What is Inerrancy? Part 5

Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a Biblical perspective. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism.

I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry, and with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM. What is inerrancy when it comes to our Bible? That's what we've been talking about this week, and as I've mentioned in every show, we've kind of played off a statement made by Joseph Smith where he said, I believe the Bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers. The point we've been making is I don't think there's any Bible scholars out there that would disagree with that. Of course, the problem for Joseph Smith is he felt that the Bible was purposely corrupted over the years, and because it was corrupted, it cannot be trusted any longer. Most Mormons would look to Article 8 where it talks about we believe the Bible to be the Word of God as far as it's translated correctly, and even though Joseph Smith in that statement goes on to say that ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors, I think the main argument probably most Latter-day Saints have, Eric, is not so much with translation as they do transmission. And certainly Joseph Smith seems to have a problem with that as well.

But that's the question. Was it transmitted correctly? Was it written down properly and handed down properly to where we can look at our modern Bibles today and say, you know what, I think the evidence shows that what this says goes right along with what God meant when he spoke to the person who wrote it down for the first time, what we call the autograph manuscripts. We don't have any autograph manuscripts of our Bible, we admit that, but we think there is a way that you can be sure that what we have is what God intended. In yesterday's show, I spoke of a fictitious Syrian scribe writing in a dark cave with a candle and purposely taking manuscripts and correcting them and corrupting them as, let's say, Joseph Smith assumed in that statement that I read from page 327 of the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. How would we know that the manuscripts that he was producing are faulty? And as I mentioned yesterday, you would compare it with other manuscripts that are out there to see if what he's saying concurs with what the other manuscripts have to say. Now, going a little bit further, Greg Kochel has an analogy that he uses, and Eric, I want you to read what Greg Kochel has to say, because I think it goes along pretty much with what we were trying to explain yesterday. And maybe his analogy of Aunt Sally might help a lot of people better understand what we're saying. I think it can, because what we're trying to show in yesterday's show and today is how we can believe the inerrancy of the Bible and what God originally intended can be still meant for us today, because we do believe we have a direct line to those original sources.

We have an article on our website, MRM.org slash Bible inerrancy, Bible hyphen inerrancy. You might want to go there. There's more information there that we have written. But Aunt Sally's letter, I read this many years ago, and I think it's a perfect illustration of what we call textual criticism and being able to understand what the original said. He says, let me illustrate how such a test can be made.

It will help you to see how scholars confidently reconstruct an original from existing manuscript copies, even though the copies have differences that are much younger than the autograph. Pretend your Aunt Sally learns in a dream that the recipe for an elixir that preserves her youth, when she wakes up, she scribbles the directions on a scrap of paper, then runs to the kitchen to make up her first glass. In a few days, Aunt Sally is transformed into a picture of radiant youth because of her daily dose of Sally's secret sauce. Aunt Sally is so excited, she sends detailed handwritten instructions on how to make the sauce to her three bridge partners.

She doesn't have any photocopiers or email. They in turn make copies for 10 of their own friends. All goes well until one day Aunt Sally's pet dog eats the original copy of the recipe. In a panic, she contacts her three friends who have mysteriously suffered similar mishaps, so the alarm goes out to the others in attempt to recover the original wording. Sally rounds up all the surviving handwritten copies, 26 in all. When she spreads them out on the kitchen table, she immediately notices some differences.

23 of the copies are exactly the same. Of the remaining three, however, one has misspelled words, another has two phrases inverted, mix then chop, instead of chop then mix, and one includes an ingredient none of the others has on its list. Do you think Aunt Sally can accurately reconstruct her original recipe from this evidence?

Of course she can. The misspellings are obvious errors. The single inverted phrase stands out and can easily be repaired. Sally would then strike the extra ingredient reasoning it's more plausible one person would add an item in error than 25 people would accidentally omit it. Even if the variations were more numerous or more diverse, the original could still be reconstructed with a high level of confidence if Sally has enough copies. This, in simplified form, is how scholars do textual criticism, an academic method used to test all documents of antiquity, not just religious texts. It's not a haphazard effort based on hopes and guesses, it's a careful linguistic process allowing an alert critic to determine the extent of possible corruption of any work.

So, in other words, he's explaining something very similar to what we were talking about yesterday. You would merely compare them with all the other manuscripts that are in existence. It would seem to make sense that a newer manuscript that says less is leaving something out if a lot of older manuscripts said more in that particular verse or sentence. When we learn how to interpret the Bible in seminary, one of the things that the professor taught us was two rules.

Number one, you always want to go with the oldest copy, not the youngest copy, because as time goes on you're certainly going to have more ability to have errors put in. So you want to go with the earliest manuscripts, and this was interesting for me, but you want to go with the harder reading manuscripts over the easier reading. Because it would be more likely that the scribes, and I think most of the scribes were godly men who were seriously wanting to preserve God's Word by writing it down so future generations could read, and they would make changes that they thought would make it easier to understand, or they thought, ah, you know, this is kind of complicated, let me just simplify it. But when you reconstruct Aunt Sally's letter, the same idea is there, that if somebody adds in a word and the other 26 manuscripts don't have that, then it's unlikely that they had forgotten to put that word in, and so you say, well, that might have been an addition. So they have different ways of figuring this out, and then they can rate the different writings to help us understand which is more likely. So there is an actual science to this called textual criticism. I wish more Latter-day Saints understood that, because I think it would prevent them from having such heartache going off into, let's say, agnosticism or atheism, when they can be having the glory of sharing in Christ's salvation and resting in his promises.

I think another point needs to be made, and we've brought it up earlier in this series. Joseph Smith tries to give the impression that there was some sinister act going on to purposely corrupt the text, and I think you made a comment here that needs to be addressed. When the early Christians were copying the manuscripts, we assumed that they were Christians. Wouldn't you think that they would want an accurate copy of the text to be handed down to fellow believers? Why would they want to purposely corrupt the text and put something in there that was not in any other manuscript? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I'm not discounting that there probably could have been people doing sinister things and copying the manuscripts. I have to ask myself why they would do that.

Why would they even be interested in this? Especially when you consider that for the first few hundred years of Christian history, they were being harshly persecuted by the government. Why would they want to risk being a part of the Christians knowing that they could face persecution if they really didn't even believe what Christians were believing? So it tends to be a little difficult for me to go along with what Joseph Smith is saying here, although I think making these alleged priests being corrupt certainly would fit into Joseph Smith's narrative that there is something sinister going on that he's going to solve. Now, we know that there were some sinister people out there who were trying to change the Christian message, and we have a term for that. Gnostic Gospels. What do we know about Gnostic Gospels, Bill? Well, that's a good point to bring up, because there are a number of Gnostic Gospels as they're known, such as the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip. There's a number of these writings that are out there. I think that raises a good point, Eric. How do we know we shouldn't believe them? How do we know they're not authentic and should be accepted as part of the canon? I've had Latter-day Saints bring that up.

It's not hard to respond to a Latter-day Saint on that subject, because all you have to say is, well, does your church embrace, let's say, the Gospel of Judas or the Gospel of Thomas? They'll say, well, no. Well, then why is this an issue with you? It's not an issue with me. It's not an issue with you. So why do you want to discuss this?

I think quite simply, I would explain that we can use a very similar test. It's not so much seen if what they say in a particular verse or line compares with another verse or line, because these are original ideas, you might say. But do those ideas conform to what we already know should be trusted? For instance, if one of these Gnostic Gospels says something that is so off the wall and contradictory of what we already have, let's say, in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, wouldn't that place suspicion on that particular writing? As early as the 2nd century, and especially going into the 4th century when the New Testament canon was formed, these people who were putting the canon together never included any of these Gnostic Gospels. They knew about them, but they refused to put them in there. They did not want anything in the canon that was going to be opposite of what the truth was about Jesus and his teachings, as well as the apostles and their writings, and also that they knew Jesus personally.

These Gnostic Gospels were written at the earliest, the 2nd century. They had no communication with the authentic disciples of Christ or Jesus himself. I think what we need to do in ending this show is just put out a heartfelt plea to any Latter-day Saints that are listening and have come to the realization that Joseph Smith was not a true prophet of God.

I know it's easy, and there's a temptation to just get rid of everything, but I implore you, don't do that. Before you walk away from the Bible, before you walk away from Jesus, at least look into these claims. Do some serious study on it, and hopefully you're going to realize why millions and millions of people throughout our history have come to embrace the Bible to be the Word of God. Visit us at www.mrm.org where you can request our free newsletter, Mormonism Researched. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism. Now, once again, the bookstore is located just west of Smith's Ballpark at 1358 South on West Temple Street in Salt Lake City. That's on Saturdays from 1 to 5 p.m. Bill or Eric will be there, and of course, they look forward to seeing you.