10 Things You May Be Reading Incorrectly

The first thing you may be reading incorrectly is the Christian Bible. It annoys me when I hear non-Christians disparaging the Bible or Christians using the Bible in ways that are incorrect in terms of properly applied textual criticism.

Dr. Norman Geisler in his Systematic Theology Volume I lists several problems people have when trying to understand the Bible that are inconsistent with good textual criticism. I have listed a handful of them here:

• Assuming That the Unexplained Is Not Explainable
• Failing to Understand the Context of the Passage
• Forgetting That the Bible Is a Human Book With Human Characteristics
• Assuming That a Partial Report Is a False Report
• Assuming That Divergent Accounts Are False Ones
• Presuming That the Bible Approves of All It Records
• Forgetting That the Bible Uses Non-Technical, Everyday Language
• Neglecting to Note That the Bible Uses Different Literary Devices
• The Allegation That Grammatical Irregularities Are Errors

The second thing you may be reading incorrectly apropos of careful textual criticism is the title of this post.

If we are perplexed by any apparent contradiction in Scripture, it is not allowable to say, "The author of this book is mistaken"; but either the manuscript is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you have not understood.--Augustine