Biblical inerrancy


Biblical inerrancy is the belief that the Bible, in its original form, is entirely free from error.
The belief in biblical inerrancy is of particular significance within parts of evangelicalism, where it is formulated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. In contrast to American evangelicalism, it has minimal influence on contemporary British evangelicalism. Some groups equate inerrancy with biblical infallibility or with the necessary clarity of scripture; others do not.
The Catholic Church also holds a limited belief in biblical inerrancy, affirming that the original writings in the original language, including the Deuterocanonical books, are free from error insofar as they convey the truth God intended for the sake of human salvation. However, descriptions of natural phenomena are not to be taken as inspired and inerrant scientific assertions, but reflect the language and contemporary understanding of the writers.
Critics argue that total biblical inerrancy conflicts with empirical science by treating ancient texts as authoritative on natural phenomena, despite contradictions with observable evidence, such as the age of the Earth or the historicity of Noah’s Ark. In contrast, many Christian scholars and the Catholic Church emphasize interpretive flexibility, viewing certain biblical accounts as allegorical or contextually framed, allowing for revision and alignment with modern knowledge while maintaining the spiritual authority of scripture.

Terms and positions

Positions

  • Judaism: according to H. Chaim Schimmel, Judaism had never promulgated a belief in the literal word of the Hebrew Bible, hence the co-existence of the Oral Torah. The significance of most phrases, their parts, grammar, and occasionally individual words, letters and even pronunciation in the Hebrew Bible are the subject of many rabbinic discussions in the Talmud.
  • Catholic Church: the Second Vatican Council authoritatively expressed the Catholic Church's view on biblical inerrancy.
  • * Citing earlier declarations, it stated: "Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation." But theologians disagree as to whether the words "for the sake of our salvation" in that sentence represent a shift from complete to limited inerrancy.
  • * The Council did not endorse the necessary clarity of scripture: "Since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words."
  • * The Church interprets the Scripture as part of the Deposit of Faith with Sacred Tradition, and not in an apostolic vacuum: interpretations of Scripture which contradict magisterial teaching to that extent fail to capture the inerrant meaning.
  • Evangelical Christianity: Evangelicals generally affirm that the Bible, and the Bible alone, is inspired by God and is the final authority on matters of faith and practice. However, there is an ongoing debate between two primary factions:
  1. The inerrant view - the Bible is absolutely inerrant on all matters that it affirms.
  2. The infallible but not inerrant view - while the Bible is infallible in that it does not fail believers when trusted to do what God inspired it to do, it is not absolutely inerrant in all matters it affirms, especially in some of its tangential scientific and historical statements.

    History

According to Coleman, "here have been long periods in the history of the church when biblical inerrancy has not been a critical question. It has in fact been noted that only in the last two centuries can we legitimately speak of a formal doctrine of inerrancy." The first formulations of the doctrine of inerrancy were not established according to the authority of a council, creed, or church, until the post-Reformation period.

Early Church

thought there were minor discrepancies between the accounts of the Gospels but dismissed them due to their lack of theological importance, writing "let these four agree with each other concerning certain things revealed to them by the Spirit and let them disagree a little concerning other things".
Later, John Chrysostom was also unconcerned with the notion that the scriptures were in congruence with all matters of history unimportant to matters of faith:
John D. Woodbridge disputes this claim about Chrysostom writing, "In fact, Chrysostom apparently believed in biblical infallibility extended to every detail. He does not set forth a comprehensive discussion of the subject, but scholars who have surveyed the corpus of his work usually affirm that this is case."
In his Commentary on Galatians, Jerome also argued that Paul's rebuke of Peter in Galatians 2:11–14 for acting like a Jew around the Jewish faction of the early Church was an insincere "white lie" as Paul himself had done the same thing. In response, Augustine rebuked Jerome's interpretation and affirmed that the scriptures contained no mistakes in them, and that admitting a single mistake would shed doubt on the entire scripture:
However, John D. Hannah argues that Jerome did indeed affirm the historical nature of the Bible. For example, Jerome believed in the historicity of the book of Jonah. He further argues that while Origen resorted to allegorical interpretation, he held a high view of inerrancy.
Biblical inerrancy adherents say that the Early Church Fathers did hold to biblical inerrancy, even if it was not articulated that way. In particular, Shawn Nelson cites Clement of Rome, Papias, Ignatius of Antioch, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, and the Epistle to Diognetus as examples of those whom held to inerrancy.
Clement of Rome said to his readers:

Medieval era

The medieval church fathers held to the divine origin of scripture and most believed there could not be any error in scripture as interpreted by the Church. The most prominent theologian of the Medieval era was Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas wrote:
Another theologian, Hugh of St. Victor, is known for stressing the importance of the historical and literal senses of the Bible in the face of the strong allegorizing tendency of the age. He wrote:
Philosopher John Wycliff proposed an extreme version of inerrancy, that meant that even parables must have been factually true, in the book . Wycliffe's dictum says that all truths necessary to faith are found clearly and expressly in the Bible, and the more necessary, the more expressly. This later influenced Martin Luther.
Scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, who published the first Latin-Greek New Testament in print, believed not only that translation between languages was always imperfect, that transmission errors had occurred by scribes, and that Scripture was sometimes deliberately obscure, but also that "the sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels were slightly different in each. He suggested that the Holy Spirit had not bothered to correct the faulty memories of the evangelists."

Reformation era

By the time of the Reformation, there was still no official doctrine of inerrancy. Although the term was not used, some scholars argue the Reformers did believe in the concept of inerrancy.
For Martin Luther, for example, "inspiration did not insure inerrancy in all details. Luther recognizes mistakes and inconsistencies in Scripture and treated them with lofty indifference because they did not touch the heart of the Gospel." When Matthew appears to confuse Jeremiah with Zechariah in Matthew 27:9, Luther wrote that "Such points do not bother me particularly." However, other Luther scholars have pointed out that Luther, in other places, said the Scripture cannot contradict itself. Luther said in regards to whether the Bible had errors or not, "the Scriptures cannot err." Other statements made by Luther seem to contradict that, e.g. he stated that he found numerous errors in the Bible, and lambasted a couple of books of the Protestant Bible as worthless; he also stated that his idea of Christ trumps the letter of the Scripture, especially when the Scripture is cited in order to give the lie to his idea.
The Christian humanist and one of the leading scholars of the northern Renaissance, Erasmus, was also unconcerned with minor errors not impacting theology, and at one point, thought that Matthew mistook one word for another. In a letter to Johannes Eck, Erasmus wrote that "Nor, in my view, would the authority of the whole of Scripture be instantly imperiled, as you suggest, if an evangelist by a slip of memory did put one name for another, Isaiah for instance instead of Jeremiah, for this is not a point on which anything turns."
The same point of view held true for John Calvin, who wrote that "It is well known that the Evangelists were not very concerned with observing the time sequences." However, Calvin also said that Scripture is the "certain and unerring rule." Calvin scholars are divided on whether Calvin actually held to inerrancy or not. Some scholars such as Jack B. Rogers and Donald McKim said Calvin "was unconcerned with normal, human inaccuracies in minor matters" in Scripture. Other scholars such as John D. Woodbridge and J.I. Packer said Calvin did adhere to a position equivalent to biblical inerrancy.
The doctrine of inerrancy, however, began to develop as a response to these Protestant attitudes. Whereas the Council of Trent only held that the Bible's authority was "in matters of faith and morals", Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine argued in his 1586 De verbo Dei, the first volume of his multi-volume Disputationes de controversiis christianae fidei adversus hujus temporis haereticos that "There can be no error in Scripture, whether it deals with faith or whether it deals with morals/mores, or whether it states something general and common to the whole Church, or something particular and pertaining to only one person." Bellarmine's views were extremely important in his condemnation of Galileo and in Catholic–Protestant debate, as the Protestant response was to also affirm his heightened understanding of inerrancy.

Post-Reformation

In the 17th century, Quaker apologist Robert Barclay took a step away from Biblical Inerrancy while continuing to affirm Biblical inspiration and the Bible's place in Christian doctrine. Barclay said that "errors may be supposed by the injury of the times to have slipped in", but that because of inspiration from the Holy Spirit, all necessities remained.
During the 18th and 19th centuries and in the aftermath of the Enlightenment critique of religion, various episodes of the Bible began increasingly to be seen as legendary rather than as literally true. This led to further questioning of the veracity of biblical texts.

Modern Protestant discussion

The Fuller Theological Seminary formally adopted inerrancy restricted to theological matters. It explained:
A more comprehensive position was espoused particularly in the magazine Christianity Today and the book entitled The Battle for the Bible by Harold Lindsell. Lindsell asserted that losing the doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture was the thread that would unravel the church and conservative Christians rallied behind this idea.

Arguments in favour of inerrancy

and William Nix write that scriptural inerrancy is typically argued by a number of observations and processes, which include:
  • The alleged historical accuracy of the Bible
  • The Bible's alleged claims of its own inerrancy
  • General church history and tradition
  • One's individual experience with God
Daniel B. Wallace, Professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, divides the various evidences into two approaches: deductive and inductive approaches.

Deductive justifications

The first deductive justification is that the Bible says it is inspired by God and because God is perfect, the Bible must also be perfect and, hence, free from error. For instance, the statement of faith of the Evangelical Theological Society says, "The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs".
Supportive of this is the idea that God cannot lie. W. J. Mcrea writes:
Stanley Grenz states that:
Also, from Geisler:
A second reason offered is that Jesus and the apostles used the Old Testament in a way that assumes it is inerrant. For instance, in Galatians 3:16, Paul bases his argument on the fact that the word "seed" in the Genesis reference to "Abraham and his seed" is singular rather than plural. This sets a precedent for inerrant interpretation down to the individual letters of the words.
Similarly, Jesus said that every minute detail of the Old Testament Law must be fulfilled, indicating that every detail must be correct:
Although in these verses, Jesus and the apostles are only referring to the Old Testament, the argument is considered by some to extend to the New Testament writings, because 2 Peter 3:16 accords the status of scripture to New Testament writings also: "He writes the same way in all his letters ... which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other scriptures".

Inductive justifications

Wallace describes the inductive approach by enlisting the Presbyterian theologian Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield:
Inspiration
In the Nicene Creed, Christians confess their belief that the Holy Spirit "has spoken through the prophets". This creed has been normative for Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans and all mainline Protestant denominations except for those descended from the non-credal Stone-Campbell movement. As stated by Alister E. McGrath, "An important element in any discussion of the manner in which scripture is inspired, and the significance which is attached to this, is 2 Timothy 3:16–17, which speaks of scripture as 'God-breathed' ". According to McGrath, "the reformers did not see the issue of inspiration as linked with the absolute historical reliability or factual inerrancy of the biblical texts". He says, "The development of ideas of 'biblical infallibility' or 'inerrancy' within Protestantism can be traced to the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century".
People who believe in total inerrancy think that the Bible does not merely contain the Word of God, but every word of it is, because of verbal inspiration, the direct, immediate word of God. The Lutheran Apology of the Augsburg Confession identifies Holy Scripture with the Word of God and calls the Holy Spirit the author of the Bible. Because of this, Lutherans confess in the Formula of Concord, "we receive and embrace with our whole heart the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the pure, clear fountain of Israel". Lutherans believe apocryphal books are neither inspired nor written by prophets, and that they contain errors and were never included in the "Palestinian Canon" that Jesus and the Apostles are said to have used, and therefore are not a part of Holy Scripture. The prophetic and apostolic scriptures are authentic as written by the prophets and apostles. A correct translation of their writings is God's Word because it has the same meaning as the original Hebrew and Greek. A mistranslation is not God's word, and no human authority can invest it with divine authority.
However, the 19th-century Anglican biblical scholar S. R. Driver held a contrary view, saying that, "as inspiration does not suppress the individuality of the biblical writers, so it does not altogether neutralise their human infirmities or confer upon them immunity from error". Similarly, J. K. Mozley, an early 20th-century Anglican theologian has argued:
Divine authority
For a believer in total biblical inerrancy, Holy Scripture is the Word of God, and carries the full authority of God. Every single statement of the Bible calls for instant and unqualified acceptance. Every doctrine of the Bible is the teaching of God and therefore requires full agreement. Every promise of the Bible calls for unshakable trust in its fulfillment. Every command of the Bible is the directive of God himself and therefore demands willing observance.
Sufficiency
According to some believers, the Bible contains everything that they need to know to obtain salvation and live a Christian life, and there are no deficiencies in scripture that need to be filled with tradition, pronouncements of the Pope, new revelations, or present-day development of doctrine.

Clarifications

Accuracy vs. truth
Harold Lindsell points out that it is a "gross distortion" to state that people who believe in inerrancy suppose every statement made in the Bible is true. He says there are expressly false statements in the Bible, but they are reported accurately. He notes that "All the Bible does, for example in the case of Satan, is to report what Satan actually said. Whether what he said was true or false is another matter. Christ stated that the devil is a liar".
Inerrancy vs. infallibility
Many who believe in the inspiration of scripture teach that it is infallible but not inerrant. Those who subscribe to infallibility believe that what the scriptures say regarding matters of faith and Christian practice are wholly useful and true. Some denominations that teach infallibility hold that the historical or scientific details, which may be irrelevant to matters of faith and Christian practice, may contain errors. Those who believe in total or plenary inerrancy hold that the scientific, geographic, and historic details of the scriptural texts in their original manuscripts are completely true and without error, though the scientific claims of scripture must be interpreted in the light of its phenomenological nature, not just with strict, clinical literality, which was foreign to historical narratives.
Metaphor and literalism
Even if the Bible is inerrant, it may need to be interpreted to distinguish between what statements are metaphorical, and which are literally true. Jeffrey Russell writes that "Metaphor is a valid way to interpret reality. The 'literal' meaning of words – which I call the overt reading – is insufficient for understanding reality because it never exhausts reality." He adds:
Figures such as Scot McKnight have also argued that the Bible clearly transcends multiple genres and Hebrew prose poems cannot be evaluated by a reader the same as a science textbook.

Criticism

Theological criticism

Proponents of Biblical inerrancy often cite 2 Timothy 3:16 as evidence that scripture is inerrant. For this argument, they prefer translations that render the verse as "All scripture is given by inspiration of God," and they interpret this to mean that the whole Bible must therefore be in some way inerrant. However, critics of this doctrine think that the Bible makes no direct claim to be inerrant or infallible. C. H. Dodd argues the same sentence can also be translated "Every inspired scripture is also useful", nor does the verse define the Biblical canon to which "scripture" refers. In addition, Michael T. Griffith, the Mormon apologist, writes:
The Catholic New Jerusalem Bible also has a note that this passage refers only to the Old Testament writings understood to be scripture at the time it was written. Furthermore, the Catholic Veritas Bible website says that "Rather than characterizing the Old Testament scriptures as required reading, Paul is simply promoting them as something useful or advantageous to learn. it falls far short of a salvational requirement or theological system. Moreover, the four purposes for which scripture is declared to be 'profitable' are solely the functions of the ministry. After all, Paul is addressing one of his new bishops. Not a word addresses the use of scripture by the laity." Another note in the Bible suggests that there are indications that Paul's writings were being considered, at least by the author of the Second Epistle of Peter, as comparable to the Old Testament.
The view that total Biblical inerrancy can be justified by an appeal to prooftexts that refer to its divine inspiration has been criticized as circular reasoning, because these statements are only considered to be true if the Bible is already thought to be inerrant.
In the introduction to his book Credible Christianity, Anglican Bishop Hugh Montefiore, comments:
Liberal Christianity
In general, liberal Christianity has no problem with the thought that the Bible has errors and contradictions. Liberal Christians reject the dogma of inerrancy or infallibility of the Bible, which they see as the idolatry of the Bible. Martin Luther emphatically declared: "if our opponents allege Scripture against Christ, we allege Christ against Scripture."
William John Lyons quoted William Wrede and Hermann Gunkel, who affirmed: "Like every other real science, New Testament Theology has its goal simply in itself, and is totally indifferent to all dogma and Systematic Theology the spirit of historical investigation has now taken the place of a traditional doctrine of inspiration".
John Shelby Spong, author and former bishop of the Episcopal Church who was well-known for his post-theistic theology, declared that the literal interpretation of the Bible is heresy.
Meaning of "Word of God"
Much debate over the kind of authority that should be accorded biblical texts centers on what is meant by the "Word of God". The term can refer to Christ himself as well as to the proclamation of his ministry as kerygma. However, total biblical inerrancy differs from this orthodoxy in viewing the Word of God to mean the entire text of the Bible when interpreted didactically as God's teaching. The idea of the Bible itself as the Word of God, as being itself God's revelation, is criticized in neo-orthodoxy. Here the Bible is seen as a unique witness to the people and deeds that do make up the Word of God. However, it is a wholly human witness. All books of the Bible were written by human beings. Thus, whether the Bible is—in whole or in part—the Word of God is not clear. However, some argue that the Bible can still be construed as the "Word of God" in the sense that these authors' statements may have been representative of, and perhaps even directly influenced by, God's own knowledge.
There is only one instance in the Bible where the phrase "the Word of God" refers to something written. The reference is to the Decalogue. However, most other references are to reported speech preserved in the Bible. The New Testament also contains a number of statements that refer to passages from the Old Testament as God's words, for instance Romans 3:2, d, or the book of Hebrews, which often prefaces Old Testament quotations with words such as "God says". The Bible also contains words spoken by human beings about God, such as Eliphaz and the prayers and songs of the Psalter. That these are God's words addressed to humanity was at the root of a lively medieval controversy. The idea of the word of God is more that God is encountered in scripture, than that every line of scripture is a statement made by God.
While the phrase "the Word of God" is never applied to the modern Bible within the Bible itself, supporters of total inerrancy argue that this is because the Biblical canon was not closed. In 1 Thessalonians 2:23 the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica, "When you received the word of God which you heard from us, you welcomed it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God."

Translation

Translation has given rise to a number of issues, as the original languages are often quite different in grammar as well as word meaning. For readability, clarity, or other reasons, translators may choose different wording or sentence structure, and some translations may choose to paraphrase passages. Because some of the words in the original language have ambiguous or difficult-to-translate meanings, debates over the correct interpretation occur. Some believers trust their own translation to be the accurate one. One such group of believers is known as the King James Only movement.

Autographic texts and modern versions

Those who hold the total inerrancy of the Bible have a variety of views as to whether inerrancy refers to modern Bibles or only to the original, autographic texts. There are also disagreements about whether, because the autographic texts no longer survive, modern texts can be said to be inerrant. Article X of the Chicago statement agrees that the inspiration for the words of the Bible can only strictly be applied to the autographs. However, the same article asserts that the original text "can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy", so that the lack of the originals does not affect the claim of biblical inerrancy of such recovered, modern texts. Robert Saucy, for instance, reports that writers have argued that "99 percent of the original words in the New Testament are recoverable with a high degree of certainty."
For the Catholic church, the Latin Vulgate translation has been declared "authentic", meaning that where the Latin Vulgate diverges from the original languages, for example by translator or scribal error, it is either not significant for faith or morals or is true in its own right.

Textual tradition of the New Testament

Most of these manuscripts date to the Middle Ages. The oldest complete copy of the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus, which includes two other books not now included in the accepted NT canon, dates to the 4th century. The earliest fragment of a New Testament book is the Rylands Library Papyrus P52 which dates from 125–175 AD, recent research pointing to a date nearer to 200 AD.
The average NT manuscript is about 200 pages, and in all, there are about 1.3 million pages of text. No two manuscripts are identical, except in the smallest fragments, and the many manuscripts that preserve New Testament texts differ among themselves in many respects, with some estimates of 200,000 to 300,000 differences among the various manuscripts. According to Bart Ehrman:
In the 2008 Greer-Heard debate series, New Testament scholars Bart Ehrman and Daniel B. Wallace discussed these variances in detail. Wallace mentioned that understanding the meaning of the number of variances is not as simple as looking at the number of variances, but one must consider also the number of manuscripts, the types of errors, and among the more serious discrepancies, what impact they do or do not have.
For hundreds of years, Biblical and textual scholars have examined the manuscripts extensively. Since the eighteenth century, they have employed the techniques of textual criticism to reconstruct how the extant manuscripts of the New Testament texts might have descended, and to recover earlier recensions of the texts. However, King James Version -only inerrantists often prefer the traditional texts used in their churches to modern attempts of reconstruction, arguing that the Holy Spirit is just as active in the preservation of the scriptures as in their creation.
KJV-only inerrantist Jack Moorman says that at least 356 doctrinal passages are affected by the differences between the Textus Receptus and the Nestle-Aland Greek Text.
Some modern Bibles have footnotes to indicate areas where there is disagreement between source documents. Bible commentaries offer discussions of these.

Inerrantist response

generally accept the findings of textual criticism, and nearly all modern translations, including the New Testament of the New International Version, are based on "the widely accepted principles of textual criticism".
Since textual criticism suggests that the manuscript copies are not perfect, strict inerrancy is only applied to the original autographs rather than the copies. However total inerrantists usually claim that imperfect manuscripts have a negligible effect on our ability to know what the autographs said. For example, evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem writes:
The "Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy" says, "We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture". However, it also reads: "We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant."
Less commonly, more conservative views are held by some groups.
=A minority of total biblical inerrantists go further than the Chicago Statement, arguing that the original text has been perfectly preserved and passed down through time. This is sometimes called "Textus Receptus Onlyism", as it is believed the Greek text by this name is a perfect and inspired copy of the original and supersedes earlier manuscript copies. This position is based on the idea that only the original language God spoke in is inspired, and that God was pleased to preserve that text throughout history by the hands of various scribes and copyists. Thus the Textus Receptus acts as the inerrant source text for translations to modern languages. For example, in Spanish-speaking cultures the commonly accepted "KJV-equivalent" is the Reina-Valera 1909 revision. The New King James Version was also translated from the Textus Receptus.
King James Only inerrantists
A faction of those in the "King James Only movement" rejects the whole discipline of textual criticism and holds that the translators of the King James Version English Bible were guided by God and that the KJV thus is to be taken as the authoritative English Bible. One of its most vocal, prominent and thorough proponents was Peter Ruckman.
Michael Licona
In 2010, Michael Licona published a book defending the resurrection of Jesus called, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. In one part of the book, Licona raised questions about the literal interpretation of the resurrection of the saints in Matthew 27:51-53. He suggests the passage of scripture is an apocalyptic genre. Scholars such as Norman Geisler accused Licona of denying the full inerrancy of the Bible in general and the Gospel narratives in particular. As a result, Licona resigned from his position as research professor of New Testament at Southern Evangelical Seminary and apologetics coordinator for the North American Mission Board.

Modern Catholic discussion

In Catholic discussion, the Bible is not inerrant or infallible as a document interpreted independently of teaching of the Church on matters of faith and morals.

Before Vatican II

, writing in 1884, acknowledged the "human side" of biblical inspiration which "manifests itself in language, style, tone of thought, character, intellectual peculiarities, and such infirmities, not sinful, as belong to our nature, and which in unimportant matters may issue in what in doctrinal definitions is called an obiter dictum." In this view, the Bible contains many statements of a historical nature that have no salvific content in themselves and so need not be inerrant. Often called the "absent father of Vatican II", the wording of Dei Verbum recalls Newman’s position. The theologians who wrote it knew and positively appreciated his views.
In 1907, Pope Pius X condemned historical criticism in the 1907 Lamentibili sane exitu. However, around the time of the mid-twentieth century, attitudes changed. In 1943, Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu, making historical criticism not only permissible but "a duty". Catholic biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown described this encyclical as a "Magna Carta for biblical progress".

Vatican II

After several years discussion and numerous drafts, on 18 November 1965 the Vatican II Council adopted the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, known as Dei verbum from its first Latin words. The document's teaching on inerrancy is found in a single sentence:
The first draft schema on the Sources of Revelation included "inerrancy" within one chapter heading but this word was dropped in later drafts in favour of the term "without error", used with specific reference to the truth necessary for salvation.
Since Vatican II, there has been no official pronouncement on the meaning of this phrase. Article 107 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church simply quotes the sentence from Dei verbum without any further explanation:

Present-day Catholic teaching

Some theologians and apologists defend the view that total inerrancy is still the Church's teaching. For instance, articles defending this position can be found in the 2011 collection For the Sake of Our Salvation. On a more popular level, on the apologetic website Catholic Answers there is no lack of articles defending the same position.
For instance, Raymond E. Brown, "perhaps the foremost English-speaking Catholic Biblical scholar", writes:
And also:
Similarly, Scripture scholar R. A. F. MacKenzie, in his commentary on Dei verbum, said:
In a speech to German bishops during the Second Vatican Council, the future Pope Benedict XVI described inerrancy as referring to everything which scripture intended to affirm, but not necessarily in how it is expressed, saying:
And that:
These views are shared by many Church officials and as a result are taken for granted in some Church documents. For instance:

Empirical evidence and testability

Critics argue that total biblical inerrancy undermines the empirical basis of science by treating ancient religious texts as authoritative on natural phenomena, even when these texts conflict with observable evidence. For example, a literal reading of the creation narrative in Genesis, which suggests a young Earth created in six days, is inconsistent with the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth and the process of evolution through natural selection. These discrepancies have led scholars like Richard Dawkins to criticize biblical inerrancy as being "indifferent to the evidence".
Many secular scholars highlight apparent scientific and historical inaccuracies in the Bible as evidence against its inerrancy. For instance, the story of Noah's Ark, when taken literally, describes a global flood, which lacks geological evidence and contradicts known principles of hydrology and biology. The lack of supporting evidence for other events described as historical in the Bible, such as the Exodus, further calls into question the claim of total inerrancy.
However, biblical inerrancy is not synonymous with biblical literalism, and Christians often focus more on what is intended to be written by a biblical author than the veracity of what is actually written. Pope John Paul II wrote to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the subject of cosmology and how to interpret Genesis, describing it as teaching God as the author of all creation in a way expressed within the context of knowledge contemporary to the ancient author:
Catholic priest and philosopher of science Stanley Jaki blamed the Protestant Reformation for biblical literalism, which resulted in the Bible being construed as a literal source of scientific knowledge:
As for specific events in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, Christians and scholars alike tend to view certain sections as either allegorical, or as stories based on past events but embellished with hyperbolic and figurative language, such as with Genesis, Exodus, and Joshua.

Resistance to revision

Another point of contention is the resistance of biblical inerrancy to revision, which is at odds with the self-correcting nature of the idealized scientific process. While science progresses through the refinement of theories based on new evidence, total biblical inerrancy maintains that the text is immutable, preventing reinterpretation in light of new discoveries. Philosopher Daniel Dennett has criticized this rigidity, suggesting that it hampers intellectual progress and fosters dogmatism.
The Catholic Church has embraced divergent interpretations of different books in the Bible in light of modern discoveries, while maintaining the inerrancy of scripture, insofar as such interpretations don't diverge from Catholic teaching. In 1943, Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu, making historical criticism not only permissible but "a duty" for the study of scripture, while today there exists learned groups such as the Catholic Biblical Association dedicated to the academic study of the Bible. As far back as late antiquity, Saint Augustine of Hippo taught that Christians should change their minds when interpretating scripture in light of any new knowledge.