The Quest for the Perfect Bible

Last night before I went to bed I spent an hour or so looking through the CBD catalog at Bibles. I dreamt all night about finding the perfect Bible. CBD has, I don't know, seven to ten pages of Bibles in their catalog, so there's a lot to look through. I was disappointed that I did not see one original language Bible. I guess there was one interlinear Bible, but that one is based on the centuries-out-of-date scholarship of the textus receptus.

I seem to get a new Bible about every three years. I am on a quest for the perfect Bible, which of course changes from season to season in my life. I started with the RSV I was given at confirmation. Then when I became a Christian, a friend of mine showed me the Student Bible, put together by Philip Yancey. I don't know what it is about the Student Bible, but there's something about it that says, "The Bible is cool. Read me." There really are not a lot of extras, and the 'helps' are not amazingly helpful, but there is something about it's layout that makes me, even now, think, "Wow, what a great Bible." For all the options out there, this one is still the best to give to a new believer.

Unfortunately my student Bible was only paperback, and it quickly became dogeared and beat-up. Time for hard cover. My parents took me to the bookstore to buy me a Bible for my birthday, and I picked out some generic study bible in the NIV. (For what I was looking for, I should have graduated to the NIV Study Bible, but I didn't know better yet.)

It was, I think, a year or two later that I asked my pastor what translation he preferred. He highly recommended the NASB. A few months later I bought my first NASB, the most literal translation available. This time I graduated to bonded leather. Though there were no book introductions or study notes, but I discovered the use of the side column references. I used them all the time to find parallel passages in the synoptic gospels, OT references, similarly themed verses, etc. The mini-concordance in the back was also quite extensive. Between the concordance and the references, I could usually find just about any verse that would come up.

The only thing that bothered me about the NASB was the stupid idea of the translators to refer to God with the pronouns Thee and Thou. But this really bothered me. Imagine my delight when, in 1995, the translators released an updated version with the Thees and Thous gone! I immediately bought a new one, this time in genuine leather. Do you know the difference between bonded and genuine leather? By this point I sure did. Unlike genuine leather, bonded leather is strips of leather glued on to a cardboard back. If you use it with any regularity, the glue will begin to come loose and the leather will start to fray, especially at the corners. Genuine leather is much nicer.

Once I started to learn the original languages, though, English bibles were no longer as exciting. My most recent Bible is built of two Bibles: an interlinear Greek/English (with UBS4/NA27 text) and parallel NRSV; and the Jewish Publication Society's (JPS) Hebrew-English Tanakh (Old Testament). I put grocery-bag book covers on them (just like high school textbooks) and taped them together, creating a complete Bible. What a cool idea, I thought.

But in practice I am very frustrated with this solution. First, it doesn't sit open like a single book. Whichever I have open sits awkwardly on top of the other book. I could deal with this, but a much bigger frustration is that I have no cross references or mini concordance. I didn't realize how often I use them until I no longer had them. Now I am absolutely lost whenever I get to the point of, "Oh shoot, what's that one verse?" Or reading through Matthew, I read a passage and I want to remind myself quickly whether the passage has a parallel in Mark. So I end up keeping my old NASB open next to me as I read, which entirely defeats the purpose.

Eventually I hope to graduate to a straight Hebrew/Greek Bible (which does include cross-references, though no mini-concordance). But even then I'm not sure how happy I'll be with it. I could do away with the Greek/English interlinear, but I will also lose my ability to read through, say, the gospel of Mark in a single sitting. Plus, I use my Bible too much "on the fly," and I don't think I'll ever be at the place where I can interpret on the spot for whomever I'm talking to.

Maybe I just have to use a computer Bible on laptop or handheld as my primary Bible. Something about that just seems wrong, though. I still want my primary Bible to be printed on real, physical paper.

My perfect Bible for this stage in my life would have: (1)Greek/Hebrew, (2)Parallel English translation; (3)Cross-references. It would also be great if it had (4)a mini concordance (in English, I suppose), and (5)still fit in my bag. I suppose I'm living in a dream world, but I'm not quite willing to admit defeat yet. I would love any advice from anyone else who has gone through a similar struggle.

What is your Bible story? How many Bibles have you gone through in your life? Why did you switch from one to another? Drop me a comment. I would love to hear.

The Road to Emmaus

Emmaus is mentioned only a single time in the gospels, though this reference occurs very prominently in Luke 24.13, in the “Road to Emmaus” story. Luke tells the story of two disciples, Cleopas and an unnamed person, walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus on Easter Sunday. They are discussing early reports that Jesus has risen when Jesus Himself meets them, though they are unable to recognize Him. After lamenting how, “we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel” (24.21), Jesus explains through the scriptures how the crucifixion was a necessary fulfillment of Israel’s story. The three arrive in the evening at Emmaus and have dinner together. Suddenly the disciples recognize Jesus and He instantly disappears. The two return to Jerusalem to share their story.

Last week I turned in a paper on Emmaus for my M.Div. course on the gospels. I got an A on it which I'm pretty happy about. I am posting the results of my study in hope that someone somewhere will find my brilliant argument useful in some other endeavor, perhaps another paper. If you happen to use any of my argument in your own paper, please cite this page and drop me a comment.

Emmaus (modern Khirbet Imwas) is located about 20 miles Northwest of ancient Jerusalem. It is described in the Palestinian Talmud (Shevi’it 8, 9, 38d; Abodah Zarah 85, 44d) as the most important walled city[1] in the Shephelah, the lowland between the Mediterranean cost of ancient Philistia and the mountainous region of inland Israel. Yet Luke describes Emmaus as a village (κώμη), a small group of houses that are typically unwalled,[2] and its location being seven miles (60 stadia) from Jerusalem, not 20 miles. Within the context of Luke’s narrative, it is unlikely that the disciples would have been able to travel 40-miles round-trip on foot in a single day.[3] Because Emmaus was a relatively common name, scholars have speculated that Luke may have been referring to another Emmaus in the vicinity of Jerusalem. At least three candidates have been proposed along one of two routes from Jerusalem to the traditional Emmaus:
1. Mozah (modern Qoloniyeh/Colonia) located along the southern route to the traditional site. Mozah may be a Hebrew transliteration of Amassa (Latin) or Ammaous (Greek)[4], which are linguistically close to Emmaus. It is located only 35 stadia from Jerusalem, which may be explainable if Luke was estimating the distance, especially from the Southern side of Jerusalem where the disciples had probably taken the Last Supper.
2. Kiriath-jarim (modern Abu Ghosh) is located on the same southern route, about 83 stadia from Jerusalem. It had once housed the Ark of the Covenant for twenty years (1 Sam 7.2) before David brought it back to Jerusalem. The only thing to commend this site as the actual site is it’s relative proximity to Jerusalem, though it is still over 20 stadia farther than Luke records.
3. Castellum Emmaus (modern el-Qubeibeh) is located along the northern route to the traditional site. It was identified by the Crusaders as the Biblical Emmaus because (a) it was originally the site of a Roman fort named Castellum Emmaus, and (b) it is located 60 stadia from ancient Jerusalem. The difficulty remains, however, that this site had never been a village and likely took its name because of it’s proximity to the city of the same name.

Despite scholarly debate, it is highly likely that Luke’s Emmaus is the traditional city on the border of the Shephelah. First, there is a minority, though reliable, textual variant[5] that locates Emmaus 160 rather than 60 stadia away, the distance of the traditional site. It is conceivable that this was the original reading, and may have been changed by scribes because they could not imagine a 40-mile round-trip being taken in a single day and changed it to reflect the distance of the Roman fort (site 3). If, on the other hand, scribes changed the reading from 60 to 160, they likely did so in an effort to make the text conform to the actual distance, which shows that Luke’s Emmaus was associated with the traditional Emmaus from early on, if not immediately.[6] The closeness between 60 and 160 (rather than, say, 25 and 90) makes it much more plausible that one of these scenarios is true rather than the explanation depending on simple coincidence.

Secondly, a distance of 160 stadia actually makes better sense of the Lukan story than a shorter distance. It makes sense of the disciples comment in verse 29, urging Jesus to stay with them at Emmaus for a meal, “for it is getting toward evening, and the day is now nearly over.” Luke is emphatic that the disciples returned in the evening, (“They got up that very hour and returned to Jerusalem,” v.33), which would have only been mildly notable if they were a two-hour walk from the city, but an entirely fitting (and dangerous) response to a life changing event like a resurrection appearance, forcing them to travel through the night.

Third, the repetition of the name Emmaus at such a close location becomes absurd for sites 1 and 2. By comparison, it is not surprising that there are Deerfields in both Illinois and Wisconsin, but it would be quite bizarre for there to be a second Deerfield located just fifteen miles from the current Illinois Deerfield.

Fourth, 1 Maccabees 4 records one of Judas Maccabaeus’ most decisive victories over the Syrian army. The battle was fought at Emmaus, and there is no debate that this Emmaus is the same as the traditional Emmaus. In fact, the very name of the city would have evoked a feeling of patriotic faith in first century freedom fighters. To make another modern comparison, Emmaus probably evoked a similar reaction to that of a modern American at the mention of Gettysburg. Luke could hardly have told a story about Emmaus without expecting many of his readers to hear an echo of Judas Maccabaeus.[7]

For these reasons, we may identify Luke’s Emmaus with the traditional site of Emmaus with a very high degree of certainty. There are, however, two additional events which were important in the history of Emmaus, and thus for an understanding of the Lukan passage. In the first century B.C., the Roman general Cassius asserted his might in Israel by sacking Emmaus and selling its inhabitants into slavery.[8] Then in 4 B.C., a shepherd named Anthronges from Emmaus led an uprising in the spirit of the Maccabees to retaliate against the Romans. In contrast to the Maccabees, however, Anthronges was defeated and killed, and the Roman proconsul, Varus, had the city burned to the ground.[9] This would explain why Luke could call it a village rather than a city, and would have actually emphasized the fact that Israel had not been able to expel the Romans the way they had done with the Syrians.

Then, in the years leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem, Emmaus was captured by the Roman general, Vespasian, where he stationed the entire Fifth Legion.[10] He later gave land from the city in reward to his veterans.[11] Though this event occurred nearly thirty years after Luke’s narrative, it would have been a recent event for Theophilus and Luke’s initial audience when the book was written.

In this context, the initial disappointment of the disciples takes on a fuller meaning. In Luke 24.21, the disciples explain, “we were hoping that it was he [Jesus] who was going to redeem Israel.” In other words, we had been hoping he would be like Judas Maccabaeus and deliver us, but instead he was executed the same as Anthronges. They had not been anticipating that Jesus would have gotten crucified, and had not even remotely considered that he would be resurrected in three days any more than anyone considered that Anthronges would be resurrected to finish what he had started. Jesus’ response shows that His messiahship must be understood in light of God’s purposes for Israel (and the fulfillment of His promises to Abraham that they would be a blessing to all the peoples of the earth) rather than the story of national military resistance.

[1] Excavations have discovered city walls over two-feet thick. Avi-Yonah, “Emmaus” in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (NEAEHL), 386.
[2] BDAG, 580.
[3] Strange, J.F., “Emmaus” in Anchar Bible Dictionary (ABD), 497.
[4] Ibid, 498.
[5] In the Codex Sinaiticus. This variant is also found in Jerome’s quotation of the passage.
[6] It is conceivable that the mistake between Emmaus and the Castellum Emmaus goes back to Luke himself, though this is not a tenable solution for those who hold to a version of Inerrancy as represented in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. We must then posit that the change occurred very early in the manuscript tradition. If we hold to inerrancy, it is far easier to take the minority reading as the original based on the weight of the rest of the argument.
[7] Safrai, The Jewish People in the First Century, 86. Even if my argument for the traditional site fails, the name alone would have still induced a powerful comparison.
[8] Josephus, War i.9.
[9] Josephus, Antiquities xvii.10.7-9. This event happened subsequent to Varus’ destruction of Sephoris to the North, whose inhabitants he had sold into slavery. This compelled the residents of Emmaus to desert the city before he got there.
[10] Josephus, War of the Jews iv.8.1. The discovery of Roman Army tombstones from this period confirms Josephus’ account. (Avi-Yonah, 385).
[11] Shürer, et. al., The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, 512.

N.T. Wright Wrecked My Life

Once upon a time the Christian faith made sense to me. There were some things that I did not understand or some things that did not seem to fit perfectly, but overall the whole thing worked pretty well. Then I started reading N.T. Wright and my whole world crashed down around me.

See, I read somewhere that you ought to pick one author and read as much of their writing as you can so that you can interact in depth with their thought. This was well before I started seminary, back when I did not care a whit about scholarship. I decided to read Wright after first encountering him in a "Life of Jesus" class at church. We had read through the little book The Life of Jesus, and even though it was not that impressive I felt Wright had more under the surface than I had been able to garner from this little volume. He seemed to be a highly regarded Jesus scholar, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

So I went to the library at our local Catholic college where I found and checked out his two massive works, The New Testament and the People of God and Jesus and the Victory of God. I also picked up The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, in which he and co-author, Marcus Borg, defend and critique one another's historical reconstructions of Jesus. I began with The Meaning of Jesus, since it seemed the most accessible of the three, and I started to get hooked. But it was when I moved on to The New Testament and the People of God that everything I believed was shaken.

The problem is that it was not a frontal assault. In fact, I stood behind N.T. Wright as we took the liberal onslaught from Borg in The Meaning of Jesus. But as Wright prepared to deliver an uppercut of historical scholarship to Borg, I moved in to see things more closely and got elbowed in the face. I have spent the past decade trying to recover from that injury.

What is this great injury? Simply this: to understand the New Testament, we must read it in light of the world of first century Judaism, which is a lot more alien to us in the twentieth century than we like to think. It is especially rooted in the apocalyptic genre, especially in Daniel. Specifically, Daniel 7 is a particularly important passage for understanding early Christianity and the message of Jesus: the Son of Man is enthroned beside the Ancient of Days as the Kingdom of God is ushered in.

The book of Daniel represents in a microcosm the locus of most of my theological problems. Was it really written by Daniel or was it actually written centuries later during the Maccabean period? Scholars can make a good case for the latter, which even Wright accepts. Why should we even accept Daniel as scripture? It is not enough to say that we accept it because Jesus accepted it, since this whole examination of Daniel was prompted because it is the linchpin which holds together the New Testament. The book of Daniel (and the Old Testament as a whole) provides the entire foundation for the New Testament. As I see it, if Daniel falls, so does the New Testament.

The book of Daniel presents the primary OT basis for belief in an end-time resurrection of the dead. If it was written just to encourage the faithful that were being martyred by the Hellenistic king Antiochus Epiphanies, then what reason do we have to believe it? Would we not have warrant to judge that it was just wishful thinking? ...that as the Jews looked around at the injustices against their people, they speculated that there must be a resurrection to put things right? Wright himself proposes that this sort of eschatology (God will one day make all things right) arises from the combination of the doctrine of monotheism (God is in control), election (He has chosen Israel), and reality (Israel is suffering). Am I to believe in the resurrection of the dead because there was a pogrom against the Jews over two millennia ago? Please forgive me if this is a bit of a stumbling block in my faith.

Finally, even if I can get past all of this, the message of Daniel looks very different from the gospel I received. The gospel I know says you can be forgiven for your sins if you trust in Jesus, but if you do not, you will be damned for eternity. The message of Daniel is much more intuitive: that even when the bad guys seem to get away with it in this life, they will not in the end; and even if the good guys seem to get screwed in this life, they will ultimately be vindicated. It is a much more 'pluralist-friendly' message than orthodox theology seems to allow.

N.T. Wright does a fine job of making the New Testament seem historically plausible, but only at the expense of making its message seem utterly implausible.

O Dr. Wright, why tormentest thou me?

Observations on the Doctrine of Scripture

Yesterday I (finally) laid out a covenantal understanding of the doctrine of scripture. Today I want to make a few observations that I think are entailed by the way I have approached things:

First, there is no need to jettison the term inerrancy. If God is inerrant, and the Bible is His covenant with us, it makes sense to view the Bible as inerrant also. It is important to define exactly what an error is. We do not hold the scriptures to a higher standard than they set for themselves. (See also my inerrancy post from a few months ago.)

Second, we should expect the Bible to give us information relating to the covenant and our response to the covenant. We should not expect the Bible to be giving us scientific information. If one can demonstrate that the purpose of a passage is to give scientific information, then a belief in inerrancy compels us to assume the passage is scientifically accurate. BUT given the covenantal purpose of the scriptures, I am doubtful that any passage does intend to convey scientific information.

Third, nothing about a covenantal view of scripture limits God’s self-revelation exclusively to the Bible. Even if we have been able to identify the way God has been dealing with us, we are given no authority to conclude how He has (or has not) been interacting with other peoples on the globe. Therefore we have no justification, for instance, for pronouncing all non-Christian religious traditions to be evil. Terrance L. Tiessen proposes that “formalized religions are ambiguous responses to divine revelation, and so are the religious commitments of individual members of those religions.” (Who Can Be Saved: Reassessing Salvation in Christ and World Religions, 2004, p.358)

Fourth, our covenant with God is not logically necessary but rather historically contingent. That is to say, the covenant we have with God might have been entirely different than the one we have now, based entirely on the way different individuals in our now-distant past chose to respond to God. This might be self-evident were it not for popular gospel presentations like “The Four Spiritual Laws” which present the gospel as a set of timeless truths. The gospel is not like Buddhism's Four Noble Truths, which apply equally to all humans at all times, having always existed and were waiting only to be discovered by Buddha. Instead, the gospel is a call to accept that God has given Jesus, the real-flesh-and-blood-historical Jesus, authority to become the Lord of Heaven and Earth. There is no need to cross Lessing’s “ugly ditch” between the accidental truths of history and the necessary truths of history, for the gospel is firmly rooted on the side of history.

The Doctrine of Scripture

In an earlier post, I stated my reasons for rejecting the two popularly held beliefs about the Bible: first, that the Bible is just a human book with no connection to the divine; and second, that the Bible as the Word of God is the “user’s manual of life.” In fact, there is a nugget of truth in each. That the Bible was produced by humans is self-evident on even a cursory reading. Whatever else one may believe, it is clear that the style of writing and the personality of each biblical author was not short-circuited when the Bible was written. On the other hand, literally billions of people have approached the Bible as the Word of God and have felt the Bible become a divine catalyst to connect them to God.

It is noteworthy that the early Christian creeds attempt to sum up the teachings of the scriptures but they do not include a doctrine of scriptures themselves. A few weeks ago I posted a quote from Clark Pinnock who argued that the most important purpose of the Bible is “to present a sound and reliable testimony to who [God] is and what God has done for us.” The Bible does not call attention to itself, but instead acts as a giant pointer to Jesus Christ and the gospel. It is far more important what you believe about what the Bible says than what you believe about the Bible itself. Jesus Christ, not the Bible, is the object of our faith.

Through His death, Jesus offers us the opportunity to enter into covenant with God (Mark 14.24). Ephesians 2.12-13 reminds us that we, as gentiles, “were [once] separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus [we] who were formerly far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” Entering into covenant with God requires that we understand the terms of the covenant that God has made with us, and this is the best way for us to understand the doctrine of scripture.

In The Last Word, N.T. Wright argues at length that “‘authority of scripture’ is shorthand for ‘God’s authority exercised through scripture” (p.23). The Bible functions as the covenant document between God and His people. Based on no other evidence but the cumulative experiences of Christians through history (including my own), it is entirely plausible that the covenant presented in the New Testament is a true covenant offered by God.

Thus the doctrine of scripture is best understood covenantally. It helps us unpack what it means to follow Jesus and live in obedience to our covenant God. A covenantal view avoids the problem of trying to defend the kind of bumper sticker faith that boldly asserts, “The Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it,” but cannot stand up to rigorous cross-examination from those who are not so trusting. But the covenantal approach also allows us to open our eyes to legitimate difficulties in the text without collapsing into total skepticism.

Tomorrow I will make some observations that follow from this covenantal doctrine of scripture. As always, I invite your comments. I am still working this all out, so I am not sure I am consistent yet.

The Bible and the Qu'ran

Clark Pinnock writes,

The Bible is not a book like the Koran, consisting of nothing but perfectly infallible propositions, a book that should not be translated or commented upon for fear of corrupting the incorruptible. The Bible did not fall from heaven. We do not need to wash our hands before picking it up. Inspiration did not make the writers superhuman. It did not cancel out their historicity and weaknesses, but guaranteed that through them the true testimony to Jesus Christ should come that would have lasting normativity and authority in the church. We place our trust ultimately in Jesus Christ, not in the Bible. He alone is the foundation and ground of our faith. What the Scriptures do is to present a sound and reliable testimony to who he is and what God has done for us. The marvel of it is that he has done it, not through angels, but through ordinary human beings, with all their limitations. (The Scripture Principle, 1984, p.100)

Here Pinnock provides what I believe is the first step to answering the question I asked several days ago: What theological justification do we have to call the Bible the Word of God? However, if I understand Pinnock correctly, his own answer to this question seems to be church tradition, "that entrenched in Christian thinking of every kind is a belief in the Bible as the written Word of God." (p.ix) Admittedly his purpose is to set out an understanding of what it means to say the Bible is the Word of God rather than why. Pinnock's position is quite close to biblioblogger Chris Tilling's Statement of Inerrancy (Part 1 and Part 2) that caused such a stir last week.

I hope to publish my own views defending the Bible as scripture in a few days.

The Scripture Problem

Is the Bible the Word of God? For skeptics, the answer is simply no - us crazy humans wrote it, and Christianity is patently false. On the side of faith the answer is yes, the Bible is the owner's manual for living - those who choose to ignore it will end up shipwrecked in life. For atheists and fundamentalists alike, these seem to be the only two options. I find both options troubling.


The skeptical answer seems to deny every encounter I've ever had with God through the scriptures. God transformed my life, and He has done the same for literally billions of others. This is one reason why I don't think the atheist position has much to commend it and why I don't find the atheist-theist debate to be anything more than mildly interesting.


My problem with the fundamentalist option is that I just can't find any good reason to accept it. The various defenses generally focus on refuting claims that the Bible is unreliable or contradictory. But once you have done that, you have still not proven that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, just that it is reliable and not contradictory. As far as I know, there are only three options for defending the "Owner's manual" view of the Bible:

1. Fulfilled prophecy - "One of the unique and fascinating aspects of the Bible is that in no other religious literature do we find the accuracy of fulfilled prophecy" (Josh McDowell, A Ready Defense, 56). My difficulty is that the fulfilled prophecies are not that cut-and-dry. Matthew 2.15 fulfills Hosea 11.1, "Out of Egypt I called my Son" - except that in its context in Hosea there is nothing that sets this passage apart as a Messianic prophecy, or even as a prophecy at all. Matthew 27.35, "And when they had crucified Him, they divided up His garments among themselves by casting lots," seems to fulfill Psalm 22.18, but the skeptic's answer seems at least equally plausible: that Matthew invented this little bit in order add credibility to his story. Daniel seems to prophesy the rise and fall of kingdoms (Daniel 11), but there is significant evidence that the book was written during the Maccabean period, long after the prophesied events had already occurred. Of course there are answers to all of these, but one's acceptance of them seems to depend on an a priori belief in the inerrancy of scripture, the very thing this argument is attempting to prove.


2. Best option - The argument is that it is reasonable to believe that God has given us some divinely inspired writings and the Bible is the best candidate. The trouble here is that it merely shifts the problem from why we should believe the Bible to why we should assume that God would give us any divinely inspired writings. It is certainly not intuitive that God would give choose to give us a book. Why not speak directly to us? Why not write a message in the sky or light up a message on the board in a baseball stadium? Moreover, this argument has the added problem of now having to prove that the Bible is the best option, a proposition which is typically defended by creating straw men of those who defend other religious traditions. On the whole this argument seems to fail.


3. Jesus' authority - It is reasonable to believe in the deity of Jesus on the weight of the historical evidence alone, and Jesus authenticated the scriptures. The argument is weakest in affirming the books of the New Testament, all of which were written after Jesus had made any of these statements. The classic passage used to defend the New Testament comes from John 14.26, "The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you." This leads us to all sorts of difficulties related to canon: How do we know we got the right books? Why should we accept Hebrews or 2 and 3 John, which offer no textual support for being written by apostles? Why should we accept Mark, Luke, and Jude which do not even claim to be written by apostles? Why should we accept any of Paul's writings, who had never even met Jesus during his earthly ministry, providing absolutely no way for the Holy Spirit to "bring to [his] remembrance all that [Jesus] spoke to [him]"? Even the strongest part of this argument, Jesus' affirmation of the Old Testament, comes from a single passage, John 10.35, where Jesus asserts that "the scriptures cannot be broken." Most critical scholars would deny that the book of John is historically reliable at all. Of course we might want to reject that consensus, but our primary reason for doing so, as above, rests on a view of inerrancy that we are trying to prove.

How can a Christian affirm the scriptures? Before I offer my solution, I am curious how you, the reader, might answer the question. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Inerrancy

Lots of people hate the doctrine of inerrancy these days. Chris Tilling takes time to defend people who believe it, though rejecting the doctrine itself. I just want to offer a few brief thoughts.

1. A year ago, I thought one's position on inerrancy was very important theologically, and was leaning towards rejecting it. These days I am much more favorable to the doctrine but I think it is relatively unimportant. What one believes about inerrancy is less important than, say, what one believes about believer's/infant baptism.

2. Nobody in the blogsphere seems to like the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy. But I don't think it's affirming everything people think it's affirming. For instance, in article XVIII: "We affirm that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture." It is wrong to hold scripture to a standard that it is not setting for itself, such as accurate chronology or exact qutoes. This point alone allows us to avoid the difficulties Lindsell encountered when he was forced to assume that Peter denied Jesus six times.

3. Note too article X: "We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original." Yes, there are copyist errors. Check out Ben Witherington's comments in response to Bart Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus.

4. Vanhoozer, according to his speech-act hermeneutics, suggests that a doctrine of infallibility is perhaps more important than a doctrine of inerrancy. There is much more that is important in scripture than the propositional truth it conveys. Through scripture the Holy Spirit exhorts us, encourages us, questions us, commands us, etc. Much more than simply giving us true information (though certainly not less, as Paul Helm seems to misunderstand), the scriptures give us everything we need to walk out our covenant relationship with God.