I've been wondering lately if the Bible is truly without error. It's been translated many times and these translations different. If it's not without error, how can it be a standard or measure for truth?
Why would anyone with an open mind conclude that the bible is without error?
Even on first principles, it was entirely written by humans, at various times and various places for various agendas, and in many cases later edited ─ and that's before any question of translation arises. It contains the cosmology of its day, a flat earth immovably fixed at the center of creation; the sky is a hard dome (firmament) over it to which the stars are attached; if they come loose they'll fall to earth. It has no concept of the moon as an orbiting satellite, the earth as an orbiting planet, of deep space, or that stars are other suns, or of galaxies. It contains the history, maths, science of its time, including belief in magic ─ if God created the universe, entire silence on what techniques [he] employed. How did Pharaoh's magicians turn the Nile into blood? Are we meant to take literally talking snakes and donkeys? And imagine the commercial uses of turning water into selected vintages of wine at very little cost.
Its morality is from the Bronze Age ─ God is cool with slavery, women as property, invasive wars, massacres of populations, mass rapes, human sacrifices, religious intolerance double underline, death penalties for breach of priestly rules, and so on. If you think those things are an infallible guide on how to behave, have a very good lawyer on retainer.
You can go on the net and find entire sites devoted to bible errors, self-contradictions, and so on. Anyone who wants to insist the bible is infallible is in the deeply dishonest position of having to invent excuses and false explanations and translations; the job of the apologist is not to defend what the text says but what the apologist and his or her team want it to say.
And as is well known, the bible never claims to be infallible. Not once, not anywhere.
