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It is a commonly head belief among unbelievers and Liberal Christians, that the bible must have errors in it. Being that it was copied over and over again for centuries. That there are contradictions in it. and that it came form the minds of men and not divinely inspired from God.
Here we will look at some of the evidences for the inerrancy and divine inspiration of the Holy Bible
The Bible claims to be the word of God. For phrases such as "thus says the Lord is used hundreds of times through out scripture. For example Exodus 8:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Let my people go, that they may serve me.
.Jesus spoke often of the inspiration, inerrancy and indestructible nature of the bible. Since the New testament had not been written yet. He must have been referring to the Old Testament. Read Math 5:17-18, 23:43. The word infallible is not used in the in the New testament but a relative of that word is--unbreakable. See Jn 10:35. The Bible authors claimed that the very words in the bible came from God. Though not in the form of verbal dictation but it was Gods thoughts that inspired the prophets..
God presented his message to us in human terms. He used the individual literary styles, backgrounds, interests and emotions of the writers to create the text and yet there is a unity through out the bible that cannot be explain apart from a supernatural source. The sixty six books of the bible reveal a unfolding story of man's sin and rebellion toward God and his redemption and Love for us. Jesus is the central theme that is woven amongst the pages from Genesis to Revelation
Critics claim that the writers would have know about the previous authors and therefore could write there stories to coincide with them.
But not all the authors new that their books would be in the bible and there was no one point when the books where canonized. For some of the writings where immediately excepted by the authors contemporaries for example Daniel had a copy of Jeremiah (Dan 9:2) and other where excepted more slowly until they where determined to be authentic. Also, a fraudulent writer would have to know the entire bible intimately in order to successfully fool people into excepting his work as inspirational and he would also have to know the "plan" of the bible and how it all fit together. No. There is a sincerity and truthfulness about the bible that would be hard to fake.
If someone tried to change a story in the bible it would be detected immediately. For the manuscripts where copied and distributed in several different languages. That person would have to make the same change in all the copies in order for it to be successful. Since we have no competing "original" versions of the bible this could not have happened.
Another mistake critic make is forgetting that only the original text is without error, not copies and not any translation. For only the originals where inspired by God. Not the copies. God in his providence has kept the copies from substantial error. In fact it is greater than 99% error free.
The New Testament is preserved in some 5686 partial and complete Greek manuscript portions from the second possibly even the first century through to the 15th century. In addition to the Greek there are numerous translations from the Greek (Arabic, Coptic, Latin) some 9000 copies. There also are quotations in writings from the early Church Fathers equaling to 36,289. With all this manuscript evidence we can reconstruct the entire New Testament minus 11 verses. It is estimated to be 99.5% accurate. The Dead Sea Scrolls dating between 50 B.C and 50 A.D along with the Chester Beatty Papyri dating 250 A.D are just two of the best and well known examples. This data can be found in The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics by Norman L. Geisler.
Many critics approach the bible with the preconceived idea that the bible is guilty of error unless proven first to be innocent. If we approached any other pieces of literature in the same way we could never be sure of the truthfulness of anything ever written. Any errors someone finds in the Bible are errors made with interpreting difficult verses. Most problems fall into the following categories.
What about variations in stories that describe the same events? For example was there one angel or two at the tomb the morning of the resurrection of Jesus. Matthew 28:5 says there was one angle and John 20:12 says there were two. A mathematical rule explains this problem: Where there are two there is always one. Matthew did not say there was only one angel. On a morning such as this. With all that happen, at one point there may have been one, at another point two. The same literary style or device was used in the account of the Gadarenes Demoniac, Matthew 8:28 and Luke 8:27. Where the account of Matthew says "two demon possessed men" and Luke says "a demon possessed man". The same explanation can be used here as well.
To be true something does not have to use "scientific language". The bible is pre-scientific not un-scientific. The bible is written for the average person of every generation. To reveal some technical data to an ancient people would be anachronistic. The use of round numbers is not false. To round 3.14159265 to 3 may not be precise by today's standards. It is not wrong to round numbers off.
Critics often forget that when God gives a command or a revelation, that it sometimes takes the place of what He had previously commanded. For example. in Gen1:29 God commanded that we only eat fruit and vegetables then later on after the flood when conditions changed he commanded that we also eat meat(Gen9:3) These two revelations do not contradict each other they are just different commands for different people at different times.
God has given non-contradictory commands that if taken out of context and placed beside another verse, may look like a contradiction but that is equally as wrong as to say that parents contradict themselves by not letting there 12 year old drive there car but giving permission to there 18 year old
