Benjamin Warfield and ethereal inerrancy

[Steven Avery]

sister threads

Ted Letis - infallibility and inerrancy - the Benjamin Warfield shell game - astronomy as inerrancy source?
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.864/post-1844

Inerrancy and Textual Criticism - ETC blog
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.680

Ehrman presuppositional approach - the early church was adoptionist and ebionite

[/COLOR][/COLOR]
Facebook discussion of this topic at:

Benjamin Warfield and ethereal Inerrancy
https://www.facebook.com/groups/purebible/permalink/722857934472765/

Steven Avery

 

[Steven Avery]

Inerrancy Ehrman and the Text of the New Testament - Steve Young - 2018

Here is a modern youngish seminary scholar, following the ethereal inerrancy line, trying hard to rebut the Ehrman (totally valid) attack on the doctrine of ethereal inerrancy.

Inerrancy Ehrman and the Text of the New Testament (2018)
Steve Young
https://www.academia.edu/38086420/Inerrancy_Ehrman_and_the_Text_of_the_New_Testament

The doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, according to one simplified definition, “means that Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact .” 1 According to some, however, the doctrine is laden by so many qualifications as to render it irrelevant. 2 Particularly troubling for New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman has been the doctrine’s demand that inerrancy be restricted to the original manuscripts. 3 His complaint is that those original manuscripts no longer exist and there is, as a result, no inerrant, authoritative source for Christian faith and practice.4

1 Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 91.
2. I Howard Marshall, Biblical Inspiration (Vancouver: Regent, 1982), 72.
3 Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperOne, 2005), 4-5.
4 Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 13.

...

EHRMAN AND THE “PROBLEM" OF INERRANCY

Bart D. Ehrman, highly regarded New Testament scholar and textual critic, without referencing the doctrine directly in Misquoting Jesus, homes in on the “autographic text" qualification in Article X of the CSBI:

[H]ow does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes— sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.18 18

Ehrman, Misquoting.Jesus, 7. This view is not wholly dissimilar to that held by Majority Text advocates (of whom the most extreme are known as “King James Only”) who see a necessary link between inspiration (and, so, inerrancy) and the preservation of Scripture. The
particulars of their view will not be analyzed here, suffice it to say they imagine themselves to have circumvented the problem with the number of variants by focusing on the far more uniform Byzantine text, no matter that it is far more removed from the autographs than 2-3 centuries. (Daniel B. Wallace, “Inspiration, Preservation, and New Testament Textual Criticism,”GraceTheological Journal 12:1 [1992], 21-50.)
​

​

Ehrman is correct in his attack on ethereal inerrancy. The Wallace quote is factually wrong and conceptually bankrupt. And the Steve Young attempt to bypass the AV position with the Wallace errant quote is the typical textcrit charade.

The AV and Reformation Bible defender totally disagree with the Ehrman "error-ridden copies" claim.

The AV defender will especially defend the Bible he reads as God's pure and perfect word, inspired and preserved.

While most of the paper is ho-hum stumbling modernist psuedo-apologetics for the ethereal text, the normal Daniel Wallace style clap-trap, I will highlight some nice quotes:

As Loveday Alexander writes, assessing the evidence of early Gospel transmission among Christian communities, “It is clear that we are dealing with a group that used books intensively and professionally from very early on in its existence.’26

26 Loveday Alexander, “Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels,” in The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (ed. Richard Bauckham; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 71-111.
https://books.google.com/books?id=zZujcbCTuY8C&pg=PA78

... Tommy Wasserman, after evaluating Ehrman’s text critical conclusions relating to Christology in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, writes, “Ehrman too easily identifies one reading as the original and another as ‘orthodox corruption.’”47
47 Wasserman, “Misquoting Manuscripts,” 349.

However, only one writer (present company excepted), Tony Costa, actually helped pinpoint the reader to the Ehrman presuppositions that created this scholastic textual mess.

Ehrman presuppositional approach - the early church was adoptionist and ebionite
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.969

The paper artfully dances around all the real issue. It never addresses the basic issues. Using a common logical fallacy, the paper assumes that attempting to weaken some of the Ehrman statement's can serve as a rebuttal. Even when the basic position of Ehrman is cleary true -- against the ethereal inerrancy view.

We have the normal distressing faux claims of 99% accuracy for the Critical Text, which we discuss on this forum.
And an absurd, spiritually sick, statement that 99% accuracy will give 100% truth.

These gentlemen go to seminaries to learn how not to think.

​