Questions about the Bible's origins and authority are very common. They're not just for school kids, college students, or new believers; even people who have been Christians their entire lives wrestle with them.
How can the Bible be inspired by God when it was written by different men, each with a unique style? How can we be sure it has no errors? How do we know that Scripture is infallible—that it cannot fail or make mistakes?
If you are a person of faith, you have likely wrestled with similar questions. The pilgrim's progress often involves critical thinking and putting Scripture to the test—looking closely at its morals and understanding the nature of God, that if He is really faithful, merciful, and just. Through this process, many conclude that the Bible is indeed the true word of God. Still, these questions can come back, making this a very real and ongoing battle for the heart and mind.
In this text, I want to break down these concepts: the inspiration and the inerrancy/infallibility. My goal is to present these ideas in a way that is clear and helpful. While I can't promise to change your beliefs, I can promise a thoughtful read that will help you think more deeply about this topic. I pray this writing encourages you and helps you grow in your faith and relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Divine Inspiration of Scripture
When we say the Bible is "inspired," what do we mean? The idea of inspiration teaches that God Himself is the ultimate author of Scripture. While He used human authors with their own personalities, writing styles, and words, He supernaturally guided the writing process. This made sure the final text was exactly what He wanted to communicate. The Bible itself claims this.
A. Carried Along by the Spirit
The Apostle Peter gives one of the clearest explanations of inspiration:
2 Peter 1:20–21 (ESV): "...knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."
What does Peter mean when he says "no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man"? He means that true prophecy doesn't come from a person's cleverness or wish. A person can't just decide to create a prophecy; it either comes from God, or it's false.
The key word Peter uses here is the Greek word pheró (φέρω), which means "to be carried along." It paints a picture of being moved, supported, and pushed by an outside force. Think of a ship's sails catching the wind—the ship is the vessel, but the wind provides the power and direction. In the same way, the human authors were the vessels (the tools), but the Holy Spirit was the power who "carried them along" to write God's words.
Later, in chapter 3, Peter asks his readers to remember both "the predictions of the holy prophets" (the Old Testament) and "the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles" (the New Testament). He puts them on the same level as God's authoritative word.
B. God-Breathed and Authoritative
The Apostle Paul strengthens this idea in his letters. In his second letter to Timothy, he makes a very important statement about the nature of the Old Testament (which was the "Scripture" of his time):
2 Timothy 3:16–17 (ESV): "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work."
The phrase "breathed out by God" (from the Greek theopneustos) is very important. It means that Scripture is the very product of God's breath, His creative, life-giving Spirit. This makes it uniquely powerful and useful for shaping a believer into a "man of God... complete, equipped for every good work."
Also, the apostles recognized this divine authority in each other's writings. In a remarkable part of his letter, Peter refers to Paul's letters as "Scripture," even while saying some of Paul's teachings are "hard to understand" (2 Peter 3:15-16). Despite any personal differences, Peter recognized the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in Paul's work, confirming that his letters carried the same importance as the Old Testament.
C. The Bible's Unified Message
Finally, the Bible's internal consistency—how it all fits together—gives strong proof for its divine inspiration. For example, in Acts 4:24-25, the early church prays by quoting Psalm 2. They acknowledge that King David was the human author ("...you spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David...") but that God was the ultimate source of the words.
This is just one of over 2,500 prophecies and over 300 messianic prophecies and connections within the Bible; the odds of this happening by chance are astronomically low—less than one in 100 quadrillion. The fact that about 40 authors, writing over 1,500 years on 3 different continents in 3 different languages could produce a single, unified story of redemption points not to human genius, but to a divine author guiding the entire process. Every single word in the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit, written through the human authors He chose.
Inerrancy and Infallibility
We have multiple accounts with internal and external evidence for inspiration, but I want to get a little logical about the Bible being a book with no errors. While inerrancy means the Scriptures are without error in all that they affirm, infallibility means they cannot fail in their ultimate purpose of revealing God and the way of salvation. The historical evidence supports both.
How is this possible? Some people might say, "We do not believe everything written in the Bible is true. We are not sure about historical accounts like the parting of the Red Sea or the miracles Jesus performed, so we are not going to see the Bible as authoritative in these passages, as they sound metaphorical to us."
The Old Testament
The Old Testament has been well-preserved over the course of several thousand years. Scrolls like the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in the 1940s, date to a few hundred years before Jesus’s birth and talk about His birth, death, and resurrection. The sheer volume and consistency of ancient manuscripts prove that the text we have today is historically and archaeologically accurate and incredibly reliable.
Jesus Himself, in Matthew 22:29, refers to the Old Testament as the word of God, and in John 10:35, He says that "Scripture cannot be broken." If Jesus is the Son of God, and He believed and treated the Old Testament as authoritative—not metaphorically, but as literal Scripture—then we as believers are to trust Him.
Archaeologically, many places mentioned in the Old Testament have been found just as the Bible described them. The existence of King David, the city of Jericho, Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar, the Hittites, Jacob’s well, Sodom and Gomorrah, and many other places proves that these accounts are literal, not metaphorical. While these facts might not change our hearts and spirits on their own, they should change our perspective on the historical credibility of the Scripture.
The New Testament
In a similar manner, the New Testament is the most well-attested collection of books from antiquity, supported by over 25,000 manuscripts in various languages. The Gospels are eyewitness accounts, and the book of Acts details what happened after Jesus’s resurrection, according to what He said throughout the Gospels. Scholars affirm that these scriptures are 99.5% textually accurate, and the remaining 0.5% consists of minor word changes and scribal variants that do not change any doctrine or the core message of the Bible.
Archaeological and External Evidence
There are inscriptions of the Roman rulers who were in power at the time, the pool where Jesus performed one of His miracles has been located, as well as the likely place of His tomb and crucifixion. This is not only recorded in the Bible; many historians of that time, like Josephus (a Jewish historian) and Tacitus (a Roman historian), wrote about these events. Even a Roman governor at the time noted in his writings that early Christians were "worshipping Jesus as God." All of these things prove that the writings in the Bible are attested to not only by the followers of Christ Jesus but even by unbelievers.
My argument for inerrancy has relied on rational thought and logic. And all this logic points to one single man who is God, who came down to die for you and me, and who said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." (John 14:6)
A Note on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is one of the most important modern documents on this topic. In 1978, over 200 evangelical leaders and scholars met in Chicago to address a growing trend that leaned away from the conservative ideas about theology and was questioning the Bible's full authority. The scholars who gathered and their goal was to create a clear, precise, and unified declaration of what evangelicals have historically believed about the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture.
The statement consists of a summary, 19 articles of affirmation and denial, and an exposition. It affirms that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, completely true and trustworthy in all that it affirms, from matters of faith and salvation to its claims about history and the natural world. It has since become a foundational document for countless seminaries, churches, and parachurch organizations, providing a clear standard for biblical authority.