“All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching the truth, rebuking error, correcting faults, and giving instruction for right living” (2 Timothy 3:16 GNT).
Another important concept related to 2 Timothy 3:16 concerns the doctrine of “inerrancy.” In this context, “inerrancy” means that the Bible, as originally written, is completely true and doesn’t contain any mistakes. We can clarify this idea by first defining what we mean by “truth.”
When we say that something is “true,” we are saying that it corresponds (or “goes along”) with reality. In other words, “truth” means that we’re talking about the way things really are. With this in mind, we can say that “inerrancy” means that the Bible always talks about the way things really are and the way things really happened with complete accuracy.
This is a critical definition because there are many who believe that the Bible may contain mistakes in scientific or historical matters but is completely true when it comes to spiritual teachings. While this may seem like a good compromise, this “have it both ways” approach creates a problem. After all, if the Bible is inaccurate on relatively minor subjects (such as history), then why should we trust it in spiritual matters?
Inerrancy is important because the Bible claims to be the Word of God. Since it is impossible for God to make a mistake (Psalm 18:30), we should expect the Bible to be mistake-free as well if it is truly what it claims to be in 2 Timothy 3:16.
Nevertheless, there are some important things to remember when it comes to the subject of Biblical inerrancy. The first is that the doctrine of inerrancy doesn’t guarantee that every copy of the Bible ever produced is free of mistakes. For instance, there have been typographic errors that have clearly slipped into various Biblical copies over the years.
Perhaps the best known of these errors occurred in the 16th century when a copy of the Bible translated the seventh commandment from Exodus 20:14 as, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Despite the glaring nature of that mistake, many such examples are simple spelling or punctuation errors. Fortunately, we have the ability to compare many Biblical copies from ancient times and use them to identify and eliminate any “typos” that may exist.
This is one reason why we can be confident that the Bible has been accurately passed down to us even though an occasional error may have slipped into various Biblical copies from time to time. We’ll discuss the accuracy of Biblical transmission down through the ages at greater length beginning next.
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