Most inerrantists are blind to the obvious meaning of 2nd Timothy 3:16

Roger Pearse recently gave some insightful comments about the history of the KJV here.

His last comment made me think of my own basic rebuttal to biblical inerrancy.  He said:

This claim is not what Christians believe about the scripture.  It is merely a strawman, designed to require something that does not exist and never did exist.  Jesus himself talked about the rolls of the law as inspired; but these were written by men.  However divine inspiration works, it can certainly cope with spelling mistakes, human error, and all the business of living in an imperfect world.

This reminded me of my infallible argument refuting the "inerrant only in the originals" belief of modern-day inerrantists, and I posted the following in reply to Pearse.  The comments did not show up after I clicked "reply" to we'll have to wait and see whether this was because he already blocked me, or if he elects to approve of comments before allowing them to post.  Here's what I wrote:

Your last comment implicates a powerful rebuttal to the modern inerrantist movement represented in Geisler/Archer and the Chicago Statement on Bible Inerrancy. 

Most modern inerrantists sidestep the obvious errors in the bible by imposing a standard that is not reasonably checkable:  the bible is inerrant "only in the originals".  This amounts to little more than mooting the significance of the obvious copyist errors by fiat.

But in the bible, whenever the authors speak about the divine inspiration of some writing, they never express or imply that they mean "only in the originals".

Therefore, their unqualified statements about scriptural inspiration are most likely talking about the nature of the thing that their contemporaries can actually read and touch...the copies...even if they are also talking about the "originals".  That is, the most natural reading of passages like 2nd Timothy 3:16 is that the copies are inspired too.  In context Paul is talking about the scriptures Timothy knew in childhood or in the 1st century (v. 15).  Obviously, Timothy did not know "the originals".  No scholar thinks the pieces of parchment and papyrus that Moses and Isaiah actually set their pens to, survived into the 1st century.  The only "scripture" he knew were the copies.  Those copies are what Paul is according "inspiration" to, even if he "also" means the originals. 

The point is that the sense of copy-inspiration (i.e., the sense that would put the final nail in the coffin of modern-day inerrancy theory found in the CSBI statement) cannot be reasonably excluded from Paul's wording.

If then inerrantists continue standing by their other premise that "inspiration = inerrancy", then because the biblical authors taught that the copies were "inspired", the biblical authors thus also necessarily taught that the copies were "inerrant".  The very fact that the inerrantists themselves clearly deny inerrancy to the copies ensures that whatever change they make to avoid the implications of this argument, that change will imply that they have been missing the forest for the trees for decades. 

Since they cannot deny the reasonableness of the interpretation, what are they going to do?

Say Paul got it wrong?
Admit the CSBI was framed more out of a desire to avoid the obvious than by concern to be "biblical"?
Admit that the biblical "truth" they've been dogmatic about for decades, was the "wrong interpretation"?

The issue is not whether modern inerrantists can be reasonable to believe they way they do.  Maybe they can.  The issue is rather whether the bible skeptic's above-cited argument against biblical inerrancy is "reasonable".  If not, why not?  How does the "the-first-century-copies-were-inspired-too" interpretation violate anything in the grammar or context of 2nd Timothy 3:16?

But if the skeptical interpretation of Paul here is reasonable, it would appear today's inerrantists are (in light of their own commitment to "truth") under a moral compulsion to stop characterizing the skeptical affirmation of error in the bible as "absurd" or "false", to stop pretending biblical inerrancy is "obviously true" or stop being so obsessed about defending it...and to allow that the skeptical view, supra, is at least no less reasonable than their own position on the subject.

If skeptics can be reasonable to argue Paul did not mean "only in the originals", then they are reasonable to say he accorded inspiration to the copies too, in this case 1st century copies. And since no scholar thinks the 1st century copies of the scriptures were inerrant, we are reasonable to turn away from modern-day inerrantists until they interpret Paul correctly.

One homosexual inerrantist once trifled that the "only in the originals" caveat need not be "biblical", but he is obviously stupid:  the Christian's view of inerrancy needs to at least correctly reflect what Paul meant in 2nd Timothy 3:16, and they aren't doing this when they exclude copy-inspiration from Paul's comments.

Therefore, the modern-day inerrantist's "only in the originals" caveat is not merely some viewpoint of possibly arguable merit that falls within acceptable hermeneutical practice.  The "only in the originals" caveat is positively contrary to Paul's beliefs because it is neither expressed nor implied in his wording, therefore, to insert the caveat into his wording anyway is nothing less than changing what he really meant to avoid falling into the same pit that Paul himself dug.  Good luck giving an interpretation of 2nd Timothy 3:16 that seriously insists the specific "only in the originals" nuance is what Paul meant.

Some trifling inerrantist will insist that this present rebuttal doesn't hurt them because they don't adopt the version of inerrancy espoused by Geisler/Archer and CSBI they adopt a more modern form that avoids the pitfalls of the traditionalist notion.

But whether we skeptics are reasonable to view as false the "new inerrancy" , is another subject appropriate to a future blog post.  There certainly are a lot of stupid inerrantists out there who adopt the traditional CSBI form of inerrancy, so the atheist goal of "refuting the Christian view" has obviously been achieved in large part by refuting what millions of Christains and their capable scholars have believed for centuries.

I've made obviously significant headway by bulldozing a major Christian position to the side of the road.  You're next.