What is biblical inerrancy?
Inerrancy is the conviction that the Bible, in its original writings, is fully true and trustworthy in everything it affirms — not only in faith and life but also in history, geography, and incidental detail.
Inerrancy is grounded in God’s character: "God is not a man, that he should lie" (Numbers 23:19). If Scripture is God-breathed, it carries his truthfulness.
Inerrancy is not woodenly literal. It allows for figurative language, approximations ("about 5,000"), phenomenological description ("the sun rose"), and faithful summaries that aren’t verbatim quotations.
It applies to the original autographs; manuscripts have minor copying variants. But the textual evidence is so vast that what we read today is in over 99% verbatim agreement with the original — and no doctrine hinges on the disputed variants.
Original BibleDawn answer · reviewed 2026-06. Drafted with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy.