by Daniel Mcclellan

Created on: April 26, 2008

For many believers the question of whether or not the Bible is trustworthy comes down to defining the word. What is meant by "trustworthy"? Does the Bible teach valuable truths? Is the Bible historically accurate? Does it lead one to God? By carefully crafting approach to the problem, an individual can assert the trustworthiness of the scriptures without having to confront inconsistencies and inaccuracies within the scriptures. While it is not necessarily indicative of intellectual dishonesty, it can be misleading. This investigation will examine some ways in which the Bible proves to be very trustworthy, and some ways in which it proves to be just the opposite. Far too many assumptions and subjectivity must be shouldered to answer the question of whether or not the Bible teaches absolute truth or leads one to God, so this treatise will evaluate how accurately the Bible presents history and how consistent the ideologies are within it.

Modern readers need no introduction to the human element manifested in the scriptures. Most are aware of the small discrepancies between two or more texts relating the same events. These differences do not necessarily betray fabrication, but often individual interpretation and perspective. Whether Christ's robe was purple or red is ultimately immaterial, but it shows that the received text of the Bible is not univocal, but represents a collection of histories recorded as they were remembered, dictated, or as they were witnessed. Variation is inevitable in such a large corpus, and while variation says nothing about the fundamental historicity of any given pericope, it does indicate we are dealing not with a perfectly unified single expression of religious truth, but with multiple expressions of experience and of perception within a single religious heritage. In addition, much of this heritage is built on tradition and folklore rather than on objective historiography. Our job must be to responsibly interpret our textual inheritance.

Sometimes significant conflict arises between parallel texts. In the past and even today, theologians and exegetes attempt to reconcile these discrepancies in a manner that preserves the absolute historicity of each text and the absolute agreement of every book in the Bible. Such a perspective refuses to engage the text as it is, but rather as the exegete wants it to be. The univocality of scripture, however, is nowhere asserted in the text of the Bible. It is a standard that cannot be derived from the

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