We teach that the sixty-six canonical books of the Bible, as originally given, are inerrant in all that they affirm and are the final authority for the church in all matters of faith and practice.

Throughout history, God inspired His prophets to write His message for humanity. In some cases, God dictated what was written; in other cases, He guided the authors and editors so the result was exactly what God wanted. Paul said, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2Tim 3:16-17 ESV).

Over the centuries, God’s people carefully tested and accepted only sixty-six books as genuinely inspired Scripture; they also rejected many other books because they were not written by God’s prophets or they contained errors (i.e., the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha).

God gave 39 books to the Jewish people, which includes:

He gave an additional 27 books to the Christian church: 

The Holy Bible is God’s Word, and since God is all knowing and can’t lie, the Bible is inerrant in everything that it teaches. In John 10:35, Jesus said that “Scripture cannot be broken” (ESV). In other words, no one can ever prove that the Bible is wrong. People may not like what the Bible teaches, they may reject what it says, or they may misinterpret Scripture, but they can’t prove that the Bible isn’t true.

However, only the original parchment or papyrus scrolls that God’s prophets used to write the Bible were free from error, not the copies or the translations that were made from them. The original books of the Bible decayed and turned to dust long ago, but God made sure that a succession of devout scribes faithfully copied and re-copied these books over the centuries.

Modern scholars have thousands of ancient Hebrew and Greek manuscripts that they can study; although these manuscripts do have variations and copying errors, they are rare and usually easy to correct. Most involve minor variations in spelling or word order, which do not affect the meaning of a passage. In some cases, scholars have two readings that are equally possible, but this is not a serious problem because we know that one of them must be the original reading, and no doctrine of the Bible is ever based on a single passage of Scripture.

So, we can be confident that our modern Bible is God’s message for humanity; it is God’s textbook for how we should live and what we should believe. In Matthew 4:4, Jesus affirmed the central role of the Bible for God’s people when He said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (ESV). Human reason, personal experience, science and philosophy may provide useful information about many different issues, but the Bible alone is the final authority for the church in all matters of faith and practice.

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