How can I reconcile my
belief in the inerrancy of Scripture with comments in Bible translations that
state that a particular verse is not in better manuscripts?
The New Testament
manuscripts were hand copied until the invention of the printing press in the
15th century. If you ever hand copied anything, you know how easy it
is to drop some words or entire lines, or to repeat lines. That happened with
the early copyists too. Likewise, a copyist may have made a marginal note to
amplify a word, and the next copyist made it a part of the text, thinking that
was where it belonged. Since the copying was done reverently, manuscripts vary
little overall, except for the occasional “slippage” of this kind. So,
manuscript comparison reveals passages that clearly need correcting at this
level of detail. We believe the earlier manuscripts to be “better,” being
nearer to the original.
That being said, Holy Scripture is, according
to the view of Jesus and His apostles, God speaking, instructing, showing, and
telling us things, and testifying to Himself through the human witness of
prophets, poets, kings, and theological narrators of history. The Bible's
inerrancy is not the inerrancy of the published text or version. Rather,
scriptural inerrancy relates to the human writer's expressed meaning in each
book, and to the Bible's whole body of revealed truth and wisdom.
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