Let's just get this dirty laundry out of the way...
"The Bible is infallible" is some kind of catch-phrase that protestants make for some odd reason.
Let's look at the words in this statement, and then you'll see why this statement is ridiculous, and anyone saying it should feel retarded.
"The Bible" -- what is it? Is it the 66 books that the protestants consider "The Canon"? Or is it the Catholic Bible? Or any other Christian sect?
Which translation? Who made the translations? This is important, because it's a simple fact that no translation by a fallible human, even of an infallible text, can be considered infallible.
Maybe the original transcripts? Oh wait, we don't have them, since they were lost to history a long time ago.
Maybe the earliest copies? We have lots of those, but "early" is subjective. Some of the earliest copies we have are just fragments. Then we found things like the Dead Sea Scrolls which are earlier than the copies we had and changes some of the passages.
What about the septuagint? Is it more accurate than the Hebrew versions that we have access to? According to the greek New Testament, it looks like Jesus was quoting, word-for-word, from the septuagint. But was he? Do you think he was really speaking to a Judean audience in Koine Greek? Or was it much more likely that he was using Aramaic? And if so, was he using an Aramaic translation of the Greek passages? Or is it possible -- and hear me out here -- that authors like Matthew were inserting scripture passages to justify what Jesus did to an audience who were familiar with the septuagint? Read Matthew closely -- I think his intentions are pretty clear, and it's written quite explicitly in certain places. And what about the places where the quotes don't match the septuagint? What is better, the New Testament version of the quote or the septuagint?
Ultimately, there is no "THE Bible". There are "Bibles", and without naming one of them as "THE" Bible, a statement like "The Bible is infallible" is utter nonsense.
But let's continue anyway.
What does "infallible" mean? It means "incapable of error". Is any book or volume of text infallible? Of course not. It is entirely possible that there are errors in the text. Even if you somehow invented a script that was literally infallible, like it was IMPOSSIBLE to put it together in a way that could not contain any error (and I can't think of any way to do this, and I have been a programmer / amateur mathematician all my life, so I think I might know a thing or two about what kinds of errors texts (programs) can have)... would it not be possible for a copy of that text to contain an error? Like, in transcribing the text, the copyist could have made a mistake, an ERROR, and so the transcription contains an error?
So you see why this is utter nonsense and ridiculous. We don't have the originals, the copies we have are not consistent, and it's obvious that numerous errors have been introduced. So it's not infallible. (It's not even inerrant...)
But let's grant your position. Let's say that yes, that version of the Bible you carry in your hands is INFALLIBLE. Like a mathematic gift from God himself, you contain, on printed page, ink blots that somehow form an infallible text. Now you have another problem. Someone, maybe you, maybe someone else, needs to READ that text and comprehend it. Can a fallible mind understand an infallible text? Of course not. Making the whole thing moot anyway.
Maybe some of you are a bit more skeptical than your protestant evangelists and shy away from "The Bible is infallible." Maybe you say "inerrant" instead, which just means "it contains no errors." If you try to defend this position, all I would need to attack and destroy it would be to find a single error in your Bible. Maybe someone translated something the wrong way. Certainly, we know of tons of errors in the KJV, since it has been around for a long time. Plus, its source material is known to contain errors since there are better sources out there. Some of those sources were discovered long after the KJV was first published, so you have to feel sorry for the translators and compilers who never had a hope to begin with.
Maybe you retreat from "inerrant" and say something like "The Bible contains sufficient knowledge to be saved" or something like that. Well, now you are having a theological discussion and you're going to try to build your case using the text of the Bible, but inevitably you are going to make the same mistake everyone else has ever made by committing the fallacy of "eisegesis" which means taking your assumptions and reading them into the text. IE, you might suppose that Isaiah was thinking of the Trinity when he said that there is only one God, but when you look at the historical context of that particular passage, as well as its textual context, you would be forced to agree, with pretty much every other scholar, that Isaiah couldn't have possibly meant the Trinity as you understand it, since such a concept did not even exist until hundreds of years after Christ died on the cross.
So, instead of reading the Bible, you are really reading your own ideas into the text and supposing that you must be right and everyone else who has different ideas must be wrong, in particular the people who originally wrote the text of the Bible. You might as well be looking in a mirror or reading fan fic you wrote yourself and supposing it to be canonical. Yay! You're worshiping your own understanding -- something the Bible cautions us not to do!
So please, for the LOVE OF GOD, please STOP saying "The Bible is infallible" or anything like that. It just makes you look stupid. For thousands of years, Christians and other devout followers of the True God did not need to say anything like that, and did not even need the Bible. How did they understand God if they didn't have the Bible? The answer is in the text itself: God revealed himself to them in a way that they could understand. You need THAT, my friend, NOT the Bible. Maybe the Bible can help you obtain that revelation, but please do not suppose that the Bible is that revelation for yourself.
White man survived for thousands of years because we were connected, DIRECTLY, to God, not because of some arbitrary text that jews wrote thousands of years ago. GET CONNECTED.
"The Bible is infallible" is some kind of catch-phrase that protestants make for some odd reason.
Let's look at the words in this statement, and then you'll see why this statement is ridiculous, and anyone saying it should feel retarded.
"The Bible" -- what is it? Is it the 66 books that the protestants consider "The Canon"? Or is it the Catholic Bible? Or any other Christian sect?
Which translation? Who made the translations? This is important, because it's a simple fact that no translation by a fallible human, even of an infallible text, can be considered infallible.
Maybe the original transcripts? Oh wait, we don't have them, since they were lost to history a long time ago.
Maybe the earliest copies? We have lots of those, but "early" is subjective. Some of the earliest copies we have are just fragments. Then we found things like the Dead Sea Scrolls which are earlier than the copies we had and changes some of the passages.
What about the septuagint? Is it more accurate than the Hebrew versions that we have access to? According to the greek New Testament, it looks like Jesus was quoting, word-for-word, from the septuagint. But was he? Do you think he was really speaking to a Judean audience in Koine Greek? Or was it much more likely that he was using Aramaic? And if so, was he using an Aramaic translation of the Greek passages? Or is it possible -- and hear me out here -- that authors like Matthew were inserting scripture passages to justify what Jesus did to an audience who were familiar with the septuagint? Read Matthew closely -- I think his intentions are pretty clear, and it's written quite explicitly in certain places. And what about the places where the quotes don't match the septuagint? What is better, the New Testament version of the quote or the septuagint?
Ultimately, there is no "THE Bible". There are "Bibles", and without naming one of them as "THE" Bible, a statement like "The Bible is infallible" is utter nonsense.
But let's continue anyway.
What does "infallible" mean? It means "incapable of error". Is any book or volume of text infallible? Of course not. It is entirely possible that there are errors in the text. Even if you somehow invented a script that was literally infallible, like it was IMPOSSIBLE to put it together in a way that could not contain any error (and I can't think of any way to do this, and I have been a programmer / amateur mathematician all my life, so I think I might know a thing or two about what kinds of errors texts (programs) can have)... would it not be possible for a copy of that text to contain an error? Like, in transcribing the text, the copyist could have made a mistake, an ERROR, and so the transcription contains an error?
So you see why this is utter nonsense and ridiculous. We don't have the originals, the copies we have are not consistent, and it's obvious that numerous errors have been introduced. So it's not infallible. (It's not even inerrant...)
But let's grant your position. Let's say that yes, that version of the Bible you carry in your hands is INFALLIBLE. Like a mathematic gift from God himself, you contain, on printed page, ink blots that somehow form an infallible text. Now you have another problem. Someone, maybe you, maybe someone else, needs to READ that text and comprehend it. Can a fallible mind understand an infallible text? Of course not. Making the whole thing moot anyway.
Maybe some of you are a bit more skeptical than your protestant evangelists and shy away from "The Bible is infallible." Maybe you say "inerrant" instead, which just means "it contains no errors." If you try to defend this position, all I would need to attack and destroy it would be to find a single error in your Bible. Maybe someone translated something the wrong way. Certainly, we know of tons of errors in the KJV, since it has been around for a long time. Plus, its source material is known to contain errors since there are better sources out there. Some of those sources were discovered long after the KJV was first published, so you have to feel sorry for the translators and compilers who never had a hope to begin with.
Maybe you retreat from "inerrant" and say something like "The Bible contains sufficient knowledge to be saved" or something like that. Well, now you are having a theological discussion and you're going to try to build your case using the text of the Bible, but inevitably you are going to make the same mistake everyone else has ever made by committing the fallacy of "eisegesis" which means taking your assumptions and reading them into the text. IE, you might suppose that Isaiah was thinking of the Trinity when he said that there is only one God, but when you look at the historical context of that particular passage, as well as its textual context, you would be forced to agree, with pretty much every other scholar, that Isaiah couldn't have possibly meant the Trinity as you understand it, since such a concept did not even exist until hundreds of years after Christ died on the cross.
So, instead of reading the Bible, you are really reading your own ideas into the text and supposing that you must be right and everyone else who has different ideas must be wrong, in particular the people who originally wrote the text of the Bible. You might as well be looking in a mirror or reading fan fic you wrote yourself and supposing it to be canonical. Yay! You're worshiping your own understanding -- something the Bible cautions us not to do!
So please, for the LOVE OF GOD, please STOP saying "The Bible is infallible" or anything like that. It just makes you look stupid. For thousands of years, Christians and other devout followers of the True God did not need to say anything like that, and did not even need the Bible. How did they understand God if they didn't have the Bible? The answer is in the text itself: God revealed himself to them in a way that they could understand. You need THAT, my friend, NOT the Bible. Maybe the Bible can help you obtain that revelation, but please do not suppose that the Bible is that revelation for yourself.
White man survived for thousands of years because we were connected, DIRECTLY, to God, not because of some arbitrary text that jews wrote thousands of years ago. GET CONNECTED.
You're being honest and true.
My latest reading is that the New Testament gospels are not a history. They are not meant to be a history. Instead, it is a collection of various stories people told each other about Jesus, most of them probably being mostly true. Regardless, the people leading the church in the First and Second centuries felt they were important enough to write down.
According to some of the texts we found in Nag Hamadi, it's very likely that they were written down to combat false stories that people were spreading at the time.
Taken in THIS light, I think people would be much more responsible reading the text rather than turning their brains off and letting someone else fill it with nonsense.
We Christians were never meant to be passive in our faith, but to actively pursue Christ and revelation and truth through the gift of prophecy. We are each entitled to it!