The Bible: Some Assembly Required

If you insist that the Bible is inerrant or infallible, the question you need to answer is “Which Bible?” Even without the complications we explored in the last post – that human engagements with texts are always interpretive and subjective and that what we read in a text is what we bring to it, so that to argue that the Bible is infallible is synonymous with arguing that our interpretations are infallible (I should not need to point out why that is problematic) – the history of how we came to be in possession of the Bible should be sufficient to dispel the myth that it came to us directly from God.

A quick glance at history will be sufficient to reveal that there is a messy, undeniably human process behind our arriving at a point where we can uncritically refer to the Bible as The Word of God. Even the term “The Bible”, which implies one cohesive tome, is misleading: The Bible has never been a fixed, singular book; rather, it is an evolving collection of texts shaped by debates, councils, and a not inconsiderable amount of political maneuvering.

It is high time we abandoned the demonstrably erroneous idea of a single, unified Bible. What Christians call the Old Testament began as a collection of separate scrolls, read and interpreted within Jewish communities. These texts were not static; they were debated, translated, expanded, and sometimes even rewritten. Some texts were revered but not considered Scripture; others were Scripture for some groups but not others. There was certainly no agreed-upon canon.

At the time of Jesus, there was no single “Bible.” Different Jewish communities used different versions of their sacred texts. The Sadducees, for instance, accepted only the Torah (the first five books), while the Pharisees accepted a broader set of writings that later became the Tanakh (what Christians call the Old Testament). Meanwhile, Greek-speaking Jews widely used the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that included additional books that were later scrapped by Protestants but kept by Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

Early Christians inherited this diverse textual tradition and then expanded it—dramatically. Letters circulated between churches, stories of Jesus were compiled, and apocalyptic visions were feverishly recorded. Some of these texts gained traction; others faded into obscurity. But for the first few centuries of Christian history, there was no official New Testament, and different Christian communities read different sets of writings. One bishop’s heresy was another’s inspired Word of God.

The process of canonisation was slow and messy. The first known attempt at a definitive list of New Testament books came from Marcion in the 2nd century, who conveniently left out the entire Old Testament and heavily edited Luke and Paul’s letters to fit his theology. The Church responded by working towards its own list, but agreement wasn’t immediate. By the 4th century, debates raged over books like Hebrews, James, Revelation, and even the Gospels. It wasn’t until 367 CE that Athanasius, a bishop of Alexandria, gave us the first recorded list of the 27 New Testament books we now recognise—though it still took a few more centuries for the whole Church to get on board.

Here’s where things get particularly interesting: The early Church revered Scripture but didn’t hold modern Evangelical views of inerrancy – you will see no mention of inerrancy or infallibility in the early credal statements. The authority of Scripture was tied to its use in the worshipping community, not to a belief that it was error-free. Church fathers like Origen and Augustine acknowledged contradictions and allegorical meanings. The idea of a perfectly inerrant Bible, as we now know it, didn’t solidify until much later.

During the Reformation, Martin Luther and his contemporaries re-evaluated which books should be included in the Bible, famously relegating books like James and Revelation to a lesser status. Protestant Reformers also removed books from the Old Testament that Catholics retained, creating yet another version of “the Bible.” All of these different versions of the Bible are still in circulation today. Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians each have their own version of the Old Testament.

The doctrine of biblical inerrancy—the idea that Scripture is completely free from error in all it affirms—didn’t take its final shape until the 19th and 20th centuries. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) was a defining moment, essentially codifying a belief that would have baffled many earlier Christians. While reverence for Scripture has existed since the beginning, the idea that it is a flawless, monolithic text is a relatively new invention.

The sheer number of different biblical canons—Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox—not to mention the thousands of manuscript variations and translation choices, makes the claim of inerrancy a logistical nightmare. Which version of the Bible is without error? The one that includes the Apocrypha or the one that doesn’t? The one that translates Isaiah’s prophecy about a “young woman” giving birth, or the one that changes it to “virgin” to fit later Christian theology?

If the Bible is an anthology—a collection of texts written by different people, in different times, with different perspectives—then perhaps its power is not in its supposed perfection but in the conversation it invites. Maybe, rather than defending an indefensible doctrine of inerrancy, we could spend our energy wrestling with Scripture the way our ancestors did—turning it and turning it again, finding new insights, and allowing it to shape us in its complexity. Perhaps the real scandal isn’t that the Bible isn’t inerrant, but that we’ve spent so much time insisting it is that we’ve missed the deeper, more transformative truths it contains.