God’s Word is settled. A brief video from my @SBTS convocation message yesterday. https://t.co/pdtxt8iON4
— Albert Mohler (@albertmohler) August 24, 2016
Do watch that video; it’s the portion of yesterday’s convocation address that Mohler is proud of, that he wishes to preserve, that he believes is important and tweeted about in order to draw attention to it.
To grasp the intellectual dishonesty of it needs some understanding of the state of Biblical scholarship. There are, literally, hundreds upon hundreds of well-documented textual variations amongst the ancient manuscripts. What is more, there is no translation of them which isn’t susceptible of honest criticism. To evade these difficulties in light of the claim that the Bible is inerrant, Southern Baptists take recourse to something called the original autographs; it is they which are inerrant, not the copied and translated texts subsequently produced by fallible humans. The inerrant version of the Gospel of Mark, for instance, is the text produced by Mark’s own hand (Whomever Mark was; nobody knows.), and nobody has ever seen that text. The oldest extant version of Mark is a copy produced ca. 150 A.D., roughly 80-years after that Gospel was written.
In other words, no living human being has ever laid eyes upon the inerrant version of Mark, or can reasonably expect to. The identical thing may be said of every other book of the Bible. In further words, and on the terms of their own (tap-dancing) evasions, no living human being, including Albert the Pious his Very Self, has ever read the Bible.
Which doesn’t, notice, stop them from mobilizing ignoramuses to demand public policies based upon their fraud. Bah. The cynicism reeks.