perhaps more than any other
debate topic, can become lost in endless details of interpretation and subtle
questions of translation. It can easily seem that to get into the debate
at all requires one to be a Biblical scholar. Fortunately, this is not
the case, particularly when dealing with fundamentalists who claim that the
Bible is free of error and contradiction.
The claim of Biblical inerrancy puts the Christian
in the position of not just claiming that the original Bible was free of
error (and, remember, none of the original autograph manuscripts exist) but
that their modern version of the Bible is the end result of an error-free
history of copying and translation beginning with the originals. Such a
position is so specific that it allows one to falsify it simply by reference to
the Bible itself. For example, Gen 32:30 states, "...for I have seen
God face to face, and my life is preserved." However, John 1:18
states, "No man hath seen God at any time..." Both statements
cannot be true. Either there is an error of fact, or an error of
translation. In either case, there is an error. And if there is an error,
then infallibility of the Bible (in this case the King James Version) is
falsified. A typical defense used here is to look up the meaning of the
original Hebrew / Greek, read that one of the words can have multiple meanings,
and then pick the meaning that seems to break the contradiction. For
example, the Christian might argue that "seen" or "face"
means one thing in the first scripture, and something completely different in
the second. The logical flaw in this approach is that it amounts to
saying that the translator should have chosen to use a different word in one of
the two scriptures in order to avoid the resulting logical contradiction
that now appears in English—that is, the translator made an error. If no
translation error occurred, then an error of fact exists in at least one of the
two scriptures. Appeals to "context" are irrelevant in cases
like this where simple declarative statements are involved such as "no one
has seen God" and "I have seen God." Simply put, no
"context" makes a contradiction or a false statement, like 2 = 3,
true.