Inerrancy of the Bible

According to a copy of the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible I was perusing a while back, the Catholic Church believes the Bible to be the word of God, but it must be interpreted by a priest or someone educated in the theological basis of the scriptures.

Most conservative Protestants, on the other hand, believe the Bible to be the inerrant and immutable word of God; writings divinely inspired, and preserved through the ages. Events described in scripture are literal historical fact.

Mormons stated their position in 1842 in their 8th Article of Faith: "We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly..." The Latter-day Saint faithful believe that "plain and precious truths" have been removed from the Bible for political purposes, and so they believe that the Bible needs to be augmented with other scripture; The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price.

I have been reading the works of Bart Ehrman, a chairman of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chappel Hill. Ehrman is an expert with over 30 years of experience in studying the extant manuscript copies and fragments of the New Testament, and the origin of the early church. His books include Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew; Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament; Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus); and Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) and others I haven't read yet.

Ehrman started his post-secondary education at Moody Bible Institute, a very conservative theological school; finished his Bachelor's degree at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, and his Masters from Princeton Theological Seminary. Early in his life, he became devoted to understanding the content of the Bible. He speaks and reads Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic and Syriac. He is an expert in the science of "textual criticism" which aims to reconstruct the original text of the New Testament by a rigorous evaluation and comparison of the available manuscript copies.

According the Ehrman, there are more discrepancies between the various manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. There isn't a definitive count, but the number of discrepancies is estimated to be between 200,000 and 400,000. The bulk majority of these are simple copying errors and spelling variants that can be easily corrected, but some of the discrepancies are significant. For example:

• In Luke 22, verses 43-44 do not exist in the earliest and best manuscripts. These are the two verses that depict Jesus as sweating blood as he prayed at Gethsemane. So much for the big guilt trip scriptures
  
• The earliest copies of Mark end with Mary Magdalene finding the tomb empty. There is none of the additional information about the resurrection in our current Bibles.
• Ehrman claims that the four gospels were not written by Mark, Luke, Matthew or John; that the pastoral epistles (Titus, 1 & 2 Timothy) as well as Jude, 1 & 2 Peter, 1,2,& 3 John are pseudipigraphical (falsely attributed to apostles) . In fact, Ehrman claims that only 8 of the Pauline letters are authentic, the rest of the New Testament is either falsely attributed or forged.
• Various edits of the Pauline letters were made to remove or alter references to women as leaders in the early church; most especially in Romans 16:7 where Paul addresses an "apostle" named "Junias," according to Ehrman, the oldest manuscript have this apostle's name as the feminine "Junia" and the masculine version is otherwise unheard of in first century Rome. A female apostle? Imagine that!
  
• There are irreconcilable difference in various biblical accounts, for example the nativity stories in Luke (Jesus presented at the Temple 8 days after birth, then he returns to Nazareth with Joseph and Mary) and Matthew (Jesus is scurried of to Egypt to avoid Herod's slaughter of the innocents until Herod dies), or the contradictions between Paul's activities recorded in Acts and by his own hand in the Pauline letters.
  

Ehrman takes a textual-critical evaluation of the New Testament, and a historians approach to examining the origins of Christianity. Ultimately, he shows that, as the church progressed from the crucifixion until the council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. views of Jesus altered significantly, beginning with the view that Jesus was an itinerant apocalipsist as depicted in the first written gospel of Mark, and ultimately defining Jesus as divine and with God eternally with the last written gospel of John.

To Ehrman, the Bible is a very human book, written by men trying to adapt to the disconfirmation that Jesus (or The Son of Man -- Jesus doesn't refer to himself as the Son of Man in Mark) has not ushered in the Kingdom of God before the generation he taught tasted death and passed away. He theorizes that various other forms of Christianity that competed with what he calls proto-orthodox we defeated and marginalized through the use of organization, a written cannon, and the monetary power of the Roman church, especially after Constantine became emperor Rome.

Ehrman's work would seem to destroy the doctrine of inerrancy, but others disagree (See Randal Price's Searching for the Original Bible).

I'll have more to write on this subject in the future, but for now, I'd like to hear your thoughts.