It is often declared in support of the Christian faith that the Bible has never been proven wrong and that it contains no inconsistency. Given the origins of the Bible, this certainly would be remarkable, though I am not wholly convinced it necessitates divine inspiration. Nevertheless, should any book be divinely inspired, we would expect that these conditions be met. That is
If text X is God inspired, then text X must be without error and completely consistent.
The above conditional is most certainly reasonably true. The problem I have found is that many people confuse the truth of the implication with the affirmation of the antecedent and therefore the consequent. In other words, many, say Christians, assume that the Bible IS, in fact, God inspired. But how do they know this? Well, despite claims to the contrary, they don't. It is (usually) an assumption made based on personal and subjective factors. While this seems of little consequence, the problem is that it creates a confirmation bias. Studying the Bible, then, is no longer about truth, but about supporting the assumption. It therefore cannot be falsified because any difficulty will simply be viewed as a lack of understanding or something that is wrong with our interpretation. And while these are certainly possibilities and indeed probable culprits in many instances, it is terribly misguided to prescribe these as the reasons at the outset.
One common example of this error is the claim that "Scripture must interpret Scripture". Now certainly, when seeking to properly understand and interpret any written text, it is essential that context, culture, history, language, etc. be taken into account. But the above prescription requires more. Implicitly it says that Scripture must be understood circularly, by the assumption that it is already self-contained and wholly consistent. If you read one book of the Bible and your understanding of it conflicts with another part, then your understanding is mistaken. You must factor in what the other part says into your interpretation and do whatever it takes, no matter how difficult, to reconcile each part together. This, however, ignores the fact that each book was written independently of the others and does not assume that the reader has access to any complete collection of Scripture on which the writing in question may depend. And since the goal of any writing (at least in most cases) is to communicate ideas, it seems reasonable that we should not have to venture far outside of the text in consideration to ascertain what it is communicating.
Therefore, should one book of the Bible be found to be possibly inconsistent with another, this possibility should be taken seriously and not immediately written off as a defect in ourselves. We should always be open to new evidence, which may, at times, demand a critical reevaluation of our beliefs. Note that this does not require that one always be changing his/her mind, but it does perhaps recommend that we avoid being overly dogmatic about things we might like to be true even if it is much easier to live that way.
