Does the Bible Have Errors?

To confess that the Bible is inerrant is to say it does not err—it teaches no falsehood in what it asserts. This follows directly from what Scripture is. If the Bible is “breathed out by God” (2 Timothy 3:16), and God “never lies” (Titus 1:2), then his Word will be as truthful as he is. Jesus prayed, “your word is truth” (John 17:17), and the psalmist declared, “the sum of your word is truth” (Psalm 119:160). Inerrancy is really just taking those statements seriously.

But it is important to understand inerrancy carefully, because it is often caricatured. It does not mean the Bible is a modern science or history textbook, or that it speaks with twenty-first-century precision. It means Scripture is true and reliable in everything it actually affirms, read according to the kind of writing each passage is. When the Bible speaks in poetry, we read it as poetry; in parable, as parable; in ordinary observational language (“the sun rose”), as we ourselves still speak. Recognizing that a psalm uses metaphor is not admitting an error; it is reading the text as it was meant to be read. Inerrancy asks what the author, guided by the Spirit, was asserting—and holds that that is true.

It is also worth knowing that inerrancy applies to Scripture as God gave it. Where a rare copying difference appears in the manuscripts, the science of comparing them lets us recover the original text with very high confidence, and no Christian teaching hangs in the balance.

Why does this matter so much? Because your confidence in the promises rests on the trustworthiness of the Book. If Scripture erred wherever it could be checked, why trust it where it cannot—on forgiveness, resurrection, and eternal life? A Bible you must constantly second-guess cannot finally comfort you. A Bible that is God’s own true Word can hold your whole weight.