I find that people don't understand the difference between error in, say, an account you tell in court about your whereabouts during a murder or something and an "error" in the retelling of an account where the sequence of events don't matter as much.
In the instance of a person who is trying to prove they didn't commit murder, not only are that person's whereabouts critically important, but times must be consistent with other things that they can compare the story against (i.e. receipts, time stamps on surveillance footage, etc.). Whether that person went to the store before or after they stopped at home is important because the time it takes to get to the store may have given them a window to commit the murder.
But in the instance of the Bible we talk about how it is infallible. We throw words around like "perfect" or "infinite"… and then people trying to prove the Bible to be infallible or imperfect throw those words right back in our faces… and rightfully so. We are not on our game. We say that God is perfect… but perfect is a description of some kind of state of being. So is God perfectly square? Perfectly round? Perfectly moral? Perfectly white? Perfectly seasoned? Perfectly moral I think is a good description of God, but the other descriptions are ridiculous. My point is that we throw around this idea of perfection and yet many of us rarely consider what we mean by that. God is perfectly moral, He is consistent, what he tells you is right will be right regardless of sins he lets us repent for. Murder is always a sin and is always wrong regardless of whether we are people who lived under the Law or people who are fortunate enough to live under Grace. It will be wrong when we live under the restored kingdom and it was wrong before Cain ever slew Able. He is perfectly moral. In that sense HE is perfect.
We also say God is infallible, and He is so long as you understand what that means. God has put his faith in some people that have really messed up. Does that mean God made a mistake or God was wrong? No, if you think that then you're looking at infallibility wrong. Making a choice that doesn't work out the way you had hoped (because people have free will and don't always do what they say they'd do) doesn't mean you were wrong.
But we're talking about the Bible itself and we are debating it's infallibility. Let's go back to our murder trial for a moment. In a murder trial, the murder suspect's story has a goal, and that goal is to show that the murder suspect couldn't possibly have committed the murder. So a few minutes here and there are crucial, as I said earlier. If the timeline of the story leaves the suspect unaccounted for for 30 minutes, then the suspect is in trouble because 30 minutes is plenty of time to commit a murder. So his story better be infallible in regards to times and locations and sequences of events. Infallible means it can't possibly be wrong. Oh, but wait… when the suspect (who is actually innocent in this scenario I'm describing) described a moment when he went to the store… but instead of saying he bought some toilet paper, he bought some paper plates. Does that add or subtract anything from what matters about his story? What matters about his story are times and locations and sequences of events. The specificity of an item being purchased may not matter at all in trial. And so what is important about the suspect's interpretation of the events is still without mistake because where it matters, everything lines up.
So in the Bible you have the Gospels and there are minor discrepancies between the accounts. Maybe Jesus performed a one miracle in Luke at a different time in the sequence of events than he did in John. How important are the sequence of events in this case? I mean clearly they are important to some degree, for instance if one Gospel, say John, had Jesus dying, being placed in the tomb, and the rock was never put in place… but in Matthew Jesus died, was put in the tomb, and the rock WAS put into place then that calls into question the truth of the idea that Jesus' body disappearing was miracle. But that doesn't happen in the Gospels.
However, if in the gospels Jesus turned water into wine (and I'm just sort making stuff up now) and then in Luke he went to Thermopylae briefly, but in Mark he stops somewhere else… but then in both accounts they line back up with Jesus healing the blind man, does that really ruin everything? Can you call that a mistake? Perhaps both tellings are true, but one omitted one event. Omitting something from an account isn't wrong if it has no bearing on the crux of the issue. We need to look at what we're trying to prove. We're trying to prove that Christ performed miracles and that he was resurrected. Discrepancies in the accounts are not marks of fallibility, and actually discrepancy would be the wrong word. A discrepancy in a story is literally the incompatibility of two or more facts. A difference in two accounts CAN be a discrepancy but it can also easily be just the mark of a different perspective focused on slightly different details.
If my friend and I both witnessed the same UFO, we may both notice different details that will make each of our stories unique. The main details should line up, 1) We spotted it in the distance, 2) it crept closer and closer until it was just about overhead, 3) then it shot straight up and disappeared. Those facts can all easily line up. In my story, though, I was so focused on the shape and the lights that I lost track of time and it felt like the craft was only there for a minute or two… but I also give a lot of details about the shape of the craft, and the colors, and how it moved, and the sounds. Whereas my friend was a bit more panicked and trying to figure out where it was going so it felt longer to him and we gave more details about locations, like it was spotted heading towards us from the southeast and shifted direction briefly before heading back towards us, and then it shot up into the sky.
Two different stories, both true. I didn't remember that it shifted direction, or maybe I did but I said it went a different direction. My friend didn't remember the color of the craft maybe. But we both get the main points of the story across effectively.
Basically folks, these words like perfect and infallible get us into trouble sometimes because people trying to prove Christianity wrong look at these words as points of weakness that will allow them to poke holes. If the Bible is 100% literally true (which some people say… it drives me nuts when they say it), then someone who doesn't like religion will only have to find one time when the Bible isn't literally true. The problem is, there are TONS of times when the Bible isn't literal. There is figurative language in the Bible… Jesus isn't really a lamb, folks. He's not a branch, he's not a line. The fire of Gehenna is not eternal, it had a beginning and it clearly had an end (that ancient garbage heap isn't burning any more). So if you arguing that the Bible is 100% literal, then you're going to lose. If you say God is perfect, then you need to think about the capacities in which God is perfect. If you say God is infinite, then again, you need to think of the capacities in which God is infinite. And you need to be careful. If you say that God knows everything, then what about when the Bible says God couldn't even fathom the evil that human kind would perform (I forget the specific verse, but it's there)? What is your answer to that question?
And if you are someone who is arguing the Bible IS fallible (even if you're blaming it on human error) then you need to be equally careful. Again, where are the mistakes and ARE they mistakes? Is a slight difference between two stories really crucial to the entirety of the Gospels? What is the Bible trying to prove? If the differences between the stories don't affect the overall narrative being presented then I'd hardly call them mistakes.
It is often a fool's errand to go nitpicking. And I think that's the problem with a lot of these debates… they are too focused on minor details and shifting the rules. They want to take a commonly held and true belief (that the Bible is God breathed and infallible) and they want to boil that down into an assertion that the Bible is 100% literally true… and that's just two simplistic a way to look at it. It's not even reasonable to read a newspaper 100% literally. "Mitt Romney is leaning a bit left of his peers when it comes to tax reform." If I read that 100% literally, I wouldn't know what the heck it was saying? Mitt Romney is leaning left? Is his left leg shorter than his right?! No! it's figurative language regarding political beliefs.
Sorry, rant over.
EDIT: forgive me for any spelling errors or using "Their" when I should have used "There" I do know the difference but I type fast than I think sometimes.
