Bible Difficulties (2 page)

When we sort them out, line them up, and put them together, we gain a fuller understanding of the event than we would obtain from any one testimony taken individually. But as with any properly conducted inquiry in a court of law, the judge and jury are expected to receive each witness's testimony as true when viewed from his own perspective--unless, of course, he is exposed as an untrustworthy liar. Only injustice would be served by any other assumption--as, for example, that each witness is assumed to be untruthful unless his testimony is corroborated from outside sources. (This, of course, is the assumption made by opponents of the inerrancy of Scripture, and it leads them to totally false results.) 6. Consult the best commentaries available, especially those written by Evangelical scholars who believe in the integrity of Scripture. A good 90 percent of the problems will be dealt with in good commentaries (see Bibliography). Good Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias may clear up many perplexities. An analytical concordance will help establish word usage (e.g., Strong's, Young's).

7. Many Bible difficulties result from a minor error on the part of a copyist in the transmission of the text. In the Old Testament such transmissional errors may have resulted from a poor reading of the vowels; Hebrew was originally written in consonants only, and the vowel signs were not added until a thousand years after the completion of the Old Testament canon. But there are also some consonants that are easily confused because they look so much alike (e.g., d
,
daleth and r, resh or y, yod and w, waw). Besides that, some words are preserved in a very old spelling susceptible of misunderstanding by later Hebrew copyists. In other words, only a resort to textual criticism and its analysis of the most frequent types of confusion and mistake can clear up the difficulty (for bibliography on this, cf.

5

Introduction). This takes in confusion of numerals also, where statistical errors are found in our present text of Scripture (e.g., 2 Kings 18:13).

8. Whenever historical accounts of the Bible are called in question on the basis of alleged disagreement with the findings of archaeology or the testimony of ancient non-Hebrew documents, always remember that the Bible is itself an archaeological document of the highest caliber. It is simply crass bias for critics to hold that whenever a pagan record disagrees with the biblical account, it must be the Hebrew author that was in error. Pagan kings practiced self-laudatory propaganda, just as their modern counterparts do; and it is incredibly naive to suppose that simply because a statement was written in Assyrian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics it was more trustworthy and factual than the Word of God composed in Hebrew. No other ancient document in the B.C. period affords so many clear proofs of accuracy and integrity as does the Old Testament; so it is a violation of the rules of evidence to assume that the Bible statement is wrong every time it disagrees with a secular inscription or manuscript of some sort. Of all the documents known to man, only the Hebrew-Greek Scriptures have certified their accuracy and divine authority by a pattern of prediction and fulfillment completely beyond the capabilities of man and possible only for God.

Introduction: The Importance of Biblical Inerrancy

Throughout the history of the Christian church, it has been clearly understood that the Bible as originally given by God was free from error. Except for heretical groups that broke away from the church, it was always assumed that Scripture was completely authoritative and trustworthy in all that it asserts as factual, whether in matters of theology, history, or science. In the days of the Protestant Reformation, Luther affirmed,

"When the Scripture speaks, God speaks." Even his Roman Catholic opponents held to that conviction, though they tended to put church tradition on almost the same level of authority as the Bible. From the days of the earliest Gnostics, whom Paul had to contend with, until the rise of deism in the eighteenth century, no doubts were expressed concerning the inerrancy of Scripture. Even Unitarians like Socinus and Michael Servetus argued their position on the basis of the infallibility of Scripture.

The rise of rationalism and the deistic movement in the eighteenth century led to a drastic modification of the inerrant status of the Bible. The lines were soon drawn quite clearly between the deists and the orthodox defenders of the historic Christian faith. An increasing aversion toward the supernatural dominated the intellectual leadership of the Protestant world during the nineteenth century, and this spirit gave rise to "historical criticism" both in Europe and America. The Bible was assumed to be a collection of religious sentiments composed by human authors completely apart from inspiration by God. If there was any such power as a Supreme Being, He was either an impersonal Force that pervaded the created universe (the pantheistic view), or else He was so far removed from man as to be Wholly Other and, as such, almost completely unknowable (the Kierkegaardian alternative). At best, Scripture could only offer some sort of 6

unverifiable testimony that pointed toward the living Word of God, a reality that could never be adequately captured or formulated as propositional truth.

In the first half of the present century, the lines were clearly drawn between orthodox Evangelicals and the opponents of scriptural inerrancy. The Crisis theologians (whose views on revelation trace back to Kierkegaard) and the liberals or modernists (who subordinated the authority of Scripture to the authority of human reason and modern science) forthrightly rejected the doctrine of inerrancy. Whether or not they avowed themselves to be "Fundamentalists," all those who laid claim to being Evangelicals stood shoulder to shoulder in their insistence that the Old and New Testaments, as originally given, were free from error of any kind.

During the second half of this century, however, a new school of revisionists has risen to prominence, and this school poses a vigorous challenge to biblical inerrancy and yet lays claim to being truly and fully evangelical. The increasing popularity of this approach has resulted in the detachment of a large number of formerly evangelical seminaries from the historic position on Scripture, even here in America. As Harold Lindsell has documented this trend in his
Battle for the Bible
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), virtually all the theological training centers that have embraced (or even tolerated as allowable) this modified concept of biblical authority exhibit a characteristic pattern of doctrinal erosion. They resemble ships that have slipped their moorings and are slowly drifting out to sea.

There is always a transitional period, however, during which these defecting schools maintain--especially to their rank-and-file constituency from whom they derive their financial support--that they are still completely evangelical in their theology, that they still adhere to the cardinal doctrines of the historic Christian church. They have simply shifted to firmer ground in their defense of the truth of Scripture. As one of their advocates has put it: "I believe that the Bible is without error, but I refuse to let someone else define what that means, in such a way that I have to go to ridiculous extremes to defend my faith." (William S. LaSor in "Theology News and Notes," p. 26 of the 1976

Special Issue entitled "Life under Tension--Fuller Theological Seminary and `The Battle for the Bible.'") Proponents of this approach invariably argue that they alone are the honest and credible defenders of scriptural authority because the "phenomena of Scripture" include demonstrable errors (in matters of history and science, at least), and therefore full inerrancy cannot be sustained with any kind of intellectual integrity. The evidential data simply will not permit a successful defense of the historic Christian position on Scripture. Even as originally composed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, we may be certain that the autographa themselves contained factual errors (except, perhaps, in matters of doctrine).

In answer to this claim, it is incumbent on consistent Evangelicals to show two things: (1) the infallible authority of Scripture is rendered logically untenable if the original manuscripts contained any such errors and (2) no specific charge of falsehood or mistake can be successfully maintained in the light of all the relevant data. For this reason the appeal to the phenomena of Scripture leads not to a demonstration of its fallibility but to added confirmation of its divine inspiration and supernatural origin. In other words, we must first show that the alternative of infallibility without inerrancy is not a viable option at all, for it cannot be maintained without logical self-contradiction. And, second, we 7

must show that every asserted proof of mistake in the original manuscripts of Scripture is without foundation when examined in the light of the established rules of evidence.

Without Inerrancy the Scriptures Cannot Be Infallible

To all professing Christians, the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ is final and supreme. If in any of His views or teachings as set forth in the New Testament He was guilty of error or mistake, He cannot be our divine Savior; and all Christianity is a delusion and a hoax. It therefore follows that any view of Scripture that is contrary to Christ's must be unqualifiedly rejected. If the New Testament means anything at all, it testifies to the deity of our Lord and Savior--all the way from Matthew to Revelation. All who claim to be Evangelicals are completely agreed on this point. If this is so, then it follows that whatever Jesus Christ believed about the trustworthiness of Scripture must be accepted as true and binding on the conscience of every true believer. If Christ believed in the complete accuracy of the Hebrew Bible in all matters of scientific or historical fact, we must acknowledge His view in these matters to be correct and trustworthy in every respect. Moreover, in view of the impossibility of God's being guilty of error, we must recognize that even matters of history and science, though not per se theological, assume the importance of basic doctrine. Why is this so? Because Christ is God, and God cannot be mistaken. That is a theological proposition that is absolutely essential to Christian doctrine.

A careful examination of Christ's references to the Old Testament makes it unmistakably evident that He fully accepted as factual even the most controversial statements in the Hebrew Bible pertaining to history and science. Here are a few examples.

1. In speaking of His approaching death and resurrection, Jesus affirmed in Matthew 12:40: "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth"

(NIV). Apart from a theory-protecting bias, it is impossible to draw from this statement any other conclusion than that Jesus regarded the experience of Jonah as a type (or at the very least, a clear analogy) pointing to His own approaching experience between the hour of His death on the cross and His bodily resurrection from the tomb on Easter morning. If the Resurrection was to be historically factual, and if it was to be antitypical of Jonah's three-day sojourn in the stomach of the huge fish, then it follows that the type itself must have been historically factual--regardless of modern skepticism on this point. The facticity of the Jonah narrative is further confirmed by Matthew 12:41: "The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now one greater than Jonah is here" (NIV)--namely, Jesus Himself. Jesus implies that the inhabitants of Nineveh actually did respond to Jonah's stern warning and denunciation with self-abasing humility and fear--

precisely as recorded in Jonah 3. Jesus declares that those raw, untaught pagans 8

were less guilty before God than the Christ-rejecting Jews of His own generation.

Such a judgment clearly presupposes that the Ninevites did precisely what Jonah says they did. This means that Jesus did not take that book to be a mere piece of fiction or allegory, as some would-be Evangelicals have suggested. Adherence to such a view is tantamount to a rejection of Christ's inerrancy and therefore of His deity.

2. Another account in Scripture that is often considered scientifically and historically untenable is that of Noah's ark and the great Flood found in Genesis 6-8. But Jesus in His Olivet Discourse clearly affirmed that "as in those days that were before the Flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they did not know it until the flood came and took them all away, so shall the coming [
parousia
] of the Son of Man be." Here again Jesus is predicting that a future historical event will take place as an antitype to an event recorded in the Old Testament. He must therefore have regarded the Flood as literal history, just as it was recorded in Genesis.

3. The Exodus account of the feeding of the two-million-plus Israelites by the miracle of manna for forty years in the Sinai desert is rejected by some self-styled Evangelicals as legendary. But Jesus Himself accepted it as completely historical when He said, "Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died" (John 6:49). Then in the following verse He presented Himself to the multitude as the antitype, as the true and living Bread sent down from the Father in heaven.

4. It is safe to say that in no recorded utterance of Jesus Himself, or any of His inspired apostles, is there the slightest suggestion that inaccuracy in matters of history or science ever occurs in the Old Testament. To the scientific or rationalistic skepticism of the Sadducees, Jesus cited the precise wording of Exodus 3:6, where Moses is addressed by God from the burning bush (the bush that burned miraculously without being consumed) in the following terms: "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Matt. 22:32). From the present tense implied by the Hebrew verbless clause, our Lord drew the deduction that God would not have described Himself as the God of mere lifeless corpses moldering in the grave but only of living, enduring personalities enjoying fellowship with Him in glory. Therefore the Old Testament taught the resurrection of the dead.