The Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy is probably false.

" I think the comment that InquireTruth made concerning Warfield/Hodge rather strengthens my position. " Not quite. Martin Luther was well known for his distaste of the Epistle of James, calling it an "epistle of straw." He put it in the appendixes of his translations and treated it with deuterocanonical authority if he treated it with any at all - this is hardly the practice of an inerrantist. So when one takes a particular quote from a early church writer and claims he is an inerrantist it is a little dangerous considering error and contradiction can too easily be viewed through a western lens and not through the language of a bygone era. It is absolutely anachronistic because there was no formulated understanding of what that even was until the 19th century. ============= Creation Mythology and Neo-Assyrian writings ============= " InquireTruth has placed the Sargon narrative account at the commonly accepted date of 7 BC. This isn't really an issue considering the Church's commonly accepted date for the writing of Exodus by Moses was 1446 BC. " This was a little disingenuous. While I did in fact place the Sargon narrative account at the commonly accepted date of 7 BC, HisLife did not place the authorship of Exodus at its commonly accepted date. The book of Exodus is most likely a compilation of multiple sources from multiple authors writen during the Exilic periods in the 6th and 5th century BC. (http://en.wikipedia.org...). The Documentary Hypothesis is a longstanding view of the authorship of the Torah held by most Old Testament scholars (while theories of redaction are numerous). (http://en.wikipedia.org...) To be fair, the Exodus is probably made up of some very old material, but it is almost universally accepted by scholars that the birth and death narrative of Moses are not among them. Since it seems you hold to a firm Mosaic authorship, one may rightly wonder how it can be seriously contended that Moses wrote of his own death - where neither context or genre bespeaks prophecy. " As to the Creation account, 1) The Young Earth theory is a matter of interpretation. Not all Christians who take the Bible literally believe in a young earth. " Then they're simply not being intellectually honest with themselves or others. There are really no serious Hebrew scholars who consider that the days in Genesis could be construed as anything other than 24 hour days - the epoch idea notwithstanding. " 2) It could easily be argued that Moses, as does Paul, uses truth wherever it is found. Paul on Mars Hill preached to pagans with many beliefs and many gods." This is apologetics - a theodicy. It is certainly possible. But that is not what is in question here. We want to know whether it is probable. Is it more probable that Moses used material that existed a thousand years before he was born but changed all the central figures names and even the deity to reflect what truly happened? Or is it more likely that the authors of Genesis were simply using a common story as a means of allegorically representing a theological truth. Form always follows function. Was the function historical or theological? I have to affirm the latter. " Considering the orthodox belief that all nations ultimately descend from Noah and his family, the recounting of the flood event would have been a certainty, and we should expect such an account to take on variations over time. Thus, the fact that so many cultures have a flood story is more to its credit than to its fault." This is the traditional begging of the question. The truth of your claim presupposes the truth of the matter in question. It is probably true that there was a very severe, localized flood that was subsequently mythologized and became core to the cultural milieu of that region. ========== Textual Variants ========== " Textual variants are well-known, as I stated before. Each person giving his own account of an event reflects a genuine, rather than a borrowed idea. The texts are:" But only one can be true in the strictest sense. I think you may be confusing infallibility with inerrancy. Each Gospel reports something verifiably different thus reflecting that at most one of them can be right in their variation. While they all pretty much report similar accounts, not one of them can be said to represent an ACTUAL account of what was ACTUALLY said above Jesus' head.