i) Geisler is a poor representative of the inerrancy position. That makes him an easy target for Licona. In fairness, Licona is returning fire. He didn't initiate hostilities.
ii) Licona jumbles together a desperate list of evangelicals who draw fire from Geisler (Blomberg, Bock, Bird, Craig, Evans, Keener, Vanhoozer, Wallace, and Yarborough), but there are significant differences in their respective positions. Licona is seeking cover by blending into the crowd, but some of the scholars he mentions don't share his views.
iii) It's not enough to criticize the Chicago statement. It's up to him to provide an alternative formulation.
"If Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity would still be true even if it were the case that some things in the Bible are not."
i) But he doesn't say which things are expendable.
ii) Warfield isn't the father of inerrancy.
"Historians of the Bible do not have such a luxury. Historical investigation does not allow us to presuppose the inerrancy of the Bible in the course of a historical investigation. Otherwise, historians would just use the above argument, close shop and go home. The doctrines of the divine inspiration and inerrancy of the Gospels are faith doctrines that cannot be proven…when approaching the Gospels historically and making no theological assumptions pertaining to whether they are divinely inspired or inerrant, historians can apply the tools of historical investigation..."
To be consistent, Licona should also endorse methodological naturalism. The logic of his strictures can't be contained to inerrancy/inspiration.
His statement is philosophically naive. It makes a big difference whether or not God is generally active in the world–as well as active in the production of Scripture in particular. That can't be bracketed off, so that we approach the Bible as though it's a naturalistic product. That's a skewed approach which takes atheism as the operating worldview when we study the Bible. That's not a Christian view of the Bible.
"Iconoclasts like Bart Ehrman are now responsible for the shipwrecked faith of many. For them, if the Bible is not absolutely true in every detail, we should reject it. (This is a good spot to remind ourselves that if Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true even if it were the case that some things in the Bible are not.) Ehrman has a polished routine in which he articulates a list of Gospel differences. Was Jairus’ daughter dead or alive when Jairus asked Jesus to heal her? It depends which Gospel you read. Was Jesus crucified on the day after the Passover meal or the day before the Passover meal? It depends which Gospel you read. Did the temple veil split before or after Jesus’ death? It depends which Gospel you read. Was there one or were there two angels at the empty tomb? It depends which Gospel you read. How many women went to the tomb? It depends which Gospel you read."
The solution is not to concede Ehrman's examples but to challenge them. Inerrancy operates at two different levels: there are specific examples of "problem passages," and then there's the hermeneutics of inerrancy.
Ehrman's fundamental error doesn't lie with his downstream examples but the upstream issue of what makes a historical account accurate. He has a very simplistic, unimaginative grasp of what makes historical writing true. As Vern Poythress would put it, Ehrman operates with a paradigm photographic realism. But there's a basic difference between seeing an event and a verbal description. There's lots of extraneous information in witnessing an event which will be left out when writing it up.
So a reader must mentally fill in the gaps. And different scenarios are possible. So there's a lot of play in how to visualize what happened.
"Thus, Matthew may have taken some liberties when writing his genealogy in order to arrange it in an artistic manner, not to invent, but to emphasize Jesus’ Davidic ancestry: Jesus is the Son of David, the Messiah. This shows Matthew was willing to redact his sources by altering details and sacrificing legal precision in the process in order to make his theological point more clearly."
i) That raises an interesting issue. Matthew is writing with Jewish readers in mind. And Jewish readers could easily compare his genealogies with related OT genealogies. That was a matter of public record. So in what respect would Matthew take liberties with the genealogy? If Jewish readers thought he was tampering with the record, his strategy would predictably backfire.
ii) In addition, is Licona saying Matthew took liberties with OT genealogies? If you think the Matthean genealogy is authentic, then he didn't get that from the OT but from Jesus or the dominical family. But if that's Matthew's source, then we're in no position to say he "redacted" or "took liberties with his source since we don't have the unredacted original to compare with the Matthean version.
iii) For modern readers, the Matthean genealogy has some puzzling features, but it was written for 1C Palestinian Jews, not modern readers, so the original target audience might not think Matthew was taking liberties with his sources. We need to exercise humility when we read ancient documents. Many things are lost on a modern reader.
"The original readers of Mark would have heard that divorce is not permissible under any circumstances. But Jesus was probably speaking in hyperbolic language to make His point stronger and more memorable as He does elsewhere and where Matthew again redacts for clarification (Luke 14:26//Matthew 10:37). Therefore, Matthew clarifies Jesus’ teaching on divorce by adding an exception clause by which divorce is permissible: adultery."
i) Licona just takes for granted that that's the only way to harmonize the passages. But in many cases, Jesus likely spoke at greater length than what the Gospels record. So it's not a case of adding words but cutting out some things.
Indeed, given how shocking his statement on divorce was, it would be surprising if there wasn't a longer discussion than the Synoptics record. The disciples couldn't believe their ears. So we'd expect Jesus to repeat himself, with verbal variations.
ii) Licona then cites other stock examples, but there's more than one way to harmonize the differences. For instance:
"Would it be possible for God to ensure that certain messages He regarded as having great importance were preserved accurately while He allowed the biblical authors freedom to write in their own words and style…"
Because it's not divine revelation if the wording simply the fallible choice of Bible writers. It's no longer the voice of God, but the voice of men, because that drives a wedge between divine revelation and what's actually communicated.
"…even tolerating a lapse of memory on their part, their need to fill in the blanks, or even a deliberate altering of data for theological reasons resulting in a portrayal of events in ways not reflective of what we would have seen had we been there?"
That's a euphemism for pious fiction. But the Judeo-Christian faith is grounded in historical events, not legendary embellishments.
"Consider the following: 1 Kings 4:26 reports that Solomon had 40,000 stalls for chariot horses and 12,000 horsemen, whereas 2 Chronicles 9:25 reports he had 4,000 stalls for chariot horses and 12,000 horsemen.[13] How is this difference to be explained?"
i) Scribal error is the most obvious explanation.
ii) I'd add that OT writers often appear to use stock numbers.
"When we look carefully through the Gospels, we find their authors compressing stories, displacing them from their original context and transplanting them in others, transferring words spoken by one person and representing them as spoken by others, simplifying their representation of a historical scene in order to avoid complicating the portrait they are painting of Jesus, converting Jesus’ direct teaching into a dialogue, and so on."
i) Matthew and Luke sometimes group material thematically. That's different from intentionally fostering a false impression regarding the actual sequence of event.
ii) Yes, Bible writers use narrative compression. That's true of historical writing in general. It's necessarily selective.
iii) Licona's paradigm is too literary. If Matthew, Mark, and John are transcriptions of oral history, then the sequence isn't based on deliberately reordering events but how Matthew, Mark, and John remember events when they dictate their recollections to a scribe.
"If we truly have a high view of the Bible, we must submit ourselves to the Gospels as God has designed them and has given them to us rather than squeeze the Gospels to fit within a view of how God should have written them."
That sounds pious, but it fails to distinguish between the Gospels as God designed them and Licona's perception of redaction and discrepancies.
The quote by Walton/Sandy is confused. Orality is irrelevant because inerrancy is concerned with what was committed to writing in Scripture, and not hypothetical oral stages leading up to the canonical text.
The "word" inerrancy is just a shorthand designation of a position that has to be defined. But the issue isn't about the word "inerrancy". Labels are necessary for reference. "Inerrancy" is an umbrella term for several propositions:
i) The Bible is true, including its moral and theological teaching.
ii) Biblical historical narratives are factual. They accurately describe real events.
iii) Biblical prophecies are predictive rather than "prophecies" after the fact.
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