I had a healthy distrust of theology by the time we started the study, so it was relatively easy for me to shove all of that aside — throw it on a heap, burn it, and cast the ashes to the winds. However, as sure as I was about God’s will for us to conduct the study without any preconceived notions, there  were two foundational understandings that seemed to go without saying. The two that undergirded the study were the veracity of the Bible and understanding that Jesus is the Son of God/Savior. One of these came under scrutiny almost as soon as we started.

As we read and discussed the text, we sometimes ran into trouble because what we read just didn’t make sense. A word would seem to be out of place or just *odd* given the context of the passage or sentence. At those times, we would look at other versions of the Bible to see if they all agreed. Invariably, the versions of the Bible disagreed on how it should have been translated. They never all agreed on how it should read. To add to the confusion we learned that sometimes it depended on the source of the text as to which word was even supposed to be translated.

We learned that the Bible as we know it did not come from one source. There was no original Bible. The Bible is actually a compilation of what used to be individual writings that were put together like an anthology and declared to be authoritative by theological leadership. Nevertheless, even that is not entirely the picture. Some of what we know as the Bible’s earliest manuscripts come from scraps of paper containing pieces of pages. These scraps are compared with each other and often they are not identical in content.

It’s easy to understand how that can happen when we understand that there was no printing press, so to get a copy of something, someone would have to literally look at a manuscript and write what they saw – hand copy it. As far as it is known, we have no true originals to check our current version against, but those we have are actually copies of copies. You can imagine the errors that could be made when copying from one person’s handwriting to another.  Whatever errors, changes, and even notes that were made by one person were copied by the next person and understood to be from the original.

Added to this dilemma is the issue of verbal transmission. Before any of it was written down, it was only verbally passed on from one person to another? Remember the game where one person would whisper something in another person’s ear, and they would whisper it to the next person until it was whispered around the room back to the original person? It always came back altered if not completely different.

The theology of the development of the Bible is that God, through His Holy Spirit, guided the development from verbal transmission, to hand-copied transmission, to accepted authoritative compilation culminating into an “inerrant” Bible. The term “inerrancy of the Bible” does not mean the text is without error, but that the teaching, central meaning, and understandings derived from the text are true.

That there are many versions (not identical) of the same text that disagree begs the question — if God, through his holy spirit, orchestrated the development of “THE Bible” — then which version?

• Not all Bibles have the same books.
• Not all bibles with the same books have the books in the same order.
• Not all bibles with the same books in the same order include all of the same passages.
• Not all passages of bibles with the same books, in the same order, with the same number of books, use all of the same words.
• Finally, they aren’t all translated the same.

So when we encountered these kinds of problems during the study, we looked for as much scholarship as we could find on the passage, and prayerfully accepted the most probable meaning. Often those meanings were very important to understanding the passage, and to understanding an idea that would help us to understand subsequent passages. Whenever scripture is mentioned in the Bible, it refers to what is best known as the Old Testament because the New Testament did not exist yet.

In the end, we understood that no version of the Bible could be declared 100% accurate. None is perfect. Since they aren’t perfect, did God provide an imperfect Guide by which we should understand? Were we studying “what God has to say to us” as was our understanding when we started the study?

• The Bible, regardless of the version, rarely quotes God.
• It is not a compilation of “words spoken by God.”
• God never mentions the Bible, anywhere in the Bible, in any version of the Bible.
• No prophets prophesy about the Bible’s development or its authority
• No heroes of the bible mention the Bible.