Did God actually write the Bible — or did fallible men write about God, and we've been calling it 'inspired' to avoid the terrifying implications?

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  Priya2d ago

  To the 17-year-old above: keep thinking. God is not scared of your questions. Any faith worth having can survive contact with reality.

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  Kofi2d ago

  I once heard a preacher say 'if the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.' Then I asked him which biblical dietary laws he keeps and whether he's stoned any disobedient children lately. He had a lot of suddenly complicated reasons why those parts don't apply. So we're ALL picking and choosing. The question is whether we're doing it honestly.

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  Reese3d ago

  I was a pastor for 22 years. I left the ministry not because I lost faith in God, but because I could no longer stand at a pulpit and tell people the Bible was inerrant when I knew the manuscript history, the editorial layers in the Torah, the theological tensions between Matthew and John. I didn't stop believing. I stopped pretending. And that cost me everything I had built.

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  Zara3d ago

  Growing up in a King James Only church, I was told that questioning the Bible was the same as questioning God. I internalized that so deeply that when I had real doubts in college I almost had a breakdown because I thought I was sinning by thinking. Years later I'm okay. But I want people to understand: the way we talk about this issue has real psychological consequences for real people. Treating doubt as spiritual attack is genuinely harmful.

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  Avery3d ago

  Blaming Satan for a theology question is not an argument. It's a way of making inquiry itself feel dangerous. That's not faith, that's fear dressed up in spiritual language.

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  Morgan2d ago

  im 17 and in youth group and we literally get told never to read commentary that questions the bible. i read this thread and my mind is spinning. not in a bad way. in a way where i feel like someone finally let me say out loud what i've been thinking for two years. i dont know what i believe about all this but i know i want to actually think about it

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  Theo3d ago

  The Bible is the Word of God. Full stop. I don't need a seminary degree to understand that. My grandmother believed it, my mother believed it, I believe it, and when I stand before God I'll be glad I did. All this 'scholarly' deconstruction is just people who want permission to ignore what it says.

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  Alex T.2d ago

  What gets me is that Christians who demand inerrancy almost never actually read the Bible straight through. Because if you do — really do — you hit Ezekiel 23, Numbers 31, the different accounts of Judas's death, Paul vs. James on works, the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 — and at that point the 'just read it plainly' position starts to require some serious acrobatics. The people most confident in inerrancy are sometimes the least familiar with the text.

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  Noah3d ago

  The 'you become the authority' argument assumes the only alternative to inerrancy is total subjectivity, and that's just not true. Scholars, communities, traditions, and careful hermeneutics all constrain interpretation. You ALSO interpret — you just don't acknowledge that you do. Saying 'I just read what it says' is the least self-aware thing a person can say about reading ancient texts translated across three languages and two thousand years.

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  Elena T.3d ago

  The honest position is that God used human authors as they were — with their personalities, limitations, cultural contexts, and yes, their own theological agendas — to produce something that, in its totality, reliably points us toward Jesus Christ. That doesn't undermine inspiration. It makes it more miraculous, not less. A God who can only speak through a robot isn't much of a God.

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  Liam1d ago

  If you genuinely believe the Bible is just a human book about God — interesting but fallible — then I want you to answer honestly: on what basis do you call yourself a Christian rather than just a person who finds Jesus inspiring? If He wasn't raised, if we can't trust the accounts, if Paul was just working out his own theology, what exactly are you holding onto? I'm not asking to be cruel. I'm asking because I think that's the real question underneath this one.

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  Leo T.3d ago

  Did anyone ever stop to ask WHY the canon was closed when it was? Because the church — the human, political, sometimes corrupt institutional church — made that call. So even if you believe every word is from God, you're still trusting fallible men to tell you which words those are. The inerrancy of Scripture rests on the authority of an institution most inerrancy defenders don't even trust.

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  Alex2d ago

  Here's what nobody's saying: infallibility and inerrancy are not the same doctrine. Many traditions — including most of historic Anglicanism and early Lutheranism — held the Bible to be infallible for what it intends to teach (faith and practice) without claiming scientific or historical precision. Chicago Statement inerrancy is ONE modern position among several legitimate Christian options. Acting like it's the only faithful view is historically ignorant.

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  Priya3d ago

  Here's the thing people keep missing: 'God-breathed' does NOT mean dictated. The Greek word is theopneustos. Paul is saying the writings carry divine authority, not that God was whispering into each author's ear like a secretary. Augustine knew this. Origen knew this. The dictation theory is actually a relatively modern, low-church invention and it ironically produces worse theology, not better.

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  Liam2d ago

  Jesus also quoted the Septuagint, which differs from the Hebrew in places. He used a translation. A human translation with human choices built in. So his use of 'it is written' doesn't actually resolve the textual transmission questions — it embeds him IN them. This is worth sitting with.

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  Yuki3d ago

  respectfully, 'every contradiction has been answered' is not the same as 'every answer is convincing.' i've read the harmonizations for Matthew and Luke's completely different birth narratives. they're not convincing. they're creative. big difference.

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  Casey2d ago

  I'll say what nobody else here will: maybe we need to stop making the Bible the fourth member of the Trinity. Sola scriptura wasn't even how the early church operated. They had Scripture AND bishops AND councils AND apostolic tradition. We stripped three of those away and then act surprised that everyone ends up with their own private religion. The Bible was never meant to stand alone.

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  Drew2d ago

  Transmission accuracy and divine authorship are two different questions though. A perfectly preserved human document is still a human document. The Dead Sea Scrolls prove the Masoretes were careful scribes. They don't prove Moses heard from God.

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  Iris S.3d ago

  I'm a literature professor and a lifelong Catholic and I find this entire debate slightly misframed. The question 'did God write it' vs 'did men write it' sets up a false binary. We believe in a God who acts through human agency — through prophets, through the church, through conscience. The Bible being a fully human document and a fully divine one are not mutually exclusive positions. This is why the doctrine of dual authorship exists. Read Vatican II's Dei Verbum.

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  Diego3d ago

  okay but if god wrote it why does 1 corinthians 7:12 literally have paul say 'I say this, not the Lord'?? paul himself is drawing a distinction between his own opinion and divine command. in the same book. you can't have it both ways

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  Ravi2d ago

  That's a genuinely touching point about your neighbor. But lots of books change lives. The Quran changes lives. The Bhagavad Gita changes lives. Existential transformation is real but it's not unique to Christianity, so it can't by itself prove divine authorship of this particular text. The question still needs an answer.

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  Morgan L.2d ago

  Counterpoint to the whole thread: Jesus treated the Scriptures as authoritative and settled. 'It is written' was His go-to in temptation. If the Son of God trusted the texts enough to stake His identity on them in the wilderness, maybe we should pump the brakes on 'well actually Deuteronomy is probably a later composition.' I'll follow Christ's interpretive method over modern scholarship's.

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  Alex L.3d ago

  that last comment just broke my brain a little ngl

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  Yuki2d ago

  I love how the debate always circles back to the same thing: whatever side you're on, you need to explain why your interpretation of the evidence is more reliable than the other side's interpretation of the evidence. Nobody just 'reads it plain.' Everybody's got a framework they walked in with.

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  Feli2d ago

  What about the Dead Sea Scrolls? The manuscript evidence for the reliability of Old Testament transmission is genuinely staggering. The Isaiah scroll is nearly identical to what we had. These aren't stories passed down by telephone — there was extraordinary care in transmission. The textual preservation argument for reliability is way stronger than critics admit.

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  Morgan3d ago

  This question itself is exactly what Satan uses to get people to start questioning everything until they walk away entirely. I've watched it happen in my own family. First it's 'well the Bible has contradictions.' Then it's 'well maybe Jesus wasn't really raised.' Then it's 'well maybe there is no God.' Be careful what doors you open.

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  Feli2d ago

  I don't care about the academic distinctions. I go to church every Sunday, I raise my kids in the faith, and the Bible changes lives. I've seen it. My neighbor was an addict and the Bible saved his life. You can argue about authorship all you want. I'll be over here watching what the book actually does in people.

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  Hana3d ago

  If the Bible isn't inerrant and fully authoritative then YOU become the authority, deciding which parts to believe and which to dismiss. That's just cafeteria Christianity. You're making yourself God. I'll take the whole book over the smorgasbord approach any day.

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  Casey3d ago

  The 'contradictions' argument is so tired. Every supposed contradiction has been answered by serious scholars. What you call an error I call a harmonization problem that requires actual study, not a Google search.

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