The Inerrancy of Scripture Part 2

Alright, there we go. They tried to get me to wear the Britney Spears microphone again, but I successfully resisted the temptation to that worldly thing. But it makes it a little bit difficult because if you're holding this and trying to do mouse things on a track pad, it's a little bit of a challenge.

Good to see all of you here this morning. I can't really see you because the light's coming from that direction. So you all can stick your tongues out at me, do things like that. I really wouldn't notice it, except for the people over on the side.

I would be able to see you. It's good to have all of you here on a Saturday morning. I know there's a lot of things you could be doing. It's a beautiful day. You could be out running and hiking and biking.

And if I were at home, that's what I'd be doing. Probably wouldn't be at a conference, that's for sure. But it is good to be with you this morning. If you were not here last evening, I apologize because last evening was sort of the introduction to where we are this morning.

We have a lot of topics to cover. If you've looked at the subject list, there's a lot of things to cover today. And so we can't get into everything as in-depth as maybe I would like, but hopefully this will be a beginning.

I do have a small book called Scripture Alone that does have chapters on a lot of these issues. For example, we want to have time today to even talk about the issue of the canon of Scripture. Why do we have the books in the Bible that we have?

Why don't we have the Gospel of Thomas? That's a whole other area of discussion. There are excellent works out there. I would highly recommend taking a look at at least the brief presentation that I make on that subject in Scripture Alone.

I highly recommend the books of Dr. Michael Kruger to you on that particular subject. He has a blog called Canon Fodder, C-A-N-O-N, not C-A-N-N-O-N. There is a difference between the two. But those are just some of the areas that we won't be able to really touch upon because of the time limits upon us.

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Authority and Sola Scriptura

What I wanted to do very quickly at the beginning, as I mentioned last evening, was to sort of just run through the major affirmations of the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. And then I want to try to sneak in, if we have the time, looking at a couple of texts that are frequently raised in regards to alleged contradiction in the Bible, just to give you somewhat of an illustration of how we would deal with these issues, how we would respond to these things, and some of the important things that we need to do in rightly handling the text of Scripture itself.

So I'm just going to try to run through these very quickly. Unfortunately, my system is projecting two different screens, so I'm going to have to look at them with you and turn away from you in the process.

I don't mean to do that. But very quickly, Article 1 of the Chicago Statement says, We affirm that the Holy Scriptures are to be received as the authoritative Word of God. We deny the Scriptures receive their authority from the Church, Tradition, or any other human source.

And that is a rather important affirmation, one that I've defended many times. It really is a statement of sola scriptura, that the Scriptures have an authority that is different than any other kind of authority because they are God-breathed.

The Church is not God-breathed. The Church is important. But the Church is the Bride of Christ, and the Bride of Christ wants to hear the voice of Christ. Once a Church puts itself in the position of having rulership over the Scriptures, and once a Church says only we can interpret the Scriptures, as Rome has done, there is no longer an ability to have an external source that can bring Reformation to the Church.

And so it's very important that we affirm sola scriptura, the fact that the Scriptures are the sole infallible rule of faith. We can have lesser rules of faith, confessions of faith, and things like that, but they are always underneath Scripture.

They are always lesser than Scripture in authority. They can never be equal to or superior to. In light of what we said last night, of what the Scripture is, since it's God speaking, then there cannot be a higher authority than God's own speech.

And so as important as Church, tradition, or anything else might be, those things cannot be superior to the Scriptures themselves. Article 2, we affirm the Scriptures are the supreme written norm by which God binds the conscience, that the authority of the Church is subordinate to that of Scripture.

We deny that Church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the Bible, a further statement of Scriptural sufficiency, and a further statement of sola scriptura.

Let me just mention very briefly that, and we will talk about this a little bit more later on, when we talk about the concept of prophets and revelation outside of Scripture, there are many people who would be identified as non-Catholics, and hence, if you only have Catholics and Protestants, they would be allegedly called Protestants.

But if your Church does not seek to specifically practice sola scriptura, if your Church does not specifically seek to emphasize the sufficiency of Scripture as the final rule of authority, and a closed canon, if your Church basically has an appendix at the end, after the book of Revelation, where you have all sorts of people saying, thus saith the Lord, thus saith the Lord, thus saith the Lord, so that technically the Bible keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, then you're not standing with the Reformers.

You're in a different group, and that particular group is difficult to define, and I'm certainly not going to be attempting to defend that kind of perspective. I believe that God has given us His Word, and He gave it to us at a particular time for a particular purpose, and that He is not giving further books of Scripture after that.

God has a purpose for giving the Church what is sufficient for the Church to exist and to function as the Church. And unless you come up with the idea that, well, there needs to be a refounding of the Church or something along those lines, all this runs into a problem, and that is that God's final revelation is Jesus Christ.

And so unless you're going to say that there are certain things about Jesus Christ that He didn't tell His apostles and that He waits 2 ,000 years to tell His Church about, there's no reason for further Scripture, further revelation, anything like that at all.

That's certainly been the Christian position for a very, very, very long time. Church creeds and councils and things like that can have great authority. They can be very important. I do not downplay them.

But they always must be subordinate to the Scriptures and to the Word of God along those lines. We affirm that the written Word in its entirety is revelation given by God. We deny the Bible is merely a witness to revelation or only becomes revelation in encounter or depends on the responses of men for its validity.

Let me just ask very quickly, sort of help to wake you up this morning, in case Starbucks was closed on your way in. That's a tragedy for some of you, I realize, but, oh, you don't have Starbucks. Mug and Bean, sorry.

It's Starbucks everywhere else in the world, but evidently they won't pay the proper bribes to get in here. So, what? You all know that was true. That's, that's, that's, you know it. Anyway, how many of you recognize the background of this article and what it's specifically responding to?

I'd just be wondering if you feel confident you know exactly what's being referred to. Or how about a specific name of a theologian? Yes, Karl Barth, that's exactly right. This is a statement and this was, I sort of resonate with this because I did my first master's degree at Fuller Seminary back in the 80s.

And I sort of feel like Karl Barth was my homeboy that whole time because he was just so big at that time. I got sick and tired of the constant citation of Karl Barth. But basically this is an affirmation of the fact that the scripture is in and of itself divine revelation.

It doesn't become divine revelation when I encounter it. Barth had an odd, well Barth was trying to respond to the wild liberalism of Schleiermacher and others of his day. But still it was not a thoroughly grounded or historical perspective that Barth took at this particular point.

And that's what article 3 is all about in case you looked this up and read it. Article 4, we affirm that God who made mankind in his image has used language as a means of revelation. We deny that human language is so limited by our creatureliness.

That it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation. We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God's work of inspiration. So this is just a basic affirmation over against some who would say well you can't call this divine revelation because God's thoughts are so much higher than ours.

And our language is corrupted, our language is limited. Some languages are better than other languages as to their ability to communicate nuances of meaning. There are some languages that have significantly deeper grammatical and syntactical capacity, vocabulary, so on and so forth than other languages.

And so there have been those who have come up with the idea that well you can't really affirm this is God speaking because this would be too limiting for God. Something along those lines. This is an affirmation that God made humanity and that God is...

We're not saying that human language can exhaust divine meaning. But that it's sufficient for the communication of divine meaning. As we saw last evening, Jesus held men accountable for what the Word of God said.

And so obviously on that level, it is sufficient for God's purposes. And that's what's being said here. Article 5, we affirm that God's revelation in the Holy Scriptures was progressive. We deny that later revelation which may fulfill earlier revelation ever corrects or contradicts it.

We further deny that any normative revelation has been given since the completion of the New Testament writing. So this touches on a number of things. When we talk about progressive, the point is that you do not have in the book of Genesis the full revelation of everything that God is going to do.

That the Incarnation, for example, took place in time and history. That Old Testament revelation looked forward to New Testament fulfillment. That there are things that clearly are revealed with much more fullness in the later portions of Scripture than they are in previous portions of Scripture.

But that is not to say that the previous portions of Scripture were wrong and had to be corrected later on. In other words, we don't have, as many Muslims have in their theology, the doctrine of abrogation, where you can have something that was revealed earlier, but then if something is revealed afterward, you can have X and then not X.

And you have to figure out what's abrogated what, and so on and so forth. That is not the understanding. And certainly if you think that when we look at the Old Testament law, for example, we're talking about completion rather than fulfillment, then you've missed the point there.

And we further deny that any normative revelation has been given since the completion of New Testament writings. It is a clear assertion that the canon is closed, that God had a purpose in the finality of the revelation in Jesus Christ, and that there is no need for further revelation after that.

Now, obviously, many people today would disagree with that. The Mormons disagree with that. Of course, I don't consider Mormonism to be a Christian religion. In fact, I have said many times before that Islam is considerably closer to Christianity than Mormonism ever could be.

And I say that as a person who knows Mormonism very, very, very well. But Mormonism is an extremely polytheistic religion. They believe in an unlimited number of gods. And when you have a religion that makes Lucifer the spirit brother of Jesus, you missed the boat badly, very badly, foundationally, a long time ago.

So they're way out in left field someplace with their particular theology. But obviously, they have further revelations in the Book of Mormon, Doctrine, Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price. But there are many people who would say that this is too limiting today, that we need new revelation to deal with new technologies, nuclear war, gene splicing, etc., etc., etc.

And rather than the idea that God's word gives us the foundations, the guidelines, the principles that we then apply to the situations that we face in the world that God has placed us in today to ask us to minister and to be a testimony to Him.

Article 6, we affirm the whole of Scripture and all its parts down to the very words of the original were given by divine inspiration. We deny that the inspiration of Scripture can rightly be affirmed of the whole without the parts or of some parts but not the whole.

And certainly, there have been many people who have attempted to basically say, well, you know, we don't have any problem seeing, say, Psalm 19 or Psalm 119 as being inspired but, I don't know, there's parts of Joshua that are really questionable and there are other sections maybe in Ezekiel someplace or just a little bit too weird for me and all those genealogies, nah.

The imprecatory Psalms definitely go out, that type of thing, as if you can pick and choose which parts you want to accept. The idea is that God has a purpose not only in the inspiration of Scripture but then in the giving of Scripture to the church and that the idea that we can then go, well, okay, yeah, maybe in the past this was relevant but it's really not relevant for us any longer today or things like that.

This pick and choose methodology is inappropriate. And if there's even more there in regards to the concept of maybe what's inspired is the general gist of a passage rather than the words, things like that also fall into this particular section.

We affirm that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit through human writers gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us.

We deny that inspiration can be reduced to human insight or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind. We touched on this just a little bit last evening. Remember I talked a little bit about Peter's discussion of men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

There are some translations because of a textual variant there that say holy men spoke from God but I have a real problem with that because as I mentioned last evening, it's not the character of the men, it's not their insights into God that makes those words special.

It is the actual work of the Spirit of God that accomplishes that. The locus of inspiration is in the actual writing of the Scripture itself, not in the understandings or musings of any of the prophets or apostles themselves and that's the affirmation that is being made here.

We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared. We deny that God in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose overrode their personalities.

So like I said briefly last evening, it is very easy for someone reading the original writings whether in Hebrew or Greek to see the difference between different authors. Paul's style, vocabulary, cadence even of writing is quite different than John's or quite different than Luke's, etc., etc., even in the Old Testament.

You can detect the differences between various of the writers of the Psalms and certainly the prophets have a different way of expressing themselves. God is big enough to use men. I mean He creates us, He makes us, and He is big enough to make the apostle Paul the person that he was so that he does not have to turn Paul into an MP3 recorder or a dictation machine or what the dragon dictate.

That's the program that I've used on my computer, which is pretty cool. It's sort of Star Trek-ish, you know, hello computer, that type of thing. And some of you know what I'm referring to there. And some of those things, uh-oh, everybody's going, he's a Trekkie.

Oh, no, man. Some of you just tuned me out. I can't trust anyone who's a Trekkie.

Well, okay.

Anyway, don't get me into that, but we don't have to have a dragon dictate type theory of how the authors of the scriptures worked. God is big enough to use each individual person as He has created them to give us exactly what He wants us to have in His words.

We affirm that inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the biblical authors were moved to speak and write. We deny the finitude or fallenness of these writers by necessity or otherwise introduced distortion or falsehood into God's Word.

And so, positively, we're not saying that because Paul is being carried along by the Holy Spirit in writing the Book of Romans that Paul then becomes omniscient, that he has knowledge of all things. The point is that as you're being carried along by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit's not going to lead you into error.

We certainly have to affirm that the Holy Spirit of God can give revelation that is beyond the natural knowledge of the individual receiving it, or you could never have anything divine given to man. If you limit what can be given to what the man himself knows, then you could never have anything supernatural revealed in God's Word.

And so, for example, we can look at the words of the prophecy in Isaiah 9, verse 6, and we can recognize the depth that is there, and we can see that it was deeper than even Isaiah might have been able to understand in his particular context at that particular time, but that doesn't mean that God cannot reveal those things.

And so, we're even told in Scripture that the men of old longed to look into these things, that angels longed to look into these things that now have been revealed in the coming of Jesus Christ. But at the same time, what they wrote made sense to them.

What they wrote had meaning at that time, even if the fullness of that meaning would not necessarily be understood until a later date. And so, you look at almost any Messianic prophecy, and almost any Messianic prophecy had a fulfillment at that time, but that wasn't the only fulfillment that it was meant to have.

And so, if you limit it solely to what human beings would know, we could have no divine revelation whatsoever. And so, the other affirmation here, really this is an affirmation of inerrancy. That is, that guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the biblical authors were moved to speak and write.

So, if they addressed something and made factual assertions about something, then the Holy Spirit of God is not going to lead them into error on those matters. It does not follow, then, that if the Apostle Paul decided to write a treatise on particle physics, that he would have gotten it right.

He didn't know what particle physics were, and he didn't need to know those things to be used in the way that the Holy Spirit used him to give us those sections of Scripture that he was responsible for.

And then, of course, you have those who would say that, well, the finitude, the fallenness of writers obviously introduces distortion or falsehood into God's Word. This whole subject of inerrancy is irrelevant because you have fallen creatures being utilized.

Well, they were fallen creatures, and no one is asserting that Paul or James or Luke were infallible beings and were sinless beings. The issue is, can God accomplish His purpose in a world where sin exists?

And, of course, we recognize that He can and He does. And since it is His purpose to give us His Word, the sinfulness of man is not going to keep Him from being able to accomplish that. And certainly, given Jesus' view, His citation of the Old Testament and His assertion that it was God speaking, it was not Jesus' view that the sinfulness of those prophets somehow automatically resulted in a distortion of the Word of God.

We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent they faithfully represent the original.

Ironically, those are almost the words of the King James translators, if you've ever read the actual introduction to the King James Version. The King James translators said even the meanest translation that is faithful to the originals can be called the Word of God.

It's interesting, a lot of folks won't really listen to what the King James translators said about the necessity of revision, the use of the Greek septuagint, all sorts of things like that. But anyway, it's very similar to that, and this is a direct assertion that when we talk about both inspiration, what's the locus of inspiration?

The original. We're not talking about the inspiring of the Latin Vulgate, for example. This would be directly against theology that developed and then undeveloped within Roman Catholicism. There was a period of time when Rome exalted the Latin Vulgate to the position of the final authority, even over the original Greek language.

And one pope even put out an infallible Vulgate, which had to be very quickly withdrawn because there were so many errors in it, which is always somewhat embarrassing. But this would speak directly to that, in that inspiration, and hence inerrancy, refers to the autographic text.

Let me just give you an example. There is a codex I mentioned to you briefly last evening. It's called Codex D, Beze Cantabrigiensis, which is a 5th century manuscript that really is sort of the living Bible of the early church.

I don't know why this author did what he did, but there are some odd additions to it. It is, by the way, the first manuscript that contains the story of the woman taken in adultery. And it also has such weird things as when Peter is released from prison and he's going back to the Christians, remember, and stands outside and I think is his angel and all the rest of that stuff, that he sends, as I recall, it's either 29 or 39 steps to the street.

It inserts this weird number in there, and no other manuscript had ever done it. So let's use that example. Is that an argument against inerrancy? No, because we're not talking about the autographic text.

There's no possibility that it is the original text. It's clearly ascribed literally 400 years later, making some type of a commentary that he thought was relevant. Thankfully, if we only had that one manuscript, we wouldn't know it was a commentary, but we have all sorts of other manuscripts so we can detect these things.

But it is not an argument related to inerrancy, and a lot of people get confused at this point when you talk about textual variations, you talk about the longer ending of Mark, things like that. They think, well, this has something to do with inerrancy.

That has to do with the issue of preservation and the method that God uses of preservation. It is not an issue in regards to inerrancy, because inerrancy has to do with the nature of inspiration and the result of that in the writing of the scriptures themselves.

And so a lot of people get those categories confused, and this is attempting to deal with that particular issue. We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs.

We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant. There are many people who do argue that unless you have the originals themselves, that you can't even begin to discuss the issue of inerrancy.

And I absolutely affirm and have challenged many people to debate this very issue. I absolutely affirm that we have in the New Testament manuscripts every single word ever written by the apostles, that was considered canonical by the church.

Now, Paul wrote other things we don't have, but Paul's grocery list is not an inspired document, and there is no reason for the Spirit of God to maintain Paul's grocery list. We don't need to know whether he liked Cheetos or Fritos.

It's not relevant to us, okay? And so the issue of preservation is the matter, and I affirm that if God extended the effort to inspire the scriptures, he's then going to extend the effort to preserve those scriptures because he has a purpose for those scriptures in the church.

They are to give guidance to the church. Romans chapter 15, those things were written for our guidance, for our encouragement, for our instruction. God has a purpose in giving us the scriptures, and so just as he supernaturally gives them to us, he's then going to guide the church in the recognition of what those books are, that is, the passive recognition of the canon, as well as in the preservation of those books, even over against the tremendous efforts to destroy the scriptures that especially took place during the first couple of hundred years under Roman persecution, where it was even illegal to produce or to own the Christian scriptures at many times.

And thousands of manuscripts were destroyed by the Romans, especially between about 250 and the end of persecution in AD 313. Thousands of manuscripts were destroyed. Yet despite all of that, God has preserved his word.

And so we deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. I don't know about you, but something tells me as I look around the world, if we had the autographs, we would undoubtedly be worshipping the autographs.

They would be in some shrine someplace, and there would be people going in there and claiming miracles and trying to get healed by this, that, or the other thing. That would be a problem. But I affirm that if it was written, we still possess it.

Now, I don't have time to go into this. I probably should have looked at the topics and said, I need to stick this in someplace. But like I said last evening, I have an entire presentation on this subject, on the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts.

But one of the things that I bring out in that is that basically one of the things that we are facing when you look at the manuscripts of the New Testament that we possess today is that it's like we have a 10 ,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

Now, which would be better? To have 10 ,100 pieces or to have 9 ,900 pieces? It's obviously better to have all the 10 ,000 pieces you need and then have to determine what the extra 100 are than to actually be missing any portion of that final product that you want to have.

And so what we have in the manuscripts is, later manuscripts tend to expand. For example, almost always titles are expanded. So when you compare the earliest manuscripts to the later manuscripts, He becomes Jesus, Jesus becomes Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus becomes Lord Jesus Christ.

You have an expansion of titles. And so they tend to be a little bit longer. And so the point is, if we only had 9 ,900 pieces out of 10 ,000, then we'd have a problem because we would not be able to construct the original.

We would not know what that missing portion necessarily said or how it might impact interpretation, etc., etc. That's not the situation that we face. The situation we face is determining those later accretions, not the deletions.

The manuscripts are so widely distributed, and we have so many of them, that it is the opposite situation. We have the 10 ,100 rather than the 10 ,000, which is very important. We further deny this absence renders the assertion of biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.

Many people make that assertion, but it is a category error that they are making. We affirm that Scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses.

Remember last evening someone asked what's the difference between inerrancy and infallibility. Here you see that being illustrated. This is talking about the teaching of Scripture. It will not err in its teaching.

Inerrancy is in regards to its factuality and its accuracy. We deny that it is possible for the Bible to be at the same time infallible and errant in its assertions. Infallibility and inerrancy may be distinguished, but not separated.

Quite true. And here's where you have a lot of people today that just simply don't accept this. I know many conservative people in Baptist churches who have opted, and this is really what's become common even amongst conservative Roman Catholics, is the Bible is infallible in its teaching, but it's not inerrant in its statements.

Now, how you try to put that together, how you try to make that work, generally for Rome, they make that work by throwing in tradition and the magisterium of the church as the missing authority to sort of prop up the Bible when the Bible is found to be allegedly errant in what it's saying about something.

And so you end up having to have external authorities being brought in. And, of course, once you start bringing in external authorities, then it's, you know, what's the flavor of the day? What external authority are you going to use today?

And you certainly don't have any basis for unity amongst believers in regards to that. So infallibility and inerrancy may just be distinguished, but not separated from one another. A lot of people do not accept that today, that's for certain.

We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit. We deny that biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive assertions in the fields of history and science.

We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood. Now, obviously, here again, this is the very essence of the type of assertion that is found to be so reprehensible within the academy today.

Because the academy, the Christian realm of scholarship, has capitulated on this issue and, in essence, says that the authority of Scripture is limited to spiritual, religious, and redemptive themes. And that, hence, everything else that it addresses, whether it be historical issues, whether it be scientific issues.

And, of course, the Bible is not meant to be an exhaustive history of mankind on earth. It is not meant to be a science textbook. I do have problems with those who try to make the Bible something other than what it is.

It's not its intention to be some type of extensive work of scientific inquiry on this issue or that issue. You could not use the Bible, for example, as a field guide to the identification of South African reptiles.

It was never intended to function in that fashion. And if you try to push it to do that type of thing, you are abusing the text and you are not respecting the authors and their original intention in giving us what they gave to us.

And yet there are some people who do try to do those very things. But obviously, for many, many people today, there are certain scientific hypotheses within the secular world, naturalistic materialism, that runs directly counter to the idea that God is the creator of all things.

And this is the real area of conflict, is what is going to be your final authority? What are you going to accept as your final authority? The ever-changing theories of men or the revelation from God himself, that really becomes the issue.

We affirm the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture. We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose.

We further deny that inerrancy is negated by biblical phenomenon such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.

Now, wow, that's a long, long section. And what in the world is being said there? Well, we could actually park on almost any one of those phrases and expand upon them for quite some time. We just simply don't have time to do so.

What is being affirmed is when we talk about alien to its usage or purpose, for example, one of the objections that I encountered early on in my ministry as a young person was the inclusion of a rabbit amongst the ruminants in the Old Testament, amongst one who chews the cud.

Well, technically a rabbit doesn't have the specific internal mechanism to chew the cud like other certain mammals do. And so someone would say, well, see, the Bible was in error in saying that the rabbit chews the cud.

Well, there is a sense in which the rabbit does chew the cud in the sense of rabbits will re-eat their own excrement. And so they're in essence doing that. But I think that misses the point. The usefulness of this observation about rabbits had to be useful to the people of that day.

And the people of that day were not doing anatomy and physiology lessons on rabbits. They weren't cutting them open and identifying various internal organs and classifying them and doing things like that.

That's a much more modern situation. It's not that they weren't cutting open rabbits, but it was primarily to eat them. And even if you did do a wonderful study of internal rabbit anatomy, you'd have to be able to necessarily preserve your observations for future generations much anyways.

The point is that if you look at a rabbit, the rabbit sits there and it goes, right? It looks like it's chewing the cud. I don't know what it's doing, but it looks like it's chewing the cud. And it was an observational thing.

It made it useful to be able to identify certain kinds of animals from other kinds of animals. And so it's taking a modern standard based upon concepts that did not exist at the time, reading them back upon a functional description that creates an alleged error or problem in the text of scripture.

And very, very often, and I know there are entire websites dedicated to this kind of stuff, biblicalerrency .org by Dennis McKenzie and other websites like that. This is what they're doing. They're not dealing with the text as it was originally written.

They're not dealing with it in the context in which it was originally written. Instead, they are attempting to apply a different standard to it and creating errors based upon the removal of it from its own context.

And so, for example, there's a description of one of the lavers in the temple. And it says it's three times farther in circumference than, so in other words, it's very close to pi. The value of pi, we all know the value of pi, right?

3 .141592654, and that's even rounded off. We all know how, for example, to drive an alien out of a computer is to ask it to compute the final number, the value of pi, right? The only people chuckling are people who know the original Star Trek series, okay?

Because that's how they got they drove an alien out of the Enterprise computer by instructing it to compute the value of pi to the final value, and it's a never-ending number. So you can't do it, but it worked.

It drove the alien out of the computer. Hey, come on. It was the late 1960s. Give him a break, you know? Have you seen Bill Shatner recently? He's not looking so good. So things have changed. Anyway, so I've actually had atheists say, well, see, see, it's 3 .141592654, not 3, as if the purpose in giving the dimensions of this laver, this round laver in the temple, was to give you the exact value of pi or something along those lines.