Bible Witness - Error (II)

Gethsamane Bible-Presbyterian Church published an article in her magazine-Bible Witness, click the link to download: https://biblewitness.com/resources/magazines/Vol24_Iss04.pdf

The writer wrote: "Paul certainly believed that he had “All scripture”—which has been given by inspiration of God—though he used apographs. By implication, Paul left his readers in no doubt as to whether God has preserved His inspired Word intact for the believers of his time. Therefore, it is absolutely unbiblical and unsound to teach that God has not preserved all of His inspired Scripture in the apographs. Like Paul, we ought to believe that we have all of the inspired Word, which is inerrant and infallible. Though many will try to prove otherwise with their humanistic scholarship, let us remember that they are only insisting on what their finite eyes and minds have observed. But we walk by faith in all of God’s promises, believing that He is able to perform all that He has promised—even in what appears to be an impossible situation."

My response:

The article conflates Paul’s confidence in Scripture with a doctrine of perfect textual preservation—a significant logical leap unsupported by the evidence it cites.

The article’s core argument rests on Paul’s trust in the texts available to him. However, Paul and Peter considered the texts they possessed to be God’s word and held them to be inerrant[1], but this tells us nothing about whether every subsequent copy remained error-free. Paul’s confidence in his texts doesn’t logically extend to all apographs across centuries. The article assumes that if Paul believed he had God’s inspired Word, then God must have preserved every copy identically—but this reasoning conflates personal reliability with mechanical preservation.

The article also mishandles the relationship between inspiration and preservation. While God did not continue the miracle of inerrancy in copying manuscripts to apographs, He providentially preserved His word in purity through transcription methods and the sheer number of copies made[2]. This distinction matters: preservation through providence and textual criticism differs fundamentally from claiming perfect preservation in every apograph.

More problematically, the article dismisses scholarly textual work as “humanistic scholarship” while ignoring that thousands of variations exist in biblical manuscripts, though most are negligible in spelling and grammar, and no single doctrine rests on a questionable manuscript reading[3]. The article’s appeal to “faith” over observable textual reality creates a false dichotomy—faith in God’s Word doesn’t require denying that copies contain errors.

Finally, the article’s claim that Paul’s use of apographs proves perfect preservation inverts the logical relationship. Textual criticism allows us to arrive at an accurate representation of the autographs, and to the degree we approximate the autographs’ content and intended meaning, we proclaim God’s Word[3]. This acknowledges both God’s care and human limitation—a more biblically defensible position than the article’s absolutism.

[1] John S. Feinberg, Light in a Dark Place: The Doctrine of Scripture, ed. John S. Feinberg, Foundations of Evangelical Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 316.
[2] Alan Cairns, in Dictionary of Theological Terms (Belfast; Greenville, SC: Ambassador Emerald International, 2002), 232.
[3] John R. Higgins, “God’s Inspired Word,” in Systematic Theology: Revised Edition, ed. Stanley M. Horton (Springfield, MO: Logion Press, 2007), 106.