Seminary professors and church pastors, for that matter, are very careful how they define inerrancy of the scriptures (in Jesus Interrupted).
I don’t see Dr. Ehrman talking about inerrancy in the context I have heard it discussed hundreds of times—that the bible is inerrant in the original languages as it was originally written. He is right in saying that we only have copies of the original manuscripts now—many thousands of them, by the way, but we don’t have the originals. Are there additions, maybe subtractions and variances in those copies, absolutely? Do they impact the central message of the Old Testament and of the New Testament—I don’t believe they do. I believe I can know exactly the major and minor themes of the Old and New Testaments with great certainty. I believe that Dr. Ehrman’s believes this too. These themes are not what any of Dr. Ehrman’s books are about. He is “in the weeds–lost.” He is down into details as a textual critic of Greek. I am not sure that he is a textual critic of Hebrew. But, as I will show later, the very science that he wakes up for every day is the science that leads us back to the “original” words of the Greek and the Hebrew. Yes, scientists who use the techniques of textual criticism can recover, if necessary, what the original manuscripts stated with great precision given the number of manuscripts that we have available to us of the Greek New Testament. Dr. Ehrman knows this. So, we have the original words that God inspired.
