When Jehovah's Witnesses began distributing door to door the NEW WORLD TRANSLATION beginning in the early 1950's a firestorm of protest broke out in mainstream churches. Why? The alarm cry was "They've changed the Bible to fit their own crooked teachings!"
You can imagine the discord as church members tried to figure out how Jehovah's Witnesses could PROVE by reading from the NWT the King James Version was full of ommissions and errors and outright fraud concerning, for instance, the Trinity doctrine or the Name of God!!
This was the real beginning of a war. The war of the translations, the war of the inerrantists and the war of the scholars.
What were the issues of this war?
1.Which translation of the Bible is the TRUE one?
2.Has the Bible really been filled with deliberate tampering for a couple of thousand years?
3.How do I know Jehovah's Witnesses aren't correct about everything?
4.How can I prove what I believe is true rather than what the other guy says is true?
The avalanche of responses from Mainstream Protestants and subsequent Evangelical Fundamentalists is still being felt today.
First of all, the cat was out of the bag: the Bible had....well, PROBLEMS! These problems were extremely embarassing for everybody who
tried to fight the cult members off who were knocking on their door "proving" false teachings with a lovely green bible!
Innocent church members turned to their Pastors for reassurances. Red faces everywhere! Stonewalling and lying gave way to retrenching and countermeasures. The battle for the Bible went to the mattresses as the Godfather might say.
Honest people in Mainstream Christianity started asking honest questions for honest scholars to answer. An immediate split was created:
Hardcore Fundamentalists vs Critical Scholars
The Fundamentalists dug their heels in like Johnny Rebs facing Sherman's Army.
The Critical Scholars began going back to the drawing board and re-examining the chain of evidence along the scriptural fragements, manuscripts, Codex scrolls, etc. and retracing the path back to the 1st Century birth of the New Testament.
Fundamentalists began training new recruits in the Seminaries who could battle Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and any other bible-detractors they might encounter by formally adopting the doctrine of infallibility.
Princeton Theological Seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary and others formally adopted the doctrine of infallibility while rejecting the doctrine of inerrancy.
What would emerging seminarians teach? There were inconsequential errors in scripture that were trivial, they would say.
The doctrines we base our faith on are not among the scribal errors. Therefore our Doctrines are infallibly supported by the Bible as it exists today!
What were the true facts? Could infallibility be proved?
The Critical Scholars examined the Dead Sea Scrolls, the available scripture fragments, the manuscripts, the Codex libararies and came to a staggering conclusion statistically supported:
There are more points of disagreement between manuscripts than there are words in the Gospels!
This blow to the solar plexus ignited a stubborn rebuttal which centered on the magazine CHRISTIANITY TODAY and a book with the title THE BATTLE FOR THE BIBLE by author Harold Lindsell. Lindsell pointed out that infallibility without inerrancy was too great a concession to make to (Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons) cults, critics, atheists assaulting the church. Modern Christianity would not survive without INERRANCY!!
This was a monumental crisis! Conservatives rallied. Unless the Bible was totally without error you could not rely on it! Churches could pick and choose whatever they wanted to believe! Christianity would dissolve into separate churches of whim, opinion, charismatics leading people wherever they chose!
What could be done to save Christianity?
CHURCHES MUST INSIST THE BIBLE IS WITHOUT ERROR. Period. End of story.
How could this be defended honestly, however? Textual Critical Scholars had the statistical evidence of the errors, ommissions, contradictions, additions.
The solution was astoundingly simple!
Christians wanted to believe the Bible was reliable, didn't they?
They already believed God had inspired it.
Let the Bible PROVE ITSELF inerrant!
Tell the people to read what God's Word said about itself!
What does the Bible say: ALL scripture is inspired... end of story!
Yes, this circular reasoning would work to reassure folks nothing was wrong with their Bible.
And, to cover themselves against truly informed critics they would cover their collective ass by formal decree.
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was formulated in October of 1978 by more than 200 evangelical leaders at a conference sponsored by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. The following was affirmed:
We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture.
Under the statement inerrancy applies only to the original manuscripts (which no longer exist, but can be inferred on the basis of extant copies), not to the copies or translations themselves. Further, in the statement inerrancy does not refer to a blind literal interpretation, but allows for figurative, poetic and phenomenological language, so long as it was the author's intent to present a passage as literal or symbolic.
Stop and consider the Weasel Words contained above.
What no longer exists is inerrant.
What does exist is not inerrant.
Yet, somehow you can infer from what does exist (and is not errant) the inerrancy of what does not exist!
Fundamentalist and Evangelicals had been driven to the edge of lunacy and illogic by Jehovah's Witnesses, Moormons and their own critical scholars!
Was the war for the Bible over? No way! It was just getting revved up for the real skirmish.
A subgroup of Fundamentalists began insisting ONLY the King James Bible was inerrant! This group completely denies Textual Critic Scholars have found anything at all to trouble them! The King James Bible, you see, was ITSELF INSPIRED by God! This neat little trick does away with worries about corruptions in text altogether.
The battle of who has the inerrant Translation was warming up. A dark and ominous cloud was hanging over scholars. It was all their fault for publishing the "problems" with available manuscripts!
SELECTIVE INFORMATION was publicly aired in magazines, news articles, scholarly papers, seminaries, tv programs and in churches which EMPHASIZED only the positive aspects of archaeology findings, paleographic investigations and Dead Sea Scroll scholarship.
The spin was on! Contradictions were ignored, downplayed, or belittled as unworthy of attention. Critics were attacked and unco-operative scholars had their funding cut off.
A stream of books flooded the market by apologists. Critics could be drowned out, shut up and marginalized!
Ask a mainstream Protestant what he thought about the Bible and likely he'd repeat this mantra:
The Bible contains everything that I need to know in order to obtain salvation and to live a Christian life, and there are no deficiencies in Scripture.
What about Catholics? What had the Church done to promote faith in a scriptural foundation?
The Second London Confession (1677) made the following declaration: “The Old T estament in Hebrew . . . and the New Testament in Greek . . . being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and Providence kept pure in all Ages, are therefore authentical; so as in all controversies of Religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them.
Embarassingly, Textual Critics in recent times had shredded this illusory dreamworld into bald assertion. The Church fell back on their Tradition and Magisterium. Whatever the Church itself proclaimed became infallible. Authority in the Church is backed up automatically in heaven.
Jehovah's Witnesses, who more or less started this great war with their NWT came under fire as well.
A mad rush by actual scholars (Watchtower "scholars" refused to identify themselves) to recite a litany of errors in the NWT had resulted in a siege mentality. The Watchtower religion followed the Catholic Church in procaiming their own Governing Body as the inspired Authority solely equipped and approved by Jehovah to make Truth available.
Protestants willed the Bible into being inerrant. JW's and Catholics asserted central authority to solve their problems and mainstream evangelicals resorted to publishing a river of popular apologetics books to bolster their assertions.
The Battle for the Bible producd controversy, doubt, conflict and debate. Who won?
In 2002 a mystery-detective fiction novel titled: THE DA VINCI CODE by Dan Brown capitalized on the gnawing doubts about the legitimacy of the Bible and the history of the Catholic Church. The book sold in excess of 80 million copies!
Readers of this fictional account were reacting in a very peculiar fashion. They were taking the novel seriously! A vast outcry of "We smelled a rat all along!" was heard. A counter insurgency of investigations began. What was the REAL story of how the Bible was written? Did the Church engage in fraud? What can we really believe?
A metaphorical fistfight broke out between Fundamentalists and suspicious laypersons.
Just as in the days of the Protestant rebellion under Martin Luther, a groundswell of discontent was given voice by people tired of being lied to, deceived and manipulated by Authority.
Jehovah's Witnesses had already undergone their own cataclysm.
Foohardy date-setting by using INERRANT SCRIPTURE PLUS DIVINE AUTHORITY broke down confidence in leadership when 1975 failed to live up to a massive preaching campaign begun in the mid-60's. A reorganization of Authority structure was followed by a shakeup and expulsion of critics inside the central headquarters.
An iron curtain of authority decended over the Kingdom Halls and a fundamentalist pall settled over the religion as a whole.
All of this the unavoidable result of publishing the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures.
How?
Once people's eyes began to open that the Bible was a damaged standard, a patchwork icon, an unprovable document propped up by men paid to interpret its' meaning....the walls came tumbling down!
Everybody in Christianity felt the body blow. Honest men went to a neutral corner and investigated. Dishonest men hardened themselves and bullied others with their claims of inerrancy. Those in the middle pretended nothing had really changed worth worrying about.
Life goes on........