Customer Reviews

Free from All Error: Authorship Inerrancy Historicity of Scripture, Church Teaching, and Modern Scripture Scholars

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In this short book on biblical inerrancy, the late great biblical scholar Fr. William Most discusses the Catholic approach to scripture, and verifying whether the bible truly is, free from all error.

He starts by establishing the rules and boundaries necessary to properly analyze scripture. Such things as, what it means to say God author's scripture through human instruments. How the Catholic comes to the conclusion of a fully inspired inerrant book, and other questions like,

1. Can a book have different inspired authors?
2. To what limit can that be taken?
3. Can the bible have more than one literal sense?
4. Could the Holy Spirit have conveyed deeper meanings that the authors may have not understood?
5. Can there be multiple fulfillments of Scripture?

And explains one of the most important topics in the book, Genre (Ch9). Genre is a pattern of writing with its own rules of how to write and understand it. He explains why you must critique a book according to the rules its genre has set. For example, Fr. Most explains, suppose you are reading a history book about the Civil War, now you expect the history book to be a mixture of history and fiction. It is history in that the main line of the story is true to history and the background descriptions fit the period. But it is also fictional in that there are fictional fill-ins, especially word-for-word conversations between, for example, Lincoln and Grant. We expect, we even want, the author to create these fill ins, to make the story fuller and more realistic. But we do not suppose that the author really states, word for word, what these important men said. We can't even be sure that he has the substance. For someone to charge the author with a historical error regarding those conversations would not be correct, since he never asserted each conversation was historically true. This would be judging the book against its genre. So with regards to the biblical authors, we must first see what they are asserting by examining their genre. Otherwise it would be unfair to charge them with error, when they may not be asserting it as true.

He also analyses the different popular historical methods. Methods like, the "Historical Critical Method", to "Form and Redaction Criticism".

The book finishes with short discussions on Jewish Tradition, and archeology.

In addressing each topic and error claim, he shows how others have answered an apparent problem, and how some fail in their attempts. The solutions may go to far from what is allowed, or not address the problem correctly. As an example, some people argue that the entire bible is only inspired when it comes to issues involving salvation, and not historically. Fr. Most shows how this goes too far, and in effect, cuts your basis for faith. Fr. Most than analyzes each error himself, and gives exceptional answers. He deals with, Genesis, infancy gospels, apocalyptic writings, and the Wisdom literate.

The positives of the book include,

1. The book deals with the OT (often not the case with biblical inerrancy books)
2. Great answers to the "errors".
3. Answers the most prominent opponents charges.
4. Get a feel for the direction scriptural criticism may go.
5. Demonstrates the need to not be to haste in asserting biblical errors, we have seen what problems arose when science wasn't done properly in the past.

However, the book also has shortcomings. For one, the book is not well organized, so unless special attention is given, you will get confused. The author also seems to bog the book down, while explaining himself, with too many examples. This adds to the difficulty of following what the author is arguing. The book is also old (85), so it would not be an appropriate place to go for the current discussions on the topic.

With everything said, and given the books small size (and price), you cannot go wrong in getting this book. The author is clearly knowledgeable about the subject.

Fr. Most covers (1) how the scriptures were authored, (2) how they became scripture (by the determination of the pillar and foundation of truth, the church, (3) the senses of scripture literal and primary spiritual sense, the allegorical (he omits the anagogical and the tropological senses); (4) the inerrancy of the scriptures by showing that the error is in the reading not in the scripture; (5) the various genres in scripture; (6) he covers the various critical methods and their limits; and (7) the study of the ancient Hebrew society through ancient literature and archaeology. He refutes biblical critics with numerous examples. He cuts through circular logic used by others to show correct logical determination of what is scripture. He show by frequent example how many read errors into the scriptures.

Fr. Most had a better sense where the current direction of scripture criticism that his peers. He almost seems to expect that the critical synoptic works of the last decade (on respectively (a) Luke's use of Matthew and (b) Mark's use of Matthew and Luke) would appear. Definitely worth reading to handle seeming conflicts in scripture.

Would have given it a full 5 star if he had covered all the spiritual senses completely.

This book is an excellent defense of the inerrancy of scripture from a Catholic perspective. There seem to be very few books that are scholarly, faithful to the teaching magesterium, and popular, but this book delivers on all three accounts. Father Most is a world class biblical scholar, and he is able to deal with questions about the historical critical method, form criticism, and archeology among other issues. Fr Most puts the historical critical method in proper perspective, showing that there are good uses for it but that it is used improperly and hence we have all this confusion today. The only small criticism I have of it is that it is a bit disorganized. The chapters are very short and readable, but it isn't obvious that they are in the correct order.

The late Fr. William Most was a well known theologian and scripture scholar who never fell in with any fads and was a counter-ballance to so many more well know theologians and scripture scholars of the era. His book "Free from All Error: Authorship Inerrancy Historicity of Scripture" is an example of this. We so often hear about so-called errors in scripture and especially lists of these "errors" from atheists who are often literal fundamentalists when it comes to scripture. This calling out of errors though is not confined to atheists and such charges have been made from those in the Church including her clergy. Even worse, often no attempt is made to reconcile these passages and when done within the Church is often a denial of what Vatican II's Dei Verbum says. Fr. Most notes:

"Precisely at the time when new techniques enable us to do what seemed impossible before, so many scholars are not only not solving the problems but even saying that problems are insoluble whose answers have been known for a long time!"

This book goes through the topics of inspiration and authorship, the cannon, senses of scripture, and the genre of scripture. He takes us through some cases of supposed errors and show how they can be reconciled using these tools and understandings. He also addresses modern techniques such as historical-critical method, source criticism, form and redaction criticism, etc. Fr. Most is totally inline with what Pope Benedict has written about these tools in that they can and should be used within their limits and under the guiding light of the magisterium.

"In regard to the methods themselves, some think that only highly trained specialists can understand them. These people are too easily awed. Anyone can grasp at least the basics of these methods, and more too. These methods are not mysterious or formidable. They are our friends."

These methods when used without the analogy of faith quickly become deformed into a type of skepticism that produced the Jesus Seminar where miracles are ridiculous and the hard sayings were added later. Fr. Most gives examples when these tools have been used incorrectly and especially in the case of scripture scholar Fr. Raymond Brown.

This book provides a good introduction to scripture study and how to be able to read difficult passages using the methods as old as the Fathers of the Church or of the modern era and would be a good companion with Mark Shea's Making Senses Out of Scripture: Reading the Bible as the First Christians Did.

I plan on reading this book again, to give it (or myself in case I misread it) another chance. The first time through, however, I found it to be full of circular reasoning and specious argument. For example, W. Most seems to be saying that if error is found in what has traditionally been considered one of the "historical" books of the Bible, then it shouldn't be considered "historical" at all, but rather as belonging to the "epic" genre, or some other genre, thereby saving the doctrine of "inerrancy in historical matters" (since the Bible isn't "trying" to be historical when written in the "epic" genre). That seems a bit too convenient to me. In another place he recognizes a contradiction that cannot be resolved or harmonized, but he says it doesn't matter because what the infallible author was trying to say is simply that he was confronted with two contradictory versions of the same event and that he didn't know which one was the correct one, so he just included both--but that the text is still inerrant because it isn't "trying" to say which one is inerrant. Huh? Like I said, I'm going to read it again...! Maybe I got it all wrong.