Turning the Text

Two of the most common critiques of Christianity today come from very different directions. The first—hypocrisy—is not a critique of Christianity itself but of its failure to live up to its own vision. The second, however, strikes at the heart of what many have come to believe Christianity is: the doctrines of biblical inerrancy and infallibility. These doctrines, largely modern inventions, have become so deeply entangled with Christian identity that refuting them is often seen as refuting the faith itself. For many, Christianity stands or falls on the claim that the Bible is a perfect, divinely dictated text, free from error or contradiction.

But this is a house built on sand. Inerrancy and infallibility are not ancient Christian beliefs; they are reactionary constructs shaped by modern anxieties about certainty. Their stranglehold on contemporary Christianity does not strengthen faith—it distorts it. It shifts the focus from the living, breathing Word made flesh to a rigid, lifeless text. And in doing so, it makes Christianity more vulnerable, not less. Critics do not have to wrestle with the radical challenge of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection; they need only poke holes in the Bible’s historical, scientific, or moral coherence. And when they do, the very people who claim to defend the gospel spend their energy defending a doctrine Jesus himself never endorsed.

The irony is profound. Christianity does not hinge on the perfection of a book. It hinges on a person—the one who is himself the Word of God. And yet, by making biblical inerrancy the cornerstone of faith, we have obscured the true power of the gospel. We have handed its critics a distraction, a lesser battle, while sidelining the real scandal of Christianity: a God who saves not through certainty, but through self-giving love.

It is imperative that we dispense with the idea that Scripture, in its original form, is without error (inerrant) and completely trustworthy in all it teaches (infallible). The Bible is not a fixed, objective revelation—a perfect record of God’s words, requiring only faithful reading to uncover its singular, clear meaning.

Jesus didn’t enageg with Scripture this way.

If anything, his approach to Scripture directly challenges these assumptions. Not only did he interpret, adapt, and reframe sacred texts, but he also omitted, contradicted, and even rejected parts of them. In doing so, he engaged in a deeply Jewish practice of interpretive dialogue with Scripture—one that recognised that meaning is not fixed but emerges in relationship with the reader. Yet even within this tradition, Jesus was radical. His treatment of Scripture is not simply an extension of Jewish interpretive methods; it is a direct challenge to any reading that presents a violent or exclusionary image of God.

In Jesus’s time, Jewish engagement with Scripture was neither literalist nor static. The Hebrew Scriptures were not a single, bound volume but a collection of scrolls, each with varying levels of authority. The most sacred was the Torah—the first five books of Moses—which was considered foundational to Jewish life and law. Yet even the Torah was not treated as a fixed, unchangeable text. Its meaning was debated, reinterpreted, and expanded upon through oral tradition and rabbinic discussion. Beyond the Torah, other writings, such as the Prophets(Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim), were also revered, but they held different degrees of authority. Additionally, Jewish communities preserved and read texts not included in the later Christian canon, such as the books now known as the Apocrypha.

Far from being settled doctrine, the Scriptures were engaged as a living tradition, requiring ongoing discussion and adaptation. In synagogues, the Torah was read aloud, debated by scholars, and applied to contemporary realities. Meaning was not something to be simply received—it was something to be created through dialogue.

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A well-known saying from the Mishnah, attributed to Rabbi Ben Bag-Bag in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 5:22, captures the Jewish approach to Scripture: “Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it.”  It reflects a key assumption in Jewish thought—Scripture is not a fixed, static message but a deep well of meaning that must be explored from multiple angles. Understanding unfolds through constant re-reading, questioning, and debate.

This stands in stark contrast to modern Evangelical and Protestant approaches, which assume the Bible speaks with a single, unified voice and must be understood as internally consistent. For Evangelicals, apparent contradictions are either explained away or ignored to maintain the illusion of a monolithic divine message. In contrast, Jewish tradition treats sacred texts as open-ended and responsive to the needs of each generation. This is why Torah study was not simply about memorisation but about dialogue—turning the text over and over, refining and expanding its meaning through discussion and embracing contradiction as part of divine revelation.

When we read Scriptures, we tend to read our 21^st Century Evangelical paradigms into the texts and consequently read Jesus as an Evangelical. Which is why the argument I frequently have levelled against me when I challenge the notion that the Bible is the Word of God is that since Jesus regarded Scripture as authoritative, we ought to as well. And maybe Jesus, when read through a Protestant or Evangelical lens, can be seen to defend such a stance. But Jesus was not Evangelical or Protestant. He was Jewish. And that means that he was deeply immersed in a Jewish – not an Evangelical – interpretive tradition. Even then, he took it further than most of his contemporaries. His engagement with Scripture was not just about reinterpretation—it was about transformation. He consistently reshaped texts to remove violence and exclusion, even when this meant directly contradicting the written word.

Take, for example, his reading of Isaiah in Luke 4:16–21. Jesus stands in the synagogue, takes the scroll of Isaiah, and reads:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Then he stops. He rolls up the scroll and declares, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

If you compare his reading to Isaiah 61, you’ll notice something shocking: he deliberately omits the next phrase, which speaks of “the day of vengeance of our God.” In other words, Jesus deliberately removes any mention of God’s wrath from the prophecy. This is no accident. His choice is a direct rejection of the violent expectations of a coming Messiah who would destroy Israel’s enemies.

To grasp how shocking this moment was, imagine a church service where someone is called upon to read Psalm 23—a passage beloved for its promise of divine care and protection—but stops after:

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.”

Then, without warning, the reader closes the book and sits down, omitting the rest—the part about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, fearing no evil, and God preparing a table in the presence of enemies. The silence would be deafening. The meaning of the passage would shift dramatically: from a promise of protection and vindication in the face of suffering to a message of peace without the expected resolution. People would be confused, maybe even angry. That’s exactly what happened when Jesus cut off the Isaiah reading. By leaving out the part about God’s vengeance, he redefined the passage’s meaning—not as a promise of divine retribution, but as a proclamation of mercy. The crowd’s initial admiration turned to fury because Jesus had just removed the one part they most wanted to hear.

Imagine this happening in an Evangelical church today. If a preacher read a passage aloud but stopped mid-verse to remove a reference to God’s wrath, many would see it as an attack on biblical authority. Yet this is precisely what Jesus does. His act suggests that Scripture, in its raw form, is not the final revelation—rather, it must be reinterpreted through the lens of God’s mercy.

If Jesus’s omissions are troubling for inerrantist readings of the Bible, his outright contradictions are even more so. Consider Matthew 5:43–45, where Jesus directly opposes a command found in the Torah:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

Granted, the phrase “hate your enemy” does not appear verbatim in the Old Testament, but the command to love only one’s neighbour while excluding others is deeply embedded in Jewish law. More significantly, Jesus’s claim that God blesses both the righteous and the unrighteous contradicts explicit statements in Deuteronomy, where God’s blessings and curses are presented as conditional on obedience (Deuteronomy 28). Jesus’s radical departure from this framework is unmistakable: he refuses to endorse a God who withholds goodness from the unrighteous.

This move is entirely at odds with biblical inerrancy. If every word of Scripture is perfect and authoritative, how can Jesus directly overturn its teachings? The only way to make sense of this is to recognise that Jesus is not treating Scripture as an inerrant, infallible document. Instead, he is engaging with it relationally, reinterpreting it in light of God’s self-revelation in love and mercy.

If Jesus himself felt free to omit, alter, and contradict Scripture, then the doctrine of biblical infallibility collapses under its own weight. Infallibility assumes that the Bible’s teachings are entirely trustworthy and authoritative in all they affirm. But what does it mean when Jesus rejects some of those teachings? If we follow his example, should we not also recognise that the authority of Scripture lies not in its words but in its witness to God’s character—a character that Jesus himself redefines?

This is where modern Evangelicalism departs most dramatically from Jesus. Whereas Jesus engaged with Scripture dynamically, Evangelical theology insists on a static, untouchable text. The claim that “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” is not only an illusion but a direct contradiction of how Jesus himself treated Scripture. If Jesus didn’t believe in biblical inerrancy or infallibility, perhaps we need to re-examine our stance.

Jesus’s approach suggests another way. Rather than using Scripture to prop up rigid doctrines, we are invited into a conversation—one that recognises that meaning is always relational, always in flux, and always shaped by love.

When Christianity is reduced to a defence of biblical inerrancy and infallibility, it is not just the faith’s critics who lose sight of the gospel—we do, too. The desperate need to maintain the illusion of an unchanging, error-free text prevents us from engaging with Scripture as it was meant to be engaged: dynamically, relationally, and with humility. Instead of leading us deeper into the transformative way of Jesus, this fixation locks us into a brittle, defensive posture, where faith is measured not by love or Christlikeness, but by how firmly we cling to textual perfection.

And so, the battle rages on. Atheists tear at the seams of the Bible, and Christians rush to patch them up—neither side realising that the true scandal of Christianity has nothing to do with an inerrant book. The gospel is not threatened by human authorship, contradictions, or historical complexity. It is threatened only when we trade the living Word for dead certainties.

Jesus did not come to defend a flawless text; he came to embody the love of God. And when we make inerrancy our hill to die on, we are not protecting the faith—we are betraying it.