I don’t believe in the infallibility of scripture anymore.

Depending on who you are, I’m aware reading that statement may have just caused you an incredible amount of anxiety or defensiveness. That’s okay. I’d encourage you to take a deep breath. I’m not here to attack you. Give me a chance to explain.

I believe in sacred texts as having divine ability to transform my life. I believe in sitting with them, pondering them, asking questions of them, letting them ask questions of me. In short, I believe in scripture as a tool “useful for teaching, for reproof, for restoration, and training in righteousness” as 2 Timothy 3:16 reads. If I open myself to sacred texts, then they often open themselves to me and good fruit it born. That is a beautiful thing.

But here’s the problem. The version of the Bible that we hold in our hands as one complete book is not inerrant. I was raised to believe that this book was given by God in its current form and content. Therefore, the Bible and only the Bible is the word of God, and it is inerrant and ordained by God. Therefore, it can’t be challenged. It is the absolute truth. Yet, how did we get this current version of the Bible that we hold in our hands?

The truth is that the book we hold now is the product of lots of decisions by human beings, starting with what was included and not included in what is known as “the cannon” (perhaps another conversation for another day). For now, let’s proceed on the premise that the cannon at least is accurate, that the “right” writings were included and the “wrong” ones excluded (Did you know that the Gospel of John almost didn’t make the cut!). Yet even if the cannon were accurate, the Bible we hold in our hands now has gone through so many different translations to get to us today. And the truth is that every time a sacred text is handled by a human being and translated, it also becomes a product of that individual and their explicit or implicit biases. It also becomes a product of the culture and time in which it is translated.

Beth Allison Barr, a Biblical and historical scholar, writes, “The English Bible is a historical artifact as much as it is the Word of God. It tells the timeless and divinely inspired story of God’s plan to rescue humanity; it tells that story through the timebound hands of human translators. […] People are products of the world in which they live, and translators are no exception. What any translator or interpreter brings to the Bible influences how we understand the Bible” (The Making of Biblical Womanhood p. 143). [For more musings on her writing see my post “My Experience with Biblical Womanhood as Gospel Truth.”]

What this means is that the version of the Bible that you hold in your hands has translation errors in it. Period. “Which ones?” you might ask. Well, that is partly up to you to seek out. That is part of the journey.

Besides translation errors, we also bring cultural biases to the text that influence how we read it. E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien, authors of MisReading Scripture with Western Eyes, point out, “In whatever place and whatever age people read the Bible, we instinctively draw from our own cultural context to make sense of what we’re reading. […] We can easily forget that Scripture is a foreign land and that reading the Bible is a crosscultural experience. To open the Word of God is to step into a strange world where things are very unlike our own. Most of us don’t speak the languages. We don’t know the geography or the customs or what behaviors are considered rude or polite. And yet we hardly notice. For many of us, the Bible is more familiar than any other book. We may have parts of it memorized. And because we believe that the Bible is God’s word to us, no matter where on the planet or when in history we read it, we tend to read Scripture in our own when and where, in a way that makes sense on our own terms” (11).

What this means is that we may read a scripture and assume we understand the original intent, but we are really applying an ancient text to a modern cultural and personal situation without even being cognizant that we are doing so. We may be missing the original intent completely.

This means three things are true. Translators have brought their own personal and cultural biases to the text of scripture. Institutions have often created or perpetuated those biases. Finally, each individual reader brings their own personal and cultural biases to the text. Most of us are well-meaning and entirely unaware that all three of these things are happening. The result is that some things are bound to be lost in translation.

This is why I suppose so many people and institutions get into huge fights over controversial elements of scripture that really should fall more in the category of gray areas or current cultural fights. Consider topics such as slavery, homosexuality, the role of women in the church, and divorce, just to name a few. Sometimes people wield scripture verses as weapons to defend their stance. They claim their stance is the will of God. But is it? Or is it also the product of their passed down human-made doctrines, their traditions, their fears and anxieties, their ego, their power structures, their culture, how they were raised or trained, their interior wounding or pain? And has it been reinforced by mistranslations of sacred texts along the way by other human beings with these same factors at play?

So what does one do with what I am pointing out? Why does this matter?

First, here is what I’m not saying.

I’m not advocating for you to stop reading sacred texts.

I’m not saying the Bible can’t have a profound impact on your life.

Second, I’ll share what I’ve chosen to do personally so far with this knowledge. Then you can allow yourself to be led to make your own choices and to hopefully be led to shift course as needed.

One, I come to my time reading sacred texts believing more in the infallibility of God than in the flawed text I hold in my hands.

I trust that ultimately God will lead me. He will be the one responsible for instructing me, for convicting and correcting me when my ego gets in the way, for setting me on a path of wisdom. I need to put my faith in Him. Not my culture, not the heads of religious institutions, not the way my parents raised me, not in Bible translators, not in anyone or anything else.

Two, I come with openness.

I find if I really want to be taught and to grow, I can’t come to the text with defensiveness, looking to prove what I already believe. I have to open. I have to be willing to admit I may have been wrong in the way I’ve gone about this my whole life up to this point. And that’s a scary vulnerable thing. I have to admit that I am not God, and I don’t know everything. Far from it. But have courage. The journey is incredible.

Three, I read a lot to try and put troubling scriptures in context.

All of the authors I’ve quoted in this post would agree that context is key to getting as close as you can to comprehending the original intent of a scripture. Who was talking to who? When? What was the cultural context of the time? Why was this being said? Sometimes understanding that makes a scripture mean something quite the opposite of what you first assumed.

Four, read lots of translations.

Cynthia Bourgeault encourages that if you can’t learn to read the texts in the original languages (I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time or ability to learn Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Coptic), then the next best thing is to read multiple translations of the text. Comparing them may reveal differences in translation choices, different ways of looking at the text, and places you want to explore and ponder further.

I offer all of this as an invitation more than a criticism. Sacred texts can be a wonderous thing. But also limited by their handling over time. My hope is that you would know that too.

For further reading I am aware of the following books that have helped me on my journey. I’m sure there are many additional ones out there:

• The Wisdom Jesus by Cynthia Bourgeault
• MisReading Scripture with Western Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien
• The Sin of Certainty by Peter Enns (he also has other titles still on my list to read that include The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It  and How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers — and Why That’s Great News)
• The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr
• Copernicus and the Jews: The Separation of Church and Faith by Daniel Gruber