What Is a Bible?

What is a Bible? That may sound like strange question to you but the answer to that question is much more important than you might first realize. In fact, how you answer the question is a good predictor of whether you will be influenced by secular arguments against the inerrancy of the Bible.

To many people, a Bible is an object, a volume of multiple books with words that cannot be altered. Yet, it is clear that this is not what a Bible is. The people of Israel had a Bible when all they had was the Law of Moses. Likewise, we see that the words of various books can change. There is a longer and shorter form of Jeremiah. Then there is the question of what manuscript tradition of both the Old and New Testament we are talking about. Does the text of 1QIsa or 1QIsab contain the accurate version of Isaiah? Is it the longer or shorter ending of Mark that transmits the original autograph correctly? Are any of the translations Bibles? The Samaritan Pentateuch? The LXX? The Syriac? The Vulgate? The KJV? The NASB?

All of these concerns are irrelevant, however, if we understand that a Bible is any document, written or digital, that inerrantly relates the divinely revealed religion of God. By “inerrantly” I mean that it does not teach any error in what it seeks to convey. Hence, it really does not matter whether one has the LXX and does not know of the various Hebrew traditions. It really does not matter whether one believes the shorter ending of Mark versus the longer ending. It does not matter whether one has the shorter version of Jeremiah versus the longer version. What variation of words, word order, length of text, etc. has no bearing upon whether one has an inerrant Bible. Likewise, since word variation is irrelevant, any translation that inerrantly teaches the divinely revealed religion of God is a Bible. The LXX, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Qumran manuscripts, the Leningrad Codex, the “Alexandrian” traditions, the Byzantine traditions, the eclectic texts of Stephanus or Erasmus or Wescott and Hort or UBS or NA, electronic Bibles are all Bibles because they all inerrantly teach the same divinely revealed religion of God.

None of them teach a different religion. By “religion” I mean a different theology and ethics or a different history of redemption. They all teach the same religion. It may be taught in a different order or with different words or in different places but they all teach the same religion nonetheless.

I think this is important to understand when people hear the apologists of the Enlightenment like Bart Ehrman. God has preserved the religion that He wanted humans to understand in order to believe and follow Him; and the amazing thing is that he has done it, not by preserving some single golden tablet that can have no variation in it, but rather by multiplying its diversity in numerous textual traditions, canons, and translations, all of which agree with one another about the central message of what God has done to save humanity, the theology the people of God need to believe, and the ethics they need to follow.

So what is a Bible? It is the Word of God to man, testifying to him of what God has done for him and how he must respond to God in light of it. In that regard, all of these quibbles over who has the correct Bible are nonsensical.