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[Physics Guy]

What is inescapably clear is that [the Bible] is not inerrant. It contains a variety of thoughts by people trying hard to understand with limited knowledge. Yet to a sizable number of people the Bible must be inerrant. I think that to an extent that creates an idol out of the book which may get worship which should go to God. In becoming an idol it can damage people's thinking, damage their moral sense, and damage faith.

I agree. In pre-modern times, including within the Bible itself, people had a lot of reverence for their Scriptures, but I don't think they had the modern concept of inerrancy. My impression is that they were quite willing to let the Bible be true in all kinds of metaphorical or even coded ways, and did not assume that whatever it most clearly seemed to mean had to be literally true.

In the early centuries of Christianity, the Bible was effectively subordinate, as an authority for believers, to the Church and its established traditions. Some of these traditions were far-fetched readings of Scripture. My impression is that this Church authority was not really just a power grab by the top clerics, but was in large part simply necessary, because it definitely was not the case that the current Scriptural canon simply fell from heaven on brass plates and was recognised unanimously as God's one revelation. Instead there were all kinds of ideas and texts circulating around the Roman world, many of them claiming some connection to Jesus. There was a desperate need for version control: if anything was going to count as revelation, then someone was going to have to say which texts were the revelations and which were mere human inventions (or worse). The Church was in large part drawn into existence by this authority vacuum.

Come the Reformation, a lot of Protestants wanted to reject the authority of the Roman Church. That meant they had to set something up in its place. So what they set up was the Bible, making it out to be a self-sufficient source of all truth in a way that I don't think earlier believers ever believed it was. In practice it took a lot of ingenuity to deduce all the doctrines one needed from the Bible alone; a new priestly class of pastors and teachers emerged who were skilled at this particular form of intellectual gymnastics.

As a qualification for church leadership, the ability to deduce desired doctrines from the infallible Word of God proved to be about as effectively restrictive as the old Catholic criterion of apostolic succession. The priestly class remained small enough that the church didn't just disintegrate. The Bible actually being ambiguous, multiple incompatible schools of doctrine emerged, all claiming to come straight from the Bible, but the restriction of having to be able to preach from the Bible kept the fragmentation from continuing down to the point where every Christian could be their own church. We got dozens of denominations, but not thousands or millions. So the concept of Biblical inerrancy, at least in this picture of mine, took hold largely because it offered a form of version control on Christian doctrine that was looser than Catholicism, but not too loose.

I should say that this view of the history of Christian attitudes to the Bible as a history of version control policy is based on only a small amount of study on my part. It's all kind of a guess inspired by just a couple of books about church history. To me it makes sense, but that might just be because I never read enough to learn all the historical facts that completely contradict it. I float the idea here mainly in the hope that someone with more historical knowledge than mine can give it a sniff test.

[Physics Guy]

I suspect that's an artifact of Christianity coming into contact with the enlightenment era. Once you have notions like objective truth, objective history, the Bible is subject to the question "is it history or fable?"

I think this is also part of the story, for sure. In fact I've thought about this for years, and it seems important to me, so I want to spell this idea out at more length, even though it's just going to be a longer restatement of drumdude's two sentences.

Even the educated elite of ancient times had a lot less reliable knowledge of the world outside their own direct experience than modern people take for granted: travel was hard, documents were scarce, controlled experiments were mostly impossible, and there were no photographs. I can't imagine, though, that ancient people were really aware of this lack on their part. I doubt that many of them consciously thought, "Man, I really don't know very much, so I can't really judge anything that I hear about things that are supposed to have happened long ago or far away, so I'd better take everything with a big grain of salt." The option of forming sound judgements based on hard evidence could hardly even have entered their minds as a possibility, and so I don't think they would have focused clearly on the epistemology of hearsay evidence.

At the same time I'm sure that ancient people were just as smart as we are. Not many of them would have been bold enough to jump off a tower holding onto a feather and reciting a verse just because they'd read an old story about how holding a feather would let you fly if you recited that verse. So my guess is that ancient people probably didn't exactly believe any old stories, but also didn't exactly doubt them, and also didn't exactly consciously articulate an agnostic position. Instead I reckon that they must have implicitly kept all old legends and stories, no matter how sacred, in a separate category of stories that ought to be known but whose relationship to everyday reality was vague.

As more reliable human knowledge did finally start to increase, with the onset of modernity, that vague approach became hard to sustain. The question of whether or not something really, literally happened became a serious question, in a way that I don't think it was before. It still wasn't feasible to go back and check whether the Flood really covered the Earth or Jesus rose from the dead, but new stories like that could now be checked, at least in principle, and so the question of literal truth for that kind of story became a lot more real.

One result of that epistemological bar-raising was that people started deciding, or at least seriously considering, that old stories might really just downright not be true, even if they were in the Bible. The other logically possible result, however, was that people could just double down on the old stories, and insist that in fact they were just as literally true as anything that could be checked by sailing there and looking, or seeing a photo in the newspaper, or doing a test in the lab.

And so in that way I think that the idea of Biblical inerrancy did indeed in large part arise because "history versus fable" became a sharper dichotomy than it had previously been. It wasn't so much that ancient people believed, and moderns learned to doubt, as that ancients never really had to decide whether or not they believed in a literal sense, but modern people had to decide.

As for my previous post, that's my hypothesis, based on a dilettante level of study. If someone who actually knows much more history says otherwise, listen to them—and please let me know, if you can, what they said.

[huckelberry]

I apologize for not looking up the exact source but long ago I remember a discussion by Augustin trying to resolve an old Testament dating tangle. He concluded that sort of accuracy was not required of scripture. Two things appear here I think. People in ages past were willing to expect accuracy and criticize failure. After all there are many activities important to people in ages past that require accuracy. It is needed building things, trade, agriculture, weapons, wars, etc.

They had no knowledge or dealing with the question of a flood or age of the earth and had no reason to doubt these stories' reality. It is a build up of a variety of knowledge and understanding which starts to contradict the Biblical stories. I think inerrancy is an idea seized on to try and protect the Bible from the possibility of falling apart. There is lurking behind the small difficulty of no flood the possibility of no exodus or conquest putting the large story in question. Inerrancy becomes a wall against the threat and a wall against some dimensions of learning.

[malkie]

I apologize for not looking up the exact source but long ago I remember a discussion by Augustin trying to resolve an old Testament dating tangle. He concluded that sort of accuracy was not required of scripture. Two things appear here I think. People in ages past were willing to expect accuracy and criticize failure. After all there are many activities important to people in ages past that require accuracy. It is needed building things, trade, agriculture, weapons, wars, etc.

They had no knowledge or dealing with the question of a flood or age of the earth and had no reason to doubt these stories' reality. It is a build up of a variety of knowledge and understanding which starts to contradict the Biblical stories. I think inerrancy is an idea seized on to try and protect the Bible from the possibility of falling apart. There is lurking behind the small difficulty of no flood the possibility of no exodus or conquest putting the large story in question. Inerrancy becomes a wall against the threat and a wall against some dimensions of learning.

In the case of the Book of Mormon's "factuality", no Tower of Babel means:

• no Jaredites
• no story of faithfulness to see the Finger of the Lord
• no "submarines" occupied by a conglomeration of creatures and their needs
• no incredible population growth (24 or so people create several million descendants in 28 generations)
• no final battle near Cumorah
• no need to explain lack of evidence of all of these "facts" that range from extremely improbable to outright impossible

But once you give permission to interpret some parts of the Book of Mormon that have been taught as fact for 200 years as allegory, how do you prevent the wedge so created from breaking the entire narrative?

[Limnor]

I apologize for not looking up the exact source but long ago I remember a discussion by Augustin trying to resolve an old Testament dating tangle. He concluded that sort of accuracy was not required of scripture. Two things appear here I think. People in ages past were willing to expect accuracy and criticize failure. After all there are many activities important to people in ages past that require accuracy. It is needed building things, trade, agriculture, weapons, wars, etc.

They had no knowledge or dealing with the question of a flood or age of the earth and had no reason to doubt these stories' reality. It is a build up of a variety of knowledge and understanding which starts to contradict the Biblical stories. I think inerrancy is an idea seized on to try and protect the Bible from the possibility of falling apart. There is lurking behind the small difficulty of no flood the possibility of no exodus or conquest putting the large story in question. Inerrancy becomes a wall against the threat and a wall against some dimensions of learning.

In the case of the Book of Mormon's "factuality", no Tower of Babel means:

• no Jaredites
• no story of faithfulness to see the Finger of the Lord
• no "submarines" occupied by a conglomeration of creatures and their needs
• no incredible population growth (24 or so people create several million descendants in 28 generations)
• no final battle near Cumorah
• no need to explain lack of evidence of all of these "facts" that range from extremely improbable to outright impossible

But once you give permission to interpret some parts of the Book of Mormon that have been taught as fact for 200 years as allegory, how do you prevent the wedge so created from breaking the entire narrative?

If the Jaredites aren’t real, the plates Limhi finds aren’t real. If those plates aren’t real, the interpreters are meaningless. If the interpreters aren’t real, Mosiah didn’t translate anything, and the authority that goes along with being a seer vanishes. Mosiah goes from being a seer with the accompanying authority to a storyteller.

Just like Joseph.

[malkie]

In the case of the Book of Mormon's "factuality", no Tower of Babel means:

• no Jaredites
• no story of faithfulness to see the Finger of the Lord
• no "submarines" occupied by a conglomeration of creatures and their needs
• no incredible population growth (24 or so people create several million descendants in 28 generations)
• no final battle near Cumorah
• no need to explain lack of evidence of all of these "facts" that range from extremely improbable to outright impossible

But once you give permission to interpret some parts of the Book of Mormon that have been taught as fact for 200 years as allegory, how do you prevent the wedge so created from breaking the entire narrative?

If the Jaredites aren’t real, the plates Limhi finds aren’t real. If those plates aren’t real, the interpreters are meaningless. If the interpreters aren’t real, Mosiah didn’t translate anything, and the authority that goes along with being a seer vanishes. Mosiah goes from being a seer with the accompanying authority to a storyteller.

Just like Joseph.

But you can choose to believe in a god that actually confounded the language of the builders of a real tower, and so all is well in Zion!

Never mind what the linguists say: they weren't there!