Problems with biblical inerrancy
The concept of the Bible as the unerring word of God has always bothered me, because it is an a priori adopted idea to which ‘reality’ is then ‘defined’. A historian, when confronted with footsteps in the snow, concludes that between snowfall and observation, somebody or something in boots that make those prints walked there. But biblical inerrancy tells you to believe whatever the Good Book tells you it is, regardless of the evidence. It commands you to do something today’s historians know never to do: take a text at face value. Why that text and no other? And if there has to be an inerrant text, why that somewhat randomly assembled hodgepodge we call the New Testament, of which one third is forged and another third was not written by the authors listed in the Bible - instead of a clean, inspired dictation of God directly to one Prophet (the Quran)? Not one of the claims of any religion that their skrzypce (1, see footnotes) is the only true one has ever even begun to sound convincing to me. Most I find swamped with logical fallacies. A pastor once told me that he knew the Bible was God’s by testing it on a daily basis. But exactly what is it that gets tested? If its wisdom is invaluable to me, it does not mean its history is accurate.
I have good reason to suspect that the belief in biblical inerrancy comes from the same regions of our deep subconscious where conspiracy theories come from, or today’s widespread belief in aliens, that is, projections of our deepest needs, desires, and fears, and have therefore nothing to do with reality, of which they are not an aſſeſſment but a counterfeit: they dress up as reality. We need it to be true, so we make it true. The fairy-tale of the ‘Holy Spirit leading the Church’ - which Church? - is a stellar example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy: shoot at a wall and create the target where the hits were made. Also, if God intended us to take cognizance of his inerrant Word, why don’t we have it? We have nothing anywhere close to an original, and sometimes we don’t know what the original is. (2)
What I wish to show here, however, is how biblical inerrancy makes real study of history impossible; is therefore an obstacle for us to aſſeſs the truth, by an a priori, arbitrary definition of what that is. It leads us away from aſſeſſing true knowledge, into a fictitious world, where God may well be reaching us - which is awesome - but which we too often confuse with the real world - which is less okay. Inerrancy is like a law that rules certain evidence inadmissible in court. The evidence points beyond any doubt at the murderer, but it cannot be used, so the murderer cannot be convicted, even though we all know he did it. Biblical inerrancy is a formal fallacy.
I think I can illustrate that with a good example. In the 2022 debate between Bart Ehrman and someone wearing a cowboy hat, about the historical reliability of the Gospels, Ehrman mentions an inconsistency between Matthew and Luke concerning the birth of the Baby Jesus in Bethlehem. To me, it is a rather important one, and I am ashamed to say that I only learned about it this year. But why have I never heard about it in Church?
In Matthew, Joseph and Mary are from Bethlehem, so the Baby was born at home - where else? Then the Star and the magi happened and Herod heard about it, got scared, and began to seek the baby out to liquidate it. Mary and Joseph, warned in a dream (everyone dreams in that Gospel), fled to Egypt and stayed there until Herod’s death. After that, they’re told in a dream to return, learned, in another dream that Archelaus now reigned in Judaea, which somehow was not cool, and they turned aside and moved to Galilee to stay clear of this son of Herod. This makes some sense, since that particular son had not inherited Galilee from his father (that went to another son, Herod Antipas), and had therefore no jurisdiction there (though since this new development had literally just happened, I wonder if Joseph would have heard about it in real life); thus they ended up in Galilee.
Luke on the other hand, in his better known version, has them be from Galilee. There was a nationwide (imperial) census, where everyone had to go register in the place where he was from. They traveled to Bethlehem, where Joseph’s ancestor David was born, and there, Mary gave birth to Jesus in a manger because there was no room at the inn. No Magi, but shepherds came to worship him, and the Angels of the Lord, Glory to God in the highest and all that sort of things. On the 8th day, Jesus had his brit milah (Ah, you’re from Bethlehem, she said. It’s rabbi Menachem, he never had a straight cut), and later he was presented in Jerusalem in order to be consecrated to the Lord, as every first born was. After the law was thus obeyed, the little nuclear family traveled back home to Galilee. No trace of a flight to Egypt.
These are two contradictory accounts. In one, Joseph and Mary are from Bethlehem and ended up in Galilee; in the other they are from Galilee and Jesus was born on a ‘forced vacation’. One mentions a flight to Egypt, the other knows nothing about it. Both accounts have serious historical problems, but about that in a minute.
If the Bible is inerrant, neither can be wrong. These stories have to somehow be reconciled.
Apparently the Church decided, by combining the two versions, to ignore Matthew’s Bethlehem origin (which it could because it was not explicit in the text, or was it perhaps deleted early on to fit the church’s interpretation? (3)) and to go with Luke’s home in Nazareth, to have Jesus be born in a manger, then to add the flight to Egypt. This version, the ‘fifth Gospel’, which was construed by church officials even later than the Gospels were written, ignores the stories of both authors. Why did Matthew leave out the birth in the manger? Because Matthew, believing Jesus was born at home, had no reason to think of an inn. And why, if Joseph and Mary were from Galilee, couldn’t they have fled Herod simply by going home to Galilee? If both stories were true, there were quite a number of essential details left out by both authors, who are both quite precise about the reasons why 1. they ended up in Bethlehem and 2. why they had to flee to Egypt..
In the TV debate, the cowboy (come on, man! - wearing a cowboy hat indoors!) came with what he seems to think is a great solution. Joseph had two houses! This stumped dr. Ehrman, who, as a historian, is trained to search a text for probabilities, not loopholes. Joseph, the cowboy gleefully explains, was of a clan, descended from David (who wasn’t? see below) which had their main domicile in Bethlehem, while Joseph had another home in Galilee. It clashes a little with the working class status of Joseph as it appears in the Gospels, though nothing prohibitive. Two houses. They may even have belonged to Joseph’s entire mishpochah.
TOUCHDOWN!
Oh, wait. There are flags on the field…
For one, we seem still to be stuck with the questions asked above. If Joseph had two houses, one in Galilei and one in Bethlehem, why did they have to flee to Egypt? While Galilei is 120 miles from Jerusalem, Memphis and the pyramids would be at least three times farther. Herod was only looking for the predicted baby Messiah in Bethlehem and vicinity. Then again, if Joseph had two homes, why did they have to go to the inn where there was no room for them? And why doesn’t Luke mention something as crucial as the flight to Egypt? Or why does he say that Joseph had to register in Bethlehem because of his ancestor David, instead of just saying that he was registered ‘under his other roof’?
The problem with juggling with different authors’ statements is that the message of both authors gets obfuscated by doctoring their visions. The cowboy may have sleuthed that Joseph had two homes, neither Matthew nor Luke knew about that. Why didn’t they? Luke really believed Joseph was from Galilei. Egypt was as far from his mind as Uranus, and I do mean the planet (which was discovered in 1781). Matthew really believed they were from Bethlehem. He never thought of a manger, why should he? Combining these two stories cripples the stories of both authors. Biblical inerrancy makes them both bad writers. Matthew should have mentioned why Jesus was not born at home, Luke should have mentioned the flight to Egypt.
A historian whose body part with the red striped imprints of last night’s erotic spanking is not chained and shackled to a concept as random and arbitrary as biblical inerrancy, and who takes into account who would have written a text and for what purpose, what mindset and cultural background, and from what sources, finds the whole birth in Bethlehem extremely suspicious in the first place.
Except for these two nativity stories, which differ from each other in almost every detail other than the place of birth, there is nothing in the entire New Testament that refers to Jesus’ being born in Bethlehem. Paul doesn’t know about it. John doesn’t know about it. In John 7:42, the only other mention of the town in the entire NT, some dude asks how anyone not from Bethlehem can ever be the Messiah. John, that is, the author of the Gospel erroneously attributed to a probably illiterate son of Zebedee - who must instead have been a (literate and well-educated) member of what scholars like Raymond Brown call the Johannite community at the end of the century in another part of the world - doesn’t make any attempt to have the man corrected. Everywhere in the NT, Jesus is simply ‘Jesus of Nazareth', which I find mentioned 18 times in those exact terms (while Nazareth is named 11 more times as Jesus’ domicile).
Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is too convenient for the messianic claims about Him to be historically persuasive. The Messiah was prophesied to come from there and to be of the House of David; so Jesus had to be born there; how else would anyone believe a convicted and executed criminal to be the Messiah? Both Matthew and Luke’s infancy stories seem to belong to the kind of fairy tales we find in so many other infancy gospels that were rejected by the Church because of being too insanely weird. These two were probably too convenient for the church to be rejected.
Matthew’s story has four parallels with Moses’ birth (Ex 1): 1. Amram’s contemplation about his wife’s pregnancy, 2. the prophecy that Moses would be destined to be the savior of his people, 3. Pharaoh learning about this child, and 4. the massacre of the innocents, all found in Flavie Joe’s’ (that’s Flavius Josephus’s) Antiquities and in Exodus (cf. Dale Allison in the Oxford Bible Commentary). The more a story resembles an older story, the greater chance that the former has been morphed to fit the latter.
Herod's massacre, in that context, is especially suspicious. It seems quite unlikely that Herod, in spite of being known for cruelty and for executing any pretenders to the throne with their immediate families, would be too disturbed by vague tales about a nameless carpenter’s baby just born in Bethlehem. How many such predictions might he have heard each year? All the things that call attention to the boy, the reverence, veneration and worship, the star, the angels, are all much too archetypical to be historically believable, so the whole story seems conveniently ‘distorted’.
The flight to Egypt also seems ‘molded’ to match the Old Testament parallel of the Exodus. Joseph and Mary had a plethora of places to go to, of which Egypt was 3 times farther than Galilei and ten times farther than the closest spot out of Herod’s jurisdiction. But of course it had to be Egypt, for the same reason that it had to be Bethlehem. For Matthew, that is. Luke knew nothing about a flight at all.
For that matter, the genealogies in Matthew seem awkward, too. First, how could a low class family know how to uncover an entire bloodline leading all the way back to Adam? Most people don’t know any ancestors by name beyond their great-grandparents. David lived 1000 years before Jesus, that’s 40 generations. If each of David’s descendants had three surviving reproducing children, the amount of male descendants of David a millennium later (x 1.5) would be around 11 million (4). Do we expect that each of those people would have kept a complete ancestry? If so, why don’t we have any? And why, at the one instance where God would incarnate into a human being, would He allow for such a crappy genealogy through a man who was not even Jesus’ father? Couldn’t God really have come up with better credentials? So this also looks suspiciously like human arguments pleading for a case.
The census forms an even bigger problem. First of all, it is historically untraceable. There was no nationwide census at the time. If there was, we would know about it. There was a nationwide census in the 70’s, I believe in 74, about the time when Luke’s Gospel was written, which makes it likely that the author was projecting a familiar custom back in time. The one local census we find at the time of Jesus’ birth, indeed under Quirinius, occurred 10 years after Herod’s death. But more importantly, what point would there be for a census where everyone had to register where one’s forefather was from? Where would you go? Almost every American would have to travel to Europe, Asia or Africa for that purpose. And what use would such information have for a government that wants to know who lives where today? Lukes’s census really looks like another excuse to ‘get Jesus to Bethlehem’ to claim that prophetic provenance as well. Finally, the census of Quirinius, 6 AD (or later) did not even count for Galilei. Galilei was not part of Judaea since 4 BC, when Herod “the Great” died. It was given to Herod Antipas, and only when that son of Herod was deposed by ‘overlord’ Tiberius in 39 AD, a few years after Golgotha, was it returned to Jerusalem’s province. It is likely that an author writing in the 70s or 80s in some Greek-speaking part of Asia Minor, Greece, Thrace or Egypt might have overlooked this little detail. Of course, biblical inerrancy also forbids any conclusion, however clear and obvious to the historian, that the Gospels were not written by the authors attributed to them, and that at least nine epistles in the NT were actually forged. (5)
There is also a timing issue. According to most scholars today, Herod died in 4 BC (the traditional date seems to have been 1 BC, but I don’t see how that would solve anything). Matthew has Jesus being born during Herod’s reign, and Luke implies the same. But by mentioning Quirinius’ as governor of Syria, Luke shifts the birth to 10 years later, to 6 BC, when such a census - not nationwide, as Luke claims) indeed occurred. Herod had been dead for 10, or at least 7 years. Luke’s mentioning of Quirinius seems lethal to biblical inerrancy. Am I missing something?
It may be clear that a true historical aſſeſſment of biblical matters is forbidden as long as we believe in an inerrant Bible. We have to believe that Joseph had two houses and that Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room at the inn, in spite of there having been a home ready for them. We have to believe that the apostles John and Matthew are the authors of two Gospels, otherwise the Bible would lie. We have to believe Jesus was born in Bethlehem, even though it looks like a fairy tale designed to convince Jews at the time that Jesus was the Messiah. We have to believe in a star, in a virgin birth, in a genealogy that in every other instance we would consider ‘inspired fiction”, and we have to believe in in a massacre of children committed by a king had heard rumors about the very same miraculous signs that we now have to believe. And we have to believe in a census that did not exist in Herod’s time, with a completely pointless purpose. And when Old Testament scholars clearly show that Moses couldn’t have written the Five Books (there wasn’t even a Hebrew script and language in his time and the entire background shows a time period half a millennium later), those scholars have to be wrong. They have to be unbelievers who hardened their heart toward God and who are out to refute everything the Bible says.
And that kind of collective narcissism I find absolutely unacceptable.
For the debate referred to, between Ehrman and the cowboy, try googling Bart Ehrman + Jimmy.
Footnotes:
The autocorrect function on my computer changes skrzypce - there! It does it again! - the word that begins with scr- and almost rhymes with picture, into the Polish word for ‘violin’. I don’t know why it does so, because I know nothing about computers, but if I may venture an uneducated guess - and I’m just spitballing here - it may be because I put it in myself.
Bart Ehrman, Jesus before the Gospels, Misquoting Jesus, Jesus Interrupted, etc.. Ehrmann in German means ‘honorable man’, a clear sign from the Holy Spirit that he speaks the truth. See what I did here? The nature of the collection we have of our skrzypces, and the nature of the skrzypces themselves, strongly suggest human, therefore fallible, manufacture. God may well work within that medium, but certainly not in a perfect, divine form of the skrzypces themselves.
I don’t know how old the oldest MS is of Matthew 1 and the first lines of 2. At least I did not find the passage among the oldest manuscrypts on line. The story itself is, they say, considered a late tradition.
this doesn’t account for doubles, of course. The total amount of descendants if each child had three reproducing children would be 12,157,665,459,056,928,801! This impossibly high number shows that by Jesus’ time, everyone with an Israelite bloodline must in some way or other have been a descendant of David. Luke must not have realized this. How many stables would there have to be to accommodate half the population of Palestine traveling to Bethlehem for that census?
The pastoral epistles and the epistles ‘by the apostles’ were written intentionally under a false name in the 2nd century. The Gospels were not forged. The authors (and this includes the Fourth, where the author claims to have gotten his information from a mysterious beloved disciple who does not appear anywhere else), wrote anonymously without pretending to be someone else.