty for one thing, with three variants that contend for possibly being the original reading. If the one that skeptics take to be silly is the correct original reading, it still doesn’t necessarily follow that Mark got the geography wrong. Mark several times uses terms fairly vaguely (e.g. 7:31, where he’s talking about larger regions). If that’s what he’s doing here, as R.T. France suggests he is, then he’s speaking of the region generally associated with the Gerasenes. It may be that their actual settlement is inland a good bit, but it’s clear in the account that we’re dealing with a remote location on the lake not that close to a settlement, and Mark may just be indicating what general vicinity of the lakeshore it’s in. It’s the region in the vicinity of the Gerasenes.

Ultimately, some won’t accept the proposals as actually correct, and I think that’s fine for those whose presumption is that the Bible isn’t infallible. But those who accept it as God’s word should presume that it reliably reports what it does report according to the literary standards of its cultural setting. If it seems that there are difficulties in taking particular passages as correct, then either we’re interpreting it wrong, or the facts aren’t what we think they are. Just as one could say that science is wrong on evolution or say that we’re interpreting the early chapters of Genesis wrong (and in either case fully upholding the Chicago Statement), so too can you say that either possibility may be the right one in another case without being sure of which one. Something isn’t a disproof of inerrancy unless there’s no possible way that what it says can be true according to the level of precision and standards of evaluation of the cultural and literary context. I have never encountered a supposed error in the Bible that I have been convinced is impossible to resolve. I may not have been convinced that a particular solution is correct in some cases, but there have always been possibilities that for all I know could be true.

That’s all inerrantists need, provided there’s a strong enough reason to believe in inerrancy, and I think there is. I don’t see how it’s possible to accept the Bible as divine revelation without its being true in everything it reports, even if what it reports has implications for areas that we now call history and science.

I think you have good partial objections.

1) I did miss the parallel accounts language in my reading of the Chicago statement – it was not an intentional strawman. However, it now seems like the Chicago statement is internally conflicted. There is significant tension between the article I quote (Article XII) and Article XIII. To me is seems to say that the Bible is accurate in all matters of history and science, except where we can compare it against equally inspired and historical accounts, then we will pull out a “get out of jail free card.”

2) First, I am not trying to individually answer all written accounts of the people trying to harmonize the gospels. That would take months. What I am arguing for is that the gospels are not attempting to be historically 100% accurate according to modern standards, something the Chicago Statement wants to import on the texts.

Furthermore, I can grant you the time of day issue, although it still seems a bit ad hoc to me. However, that does not address the difference of days. Without arguing for two Sabbaths that week, which I believe some have done, I am not aware of a way that one can harmonize John and Mark on this issue. Also, there are more than just these two issues. When did Jesus over turn the tables? How many times did he go to Jerusalem? Why does Mark get the geography of Palenstine wrong?

As for the second issue, you’re just wrong. The gospel accounts easily agree on this issue, and evangelicals have put in a lot of work explaining how what to modern ears and eyes sounds like a conflict isn’t really one if you understand the ancient methods of reporting. Particularly if something took place in the time period between (say) dawn and noon, putting it closer to one or the other would have been within the vagueness of language at the time. It would thus be an issue of precision and not accuracy, yet again. Furthermore, some of the best scholars on John have been arguing recently that his chronology is the same as that of the synoptics. If you are going to make this criticism, you’re going to have to respond to people like Carson, Morris, Blomberg, and Kostenberger and not just make assertions that the people you’re criticizing don’t accept. That counts as question-begging.

I wrote a while back on what I think a better approach to tensions in scripture.

What I don’t see in the Chicago Statement, or other statements on scripture, is an acknowledgment of these and other problems.

These “errors” are deemed so important that they must provide a hypothesis of an undiscovered document (anyone reminded of Q theory? LOL) that is free from these “errors” so that the doctrine of inerrancy is maintained. Now, if the texts we have are so fundamentally corrupted from the original autographs, then how can we trust them at all? How do we know that the manuscripts we have do not bear more important errors, say, like the nature of Christ’s death.

Rather than go down that road, which I think leads to great doubt, I think another approach makes more sense. Take the documents as they were intended back then. This type of literature was not meant to be historically accurate down to the smallest detail – things like order of events were not important. What was important was revealing the nature of the person through the stories. I think the stories did happen, but I am wary about attaching emphasizes that were not there originally.

Oh, and while I might like some of Ehrman’s stuff on the time period, I think misquoting Jesus goes way overboard.