[james73]

I visited my Hindu friend in Malaysia a couple of weeks ago~~ he had some interesting insights into scripture inerrancy.

For classic Hindu texts, which were at first passed down orally, inerrancy comes from the structure of the language. There is a "checksum" built into the Sanskrit, within the grammar. And so, if one were to change the lineage of a certain king or prophet, inserting your own favourite king etc when passing down the history, it would become readily apparent because the grammar wouldn't "add up".

Immediately he said this I thought of the lineage of Jesus and how people say there is a very fixed structure to that lineage in terms of syllables, vowels etc. I don't know much about it, but it seemed the same concept might be at work.

Some people use the "checksum" nature of Jesus' lineage to "prove" that God must have written it since it is too complicated for man to have developed, it would have taken the author 50 years to come up with something so exquisite and consistent etc - but what if, in fact, it was a verbal code, developed over generations to ensure accurate verbal transmission?

That might be a good definition of "inerrant" - that the scriptures we have today, written down, are a faithful record of what was intended to be passed down to future generations.