Ask · Scripture & How We Got It

Does the Bible contain errors?

The short answer

No. Contend's position is that Scripture, as God gave it, is without error in all it affirms, because God himself is true and cannot lie. That claim rests on Scripture's own testimony about God's word, and Christians state it carefully, distinguishing God's perfect word from human copies, translations, and interpretations, which can all be mistaken.

The fuller answer

The question is first about God, then about a book. If God is true, his breathed-out word cannot affirm what is false. The psalmist calls God's law perfect and refreshing, not partly reliable on spiritual matters and unreliable elsewhere. The claim covers what Scripture affirms when it is read as it was given, in context and in its own kind of literature, not every impression a hurried reader takes from it.

Psalm 119 sums up God's word as truth, and Jesus prayed the same to his Father on the night before the cross. Inerrancy is the later church word for this conviction: Scripture is without error in the original writings God gave. The term was sharpened in modern debate, notably by the Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, named here as modern scholarship and secondary to Scripture itself, not as the ground of the belief. That is also why Christians test alleged errors case by case, in the original languages and literary forms, rather than settling the question by a slogan in either direction.

Three careful distinctions keep the position honest. Copies can contain scribal mistakes, which textual work identifies. Translations can render a phrase poorly. Interpreters, including sincere Christians, can simply be wrong. None of those is an error in God's word itself. Where two passages seem to clash, the first task is closer reading, since apparent contradictions usually arise from genre, perspective, rounding, or a missing piece of context.

The practical consequence is trust with open eyes. Christians may investigate every alleged contradiction, consult the languages, and admit where their own understanding is incomplete, without surrendering the conviction that God's word itself is true. That stance has produced centuries of careful scholarship rather than fear of questions, since a true book can bear examination. If an interpretation makes God a liar, the interpretation, not God, must yield. Inerrancy so understood is not a shield for sloppy reading. It is a reason for the closest reading of all, since every word, rightly understood, can be relied on completely.

Sources

• Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
• Warfield on inspiration (modern scholarship, secondary)

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