A family member just graduated from a “Christ-centered” liberal arts college, and was telling me some of the things he learned. One teacher showed photographs of the various “Dead Sea scrolls”, and made the claim that there were minor discrepancies in the scriptures, caused by different scribes of the time, and that we may not “have all the picture”, so-to-speak. I replied that certain people try to subtly foist such false teaching on the Church, in order to discredit God’s word. He disagreed, and said his faith is strong, but believes this to be true. What do you think?
It’s hard to discuss things like this because the real issue is whether the person believes the Bible is the inspired word of God or not. In order to believe that the text has been altered in any meaningful way one has to believe that the Bible is not really the word of God in its totality but only contains God’s word among the words of man. Then the problem becomes trying to decide which is which.
This has always been my big problem with theologians. Many of them seem to think second guessing the Bible is an indication of their intelligence. But God said He would destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to naught the intelligence of the intelligent (1 Cor. 1:19).
Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit Paul wrote that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16) and that’s good enough for me.