Autographs and inerrancy of the Bible

    Though conservatives claim to have God’s very words, how can we be certain that the Word we hold in our hands today is essentially the same as the Word that God miraculously directed men to record?  Anyone who has had to copy passages knows it is quite easy to lose one’s place and either skip lines or repeat lines; to miss a letter or double a letter, which can change the meaning of a passage.  Someone copying from someone reading might insert a homophone, especially if it makes sense, or may write slower than the person is reading and miss things and have to go back and “fill in the gaps.”  Any of these has the potential to completely change the meaning of a work.  Sometimes there were gaps in time between the time the event occurred and when the event was recorded. Sometimes this gap was a few days or weeks.  Other times, the gap between the event and the recording of the event could be anywhere from a few decades to over thirteen billion years.

The writings of the Bible span centuries.  The newest writings are nearly two millennia old.  If the mistake occurred with a very early copy, then the mistake was likely copied over and over again for generations.  Because of the delicacy of paper—its perishability, the originals-the autographs- no longer exist.   

      We interpret the Bible through the lens of the standards of our own Generation.  Without reference to something in our own culture, the customs and beliefs mentioned in the Bible make little sense to us, or in interpreting it through our own values and priorities, we miss the meaning the author had intended to convey.  Therefore, how are we to be certain that the way in which certain passages have been interpreted throughout the ages is the correct interpretation?  People have a tendency to read into the Bible what they want it to say…

     Not only that, but the Bible was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and in Greek.  Certain issues make true translation difficult:  some words or phrases for concepts do not have an exact equivalent in the target language--especially when the concept is not part of the experience of those who use the target language, and connotations and euphemisms change over the generations, which can render a phrase nearly incomprehensible to a reader of another generation, especially if no one of the generation that used the particular euphemism is around to explain it. Take our expression “it was raining cats and dogs.”  We all know that it means simply that it was raining very hard.  You might get soaked just walking outside for a couple minutes.  Nothing truly out of the ordinary is occurring.  Let us wait a few hundred years and someone comes across that phrase—they might be looking into historical records for any mention of a meteorological phenomenon of dogs and cats literally falling from the sky.