My Bible is true
by Duke McCall
SBTS President (1956-1981)

My Bible is true and trustworthy. It is the all-sufficient rule of faith and practice. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and thereby I can know who God is and what he has done and what his intentions are for me in my world.

Is your Bible true? I do not mean the original autograph. I mean the copy you have and use. I mean whichever text of the Old Testament or the New Testament or whichever translation you actually study.

This is important because there are those who say that the Bible loses its authority and becomes relatively useless unless it is verbally inspired, inerrant, and infallible, truth without any mixture of error. That is strong language, stronger than the language of the Baptist Faith and Message adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1925 and again in 1963. Obviously such language cannot be applied to The Living Bible, for the translator tells us that he has produced a paraphrase rather than an exact translation. Neither is the popular Good News for Modern Man an exact translation, for it, too, is partially paraphrase. Scholars have also argued about specific portions of the translation in the King James Version, the Revised Standard Version, and the New English Version. Not one of these is precisely accurate without any mixture of error.

Perhaps you use the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Do you use the Hebrew text without the vowels or do you use the much later eight century AD Massoretic vowel pointed text, or do you prefer the Septuagint?

For the New Testament, do you prefer the Westcott and Hort Greek text, the Nestle’s Greek text, or the United Bible Societies’ text? Do you prefer any of the footnotes to the main text?

The scholars have had a hand in establishing each of these original language texts of the Old and New Testament, not to mention the translations. I have great confidence in scholars, but I do not think they are infallible.

Any talk about the inerrant, infallible, verbally inspired Scripture, truth without any mixture of error, must take account of the problems of textual differences and translation. Some who use this language do so apparently intending to deceive by not making it clear that they are really talking about the original copy or original autograph of each book of the Bible and not a Bible available today.

For a thousand years no one has seen any original autograph of each book of the Bible. The earliest copies of the New Testament available to us are in the library of the Vatican or the British Museum and were made about AD 400. They are not exactly alike.

That is why I am concerned about the emphasis on something not now available to us. Surely the original autograph is not the only Bible we can trust.

I am not talking about a Bible which used to exist. I am talking about the Bibles on your and my bookshelf—Hebrew, Greek, German, French, Latin, English, Russian—each one has truth without any mixture of error for its matter. It is the authoritative revelation of God; it is the rule of faith and practice; it is the source of my knowledge of salvation; it has introduced me to the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

I am aware of the mistakes the copyists made in ancient manuscripts. I am aware of scholarly limitations and prejudices and the theological blindness of some translators. Yet, my Bible is true. I am going to live by it; I am going to die believing it and trusting the Savior I have found through it; I am going to live eternally with the God who inspired it.

In the meantime I am going to study it with the help of all the theological scholars the world can produce. I will be grateful to those scholars who help me while ignoring those who do not.

If God had thought I needed an inerrant, infallible, verbally inspired copy of the Bible, he would have preserved the original text on a golden tablet. God has not left me without anything necessary for my salvation. We may use all of the strong language we want about the original autographs of the Bible, but my faith can survive with the Holy Scripture available to me today. The differences in the ancient texts are not all that great.

Please do not put any barriers against the faith of simple Christians who assume that the Holy Spirit can guide them into the truth with any copy of the Bible that happens to be handy. Let those among us who are helped thereby discuss the infallibility of the original autographs, but let scholars keep working to produce better copies of the Bible in English for some of us to use in our daily living.

After all, even an original autograph would require the interpretation of the Holy Spirit to make it come alive as God’s Word in my life. Indeed, the Holy Spirit is the agent of the infallible, redeeming truth, which permeates my thought, mind, and hard heart. Thank you, God, for my Bible and for the Holy Spirit who makes it the living Word within me.

October 2001