Is the Bible Perfect or Full of Mistakes? Rethinking Inerrancy and Trust

This is a question that a lot of people carry around quietly but don’t always feel safe enough to say out loud. Is the Bible perfect, or is it full of mistakes. And if it has mistakes, can I really trust it. For some of us, the answer to that question determines whether we keep opening the Bible or close it for good.

I grew up in a tradition where the Bible was described as the very words of God, and because of that, it had to be perfect. That was the logic. If it was God’s word, it could not contain any mistakes. If it wasn’t perfect, then maybe it wasn’t really from God. That way of thinking was so ingrained in me that I felt like I needed to learn how to defend the Bible at every turn. That’s what pushed me into apologetics—reading book after book, stacking up footnotes, learning how to harmonize every detail so I could explain away any differences or contradictions. And honestly, that served me for a while. It gave me confidence when people raised objections, and it gave me a framework for why I could trust Scripture.

But over the years, as I kept pastoring real people with real doubts and as I kept reading the Bible myself, I started to realize something. There’s a better way to approach Scripture than just trying to prove it’s always right. When you force the Bible into our modern categories of scientific precision or airtight historical reporting, you actually risk missing the beauty of what the writers were trying to show us. These were not scientists writing lab reports. They were poets, prophets, pastors, and storytellers, writing out of real experiences with God and real struggles in their world. When you insist that the Bible has to always read like a synchronized timeline with no variations, you put a weight on it that it never claimed for itself. And honestly, a lot of people feel that weight, and they walk away because of it.

Here’s the problem I see all the time. Someone notices that Jonah might not be written like a straight-up historical report, and then they panic: “If Jonah isn’t history, can I trust the Gospels. If the details don’t match up perfectly, maybe none of it is true.” That’s a false choice. Good reading doesn’t require you to force every text into a flat yes-or-no category. Good reading begins by letting each book be what it is. Ask the better questions. What kind of writing is this. What’s the cultural background. What did the author want their audience to see. If we start there, we actually hear the text better instead of making it carry a weight it was never designed to carry.

This isn’t a new struggle. Christians have wrestled with these differences for centuries. Augustine, one of the greatest minds in Christian history, lived in the fourth and fifth centuries, and even he had to deal with places in Scripture that didn’t line up neatly. His response wasn’t to accuse the biblical authors of being wrong. Instead, he said maybe we don’t understand, maybe the manuscript is faulty, maybe the translation missed the meaning. That’s a posture of humility. He still believed the canonical writings were free from error, but not in the sense we often mean today. His world wasn’t shaped by scientific precision or Enlightenment categories. He wasn’t trying to treat Scripture like a science textbook. He was trying to honor it as divine revelation communicated through human voices.

Now let me show you a small example that makes me smile every time I read it because it’s so human. Paul is writing to the church in Corinth about their arguments over baptism. People were bragging about who baptized them, as if it gave them some kind of spiritual status. Paul wants to shut that down and says:

“I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius… I also baptized the household of Stephanus. Otherwise, I do not remember whether I baptized anyone else.”

(1 Corinthians 1:14–16, NET)

Do you hear it. Paul says flat out, “I only baptized two of you.” Then he pauses, remembers, and corrects himself. “Oh wait, actually I did baptize Stephanus’s household. And honestly, I don’t even remember if I baptized anyone else.” That’s not a mistake-free scribe channeling divine dictation. That’s a pastor writing from memory and correcting himself mid-sentence.

Now here’s the question. Is that an error. If by error you mean he forgot something, yes. But does that make the Bible untrustworthy. I think it makes it even more trustworthy. Because it shows us what Scripture actually is: God working through human voices. God doesn’t erase the humanity of the writers. He breathes through it. And the miracle is not that humans disappear but that God chooses to work with them anyway.

That’s what Paul is getting at later when he writes to Timothy:

“Every scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the person dedicated to God may be capable and equipped for every good work.”

(2 Timothy 3:16–17, NET)

We hear “inspired by God” and often think it means dictated directly by God. But the phrase literally means “God breathed.” Paul is calling back to Genesis when God breathed into humanity and brought them to life. That’s what Scripture does. It breathes life. It’s not about proving every detail historically precise. It’s about receiving wisdom that shapes us for every good work.

That’s how the psalmist describes it:

“Your word is a lamp to walk by and a light to illumine my path.”

(Psalm 119:105, NET)

Notice what that means. A lamp doesn’t walk for you. It lights the path so you can take the next step. Scripture is wisdom that illuminates, not a burden that crushes you with the demand to harmonize every detail.

So is the Bible perfect or does it have mistakes. If by perfect you mean airtight scientific accuracy, I don’t think that’s the gift we were given. What we have is something better. A God-breathed library written through human voices that invites us into wisdom, shapes us into the kind of people who can walk with God, and keeps speaking across every generation.

If you’ve felt the burden of inerrancy weighing you down, I want to invite you to set it aside. You don’t need to defend the Bible to make it trustworthy. Read it as wisdom. Read it as life. Ask God to breathe through it again. Let go of the pressure to solve every detail, and instead let the words pour over you.

For me, that shift has changed everything. I don’t read to prove the Bible right anymore. I read to hear its wisdom. And I find that makes it even more alive, more trustworthy, and more beautiful than ever.

So if you’ve set the Bible aside because it felt too heavy or too impossible to defend, pick it up again. Not as a rulebook. Not as a puzzle to be solved. Pick it up as wisdom. Let it be a lamp for your next step.