It is no accident that most of those who teach the doctrine of "Biblical Inerrancy" act as though they themselves cannot be wrong.  They want everybody to believe that they are in possession of a goose that "lays golden eggs", so to speak; or in this case, a "Holy Spirit" that provides the correct answer to every question.  But is the Holy Spirit of God intended to be such a "golden goose" for people who make themselves into "Bible experts"?
        The Bible itself warns against trusting the "Scribes", i.e.  those who transcribed the sacred texts by hand, thousands of years before the first printing press was invented :

"My people do not know the ordinance of the Lord.  How can you say, "We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us," when, in fact, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie?  The wise shall be put to shame, they shall be dismayed and taken; since they have rejected the word of the Lord, what wisdom is in them?  Therefore I will give their wives to others and their fields to conquerors, because from the least to the greatest everyone is greedy for unjust gain; from prophet to priest everyone deals falsely."

This web page is a compilation of about 150 instances in which the accuracy and truthfulness of a supposedly inspired passage of the Bible is brought into question  – not by some outside non-religious source –  but by another supposedly inspired passage of the same bible.  When each and every one of several conflicting statements is supposedly inspired and guaranteed by God, only thoroughly biased individuals, determined at all costs to get to the conclusion that they want, can believe that all of these passages are true !   They come up with what they imagine to be "explanations", but only those who desperately want to be convinced in the first place find those explanations convincing.

" According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke,  Mary Magdalene was in the group of women who were told by angels at the empty tomb that Jesus had risen "even as he said,"  and Luke even said that when the women heard this, "they remembered his words" (24:9).  Such statements as these  (aside from the fact that Matthew even claimed that the women saw Jesus, held him, and worshipped him as they were running from the tomb to tell the disciples what they had seen, 28:9)  definitely indicate that the women left the tomb convinced e clarity of these statements,  John's account of the resurrection had Mary saying, after she had found the disciples, "They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we know not where they have laid him" (John 20:1).         This is the way Gleason Archer, a leading apostle of Bible inerrantists, imagines that he has explained what he would call the "alleged" discrepancy above:
        "She [Mary] apparently had not yet taken in the full import of what the angel meant when he told her that the Lord had risen again and that He was alive.  In her confusion and amazement, all she could think of was that the body was not there; and she did not know what had become of it.  Where could that body now be? It was for this reason that she wanted Peter and John to go back there and see what they could find out." .  (Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, pp. 348-349).
        This is what inerrantists consider "a successful explanation of an alleged inconsistency".  But such far-fetched, entirely speculative "explanations" do nothing to inform or convince intelligent, honest, and unbiased observers.  They only serve to confirm the ignorant in their ignorance.

The renowned theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, once observed wisely:
        "Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt.  It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure."
        And the French philosopher, Voltaire, once observed, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

I believed in the inerrancy of the Bible for years – not because of any evidence or proof – but because that was "the party line."  I hadn't even read the Bible in its entirety yet.  But it was clear to me that if I didn't adopt that belief, I wouldn't be able to get through my seminary training and become the promoter of Jesus Christ's teaching that I so wanted to be.
        Anybody who knows anything about the laws of reason, i.e. "logic", knows that there is nothing harder to prove than "a negative".  To rationally assert the negative "there are no errors in the bible", you would have to go through and examine absolutely every last statement in the bible and show why each one is absolutely true.  Inerrantists don't even attempt this impossible task because it is pure faith that makes them inerrantists, not reason.  The main reason that they believe the scriptures are "the Word of God" is that those scriptures make that claim about 2500 times.  Simple-mind people don't question that claim because on the one hand, they don't realize that the sacred books of ALL religions make the same claim, and on the other, it's impossible for contradictory statements to be made by the same intelligent person, especially if he is God!

1. This is a rather large book (or set of books, to be more exact), with many different statements, involving different writers, from different areas, from different time periods.
2. Nobody even knows what constitutes "the Bible". Jews, Catholics and Protestants have at least three rather different versions. 

   It may be hard to grasp, but there are that many Christian groups that have been created because they believed all of the others had "missed the boat"!

   Whatever New Testament scripture Christians quote to support the inerrancy of the Scriptures has to apply not to the Christian version – which didn't yet exist when that statement was made by Jesus or Paul – but to the Jewish version of the Bible.  And Jews argue that the New Testament cannot be inerrant, as the Old Testament is, because of the many incompatibilities they can point out between the two.
3. No matter which version of the bible you believe in, how can you determine how close any particular edition and/or translation is to the original, when nobody knows how close to the original any particular ancient manuscript is?
4. When bible worshippers are backed to the wall on problems with the bible, they try to escape by claiming that its the original bible texts that are inerrant.  But since nobody has the original bible texts, when are they going to face up to the fact that the Bible texts that they do have are not inerrant?
5. The greatest problem with inerrancy lies in the great number of internal (not to mention external) biblical contradictions, which honest people have to face, not try to explain away!

"BIBLICAL INERRANCY"

Click on the underlined references to have the verses displayed on a separate tab.
        {They will be displayed in the New International Version, but you can then select one of several other versions, if you prefer.}
        When there are more than two conflicting options, they are listed over one another instead of side by side.

that he ate the forbidden fruit.

  {some translations fudge "the actual day" }

Gen. 2:17

Adam lived

930 years after

he ate the

forbidden fruit.

Gen. 5:5

Gen. 6:13-16 :13 And God said to Noah, "I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. 14 Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. 15 This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits (450 feet), its width fifty cubits (75 feet), and its height thirty cubits (45 feet). 16 Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks."

Gen. 7:21-24 :  "The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet. Every living thing that moved on the earth perished — birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days."

What was the point of killing all of the animals on land and in the air as a result of the sins of man, but not the animals in the sea ?
       How was each pair of tiny animals that are barely visible to the naked eye selected?  Were all the species of dinosaurs housed above or below deck? And what did all the flesh-eating animals eat while confined to the ark? How was all their excrement handled?

What about Noah's Ark ?

        In all of history there have been only two wooden ships ever built that were even close to that size. The 377 long by 73 ft wide "Rochambeau" was an iron-clad wooden ship built in 1865 in New York. About 50 feet of her length was a ram. She was not particularly stable or seaworthy and only made one voyage in the open ocean to reach her new owners in France. The 450 ft by 51 ft "Wyoming", built in 1909 in America had a tendency to flex in heavy seas, causing the long planks to twist and buckle, allowing water into the ship, and eventually to sink the ship.

        How could primitive people like Noah and his three sons make such a gigantic wooden ship without the tools, shipyard and know-how only available to mankind in recent years?   Now that wouldn't be such a problem if the bible said that God had built the ark, but what the bible says is that Noah built the ark, with the help only of his three sons, not God, and in seven days!

  All the first-born of the cattle of the Egyptians are destroyed (again?).