Do Orthodox Christians Believe in Biblical Inerrancy?

Ask an evangelical Christian whether the Bible contains errors and you will often get a clear answer with a clear name: inerrancy. Ask an Orthodox priest the same question and the answer is likely to be slower. He will say that the Scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit, that they are the Word of God, that the Church reads them at every service and kisses the Gospel book. He may then add that "inerrancy" is not a word the Orthodox Church has ever defined, and that the question itself comes from a particular Western debate.

That slower answer can sound evasive, or even liberal. This article sets out what the Orthodox Church does and does not say, what the Fathers actually wrote about discrepancies in Scripture, how evangelicals and Catholics define their own positions, and where real questions remain open.

In brief

The Orthodox Church confesses that Scripture is inspired by God and is to be received and read within the Church. It has never defined a doctrine of "inerrancy" at an ecumenical council; the detailed definitions come from Catholic teaching (1893, 1965) and the evangelical Chicago Statement (1978). The Synod of Jerusalem (1672), a respected local council, calls the Scriptures God-taught, but it does not address errors of detail. The Fathers held Scripture in the highest honor: Irenaeus called it "perfect," and Augustine believed its authors were "completely free from error." Yet the same Fathers openly discussed discrepancies. Chrysostom said differences between the Gospels in "times or places" do not injure their truth; Origen thought some passages could not be taken literally; Augustine wrestled with Matthew's "Jeremiah" and with Septuagint numbers. Modern Orthodox teachers stress that Scripture is the Word of God in human words, centered on Christ, and Thomas Hopko allows for "incidental inaccuracies of a non-essential character." The honest Orthodox answer is a firm yes to inspiration and truthfulness, and a reserved no to the Chicago-style definition, which the Orthodox Church has never adopted as its own, even where it shares the Statement's reverence for Scripture.

Thesis: Orthodoxy affirms that Scripture is God-inspired and wholly trustworthy in what God reveals through it, but it reads that truthfulness through the Church, the Fathers and Christ himself rather than through a modern technical definition of inerrancy, and the patristic evidence supports this reading while showing that the Fathers also cared about factual accuracy more than some Orthodox writers admit.

What "inerrancy" means today

Its most careful evangelical statement is the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, drafted by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare in Chicago on October 26 to 28, 1978, and published that December in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.¹ Its Article XII reads: "We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit. We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science."²

The statement is more nuanced than its critics allow. Article XIII denies that inerrancy is negated by "the use of hyperbole and round numbers," by "variant selections of material in parallel accounts," or by "the use of free citations." Article X places inspiration, "strictly speaking," in "the autographic text of Scripture," the lost originals, while affirming that copies and translations are the Word of God "to the extent that they faithfully represent the original."³ The drafters themselves said they did not "propose that this Statement be given creedal weight."⁴

The Catholic Church has spoken with more formal authority. In Providentissimus Deus (1893), Pope Leo XIII wrote that "it is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred."⁵ The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum (1965) says that "the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation," and directs interpreters to attend to "literary forms."⁶ Catholic theologians still debate whether the phrase "for the sake of salvation" limits the scope of inerrancy or describes its purpose.

The Orthodox Church has no equivalent document: no ecumenical council and no pan-Orthodox statement defines inerrancy. The nearest Orthodox text is the Confession of Dositheus, adopted by the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, a respected local council. Its Decree 2 calls the Scriptures God-taught, to be believed without doubting as the Church interprets them, and speaks of the Church's witness as infallible like the Scriptures themselves. That is a strong affirmation of Scripture's authority, but it does not take up errors of detail. These texts do not settle the question, so we turn to what the Fathers wrote.

What the Fathers said

Scripture is perfect and true

It would be wrong to suggest that the early Church held a relaxed view of the Bible's accuracy. St Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180, told readers to leave unanswerable questions to God, "being most properly assured that the Scriptures are indeed perfect, since they were spoken by the Word of God and His Spirit."⁷ (See our article on Irenaeus of Lyons.)

St Augustine, in a letter to St Jerome around 405, went further: "I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error." If something in them seemed false, he said, he would assume "that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it."⁸ This is close to the evangelical position, including the appeal to copying errors. {{strong: The claim that the idea of an error-free Bible was invented by nineteenth-century Protestants does not survive a reading of Augustine.}}

In the eighth century St John of Damascus wrote, in a more pastoral key, that "to search the Scriptures is a work most fair and most profitable for souls."⁹

Chrysostom: condescension and small differences

St John Chrysostom matters here for two reasons. The first is his treatment of the differences between the Gospels. Opening his homilies on Matthew, he answered the charge that the evangelists disagree by calling their partial disagreement "a very great evidence of their truth," since perfect agreement would suggest collusion. Then he drew a line: "But if there be anything touching times or places, which they have related differently, this nothing injures the truth of what they have said." In "the chief heads, those which constitute our life and furnish out our doctrine," he wrote, nowhere "is any of them found to have disagreed, no not ever so little," and he listed the incarnation, the miracles, the crucifixion, burial, resurrection and ascension.¹⁰ Chrysostom is not conceding that the evangelists made mistakes. He is saying that differences of detail are not the place where Scripture's truth lies.

The second is his teaching on synkatabasis, God's "condescension" in speaking to human beings in human terms. The translator Robert C. Hill preferred the rendering "considerateness," arguing that Chrysostom implies nothing patronizing.¹¹ In his homilies on Genesis, Chrysostom explains that Moses, teaching an untutored people, showed this considerateness because "under the guidance of the Spirit he was speaking in a manner appropriate to his hearers." Commenting on God taking a rib from Adam (Genesis 2:21), he says: "Don't take the words in human fashion; rather, interpret the concreteness of the expressions from the viewpoint of human limitations."¹² The Spirit adapts the form of revelation to its hearers. That does not imply error, but the reader must ask what kind of statement a passage makes before deciding what would count as false. (For more on him, see Who Was St. John Chrysostom?)

Basil: the literal sense and the purpose of Scripture

St Basil the Great is a useful check on anyone who wants the Fathers to be allegorists. In his ninth homily on the six days of creation he rejects interpreters who "change the nature of reptiles and of wild beasts to suit their allegories" and says: "For me grass is grass; plant, fish, wild beast, domestic animal, I take all in the literal sense."¹³

Yet in the same passage Basil notes that Moses says nothing about the shape or circumference of the earth: "He has passed over in silence, as useless, all that is unimportant for us." God, he says, "has regulated all the economy of Scripture in view of the edification and the making perfect of our souls."¹⁴ Basil reads Genesis plainly, but he does not treat it as a cosmology textbook. Scripture's purpose shapes what it chooses to say.

Origen: deliberate "stumbling-blocks"

Origen of Alexandria (died c. 254), parts of whose teaching were later condemned, took a bolder line. In On First Principles he argued that "the word of God has arranged that certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and offenses, and impossibilities, should be introduced into the midst of the law and the history," so that readers would not stop at the letter but seek a spiritual meaning. As an example he asked: "who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars?"¹⁵

Origen did not think the Bible was mostly unhistorical. He insisted that "the passages that are true in their historical meaning are much more numerous than those which are interspersed with a purely spiritual signification."¹⁶ But he plainly did not hold that every sentence of Scripture is literally accurate history. He is a Father of exegesis whom the Church has never treated as a safe guide in everything. (See Who Was Origen of Alexandria?)

Augustine and the wrong prophet's name

Matthew 27:9 reads: "Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, 'And they took the thirty pieces of silver ...'" The thirty pieces of silver appear in Zechariah 11:12 to 13, not in Jeremiah.¹⁷ Augustine took the difficulty head on in The Harmony of the Gospels. He allowed that "when Matthew was engaged in composing his Gospel, the word Jeremiah occurred to his mind ... instead of Zechariah," and then argued that the Holy Spirit let the name stand, to show that the prophets speak with one voice. The name, he wrote, was "permitted, or rather directed, by the authority of the Holy Spirit" to remain.¹⁸

Modern readers may find this answer strained. Augustine himself also pointed to Jeremiah's purchase of a field, and many interpreters today say that Matthew combines Zechariah with passages from Jeremiah about a potter and a field. What matters is the method: Augustine neither denied the problem nor concluded that Scripture had failed.

The Septuagint and the Hebrew: a test case

The question of inerrancy becomes concrete for Orthodox Christians because their Old Testament is the Septuagint, the Greek translation the early Church inherited (see Which Bible Did Paul Quote?). It differs from the standard Hebrew text in many places. Two examples show why this matters.

Hebrews 10:5 quotes Psalm 40 as, "Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, But a body You have prepared for Me." The Hebrew of Psalm 40:6, as the NKJV translates it, reads instead, "My ears You have opened." The Greek Psalm, in Brenton's translation, reads "but a body hast thou prepared me."¹⁹ The letter to the Hebrews builds its argument about Christ's self-offering on the word "body." {{debated: Scholars disagree about whether "body" was the original wording of the Greek Psalm or a very early change.}} Nearly all Septuagint manuscripts read "body," but a few witnesses read "ears," and the Göttingen critical edition of the Greek Psalms prints "ears." Ronald van der Bergh's textual study surveys the options and argues that "body" was the original Septuagint reading, with "ears" a later correction toward the Hebrew; he treats other, smaller differences in the quotation as intentional changes by the author of Hebrews.²⁰

The second example is arithmetic. In the Septuagint's figures for the patriarchs, Methuselah appears to outlive the Flood by fourteen years, though only eight people were in the ark. Augustine called this "the well-known question as to the age of Methuselah" and concluded that the error most plausibly entered when the translation was first copied, rather than through deliberate falsification by either Jews or the translators.²¹ Yet Augustine also believed that "the same Spirit who was in the prophets when they spoke these things was also in the seventy men when they translated them," so that both the Hebrew and the Greek could carry the Spirit's meaning.²²

Here Orthodox and evangelical approaches part ways most clearly. The Chicago Statement locates inspiration in the lost autographs. The Orthodox Church, like the early Church, treats the Scriptures it has received and reads in worship as the Word of God, while knowing that the Hebrew and Greek traditions differ.

The Orthodox position

It helps to distinguish three levels.

Dogma. Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit and is the Word of God. "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16, NKJV). Scripture is read within the Church that recognized the canon (see How Was the Biblical Canon Actually Formed?). No Orthodox Christian may treat Scripture as a merely human book.

Common teaching. Modern Orthodox catechesis stresses the human authorship of Scripture. Fr Thomas Hopko's The Orthodox Faith, published by the Orthodox Church in America, says that calling the Bible the Word of God does not mean "that God dictated the Bible word for word to men who were merely His passive instruments." The words of Scripture "contain all of the marks of the men who wrote them, and of the time and the culture in which they were written," yet "are truly the very Word of God."²³ Hopko also insists that "no one can truly understand and correctly interpret the Bible" outside the life of the Church.²⁴

Georges Florovsky wrote that inspiration "can never be properly defined," for "there is a mystery therein." He spoke of "the miracle and the mystery of the Bible, that it is the Word of God in human idiom," and insisted that "What is human is not swept away by divine inspiration, it is only transfigured."²⁵ He also wrote, "The Bible is the Word of God indeed, but the book stands by the testimony of the Church."²⁶

Fr John Behr stresses reading Scripture through Christ crucified. In a 1998 lecture he said: "The Word concerning Christ, the Gospel, is a treasure hid in Scripture, brought to light by the Cross," and "Christ is the Word of God disseminated in Scripture."²⁷ This echoes Luke 24:27, where the risen Christ, "beginning at Moses and all the Prophets," expounded "in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." The truth of Scripture is first the truth of its witness to Christ.

Theological opinion. Whether Scripture contains any errors of detail is a matter on which Orthodox teachers speak differently. Hopko's catechism states: "It is the faith of the Orthodox Church that the Bible, as the divinely-inspired Word of God in the words of men, contains no formal errors or inner contradictions concerning the relationship between God and the world. There may be incidental inaccuracies of a non-essential character in the Bible."²⁸ An Orthodox Christian may equally follow Augustine's approach: if something looks wrong, the fault is in the copy, the translation or our understanding. The Synod of Jerusalem (1672) affirms that Scripture is God-taught but does not decide this question. {{moderate: No Orthodox council or synod has made either view binding.}}

Hard passages in practice

Take Mark 2:26, where Jesus says David entered the house of God "in the days of Abiathar the high priest," while 1 Samuel 21:1 names "Ahimelech the priest."²⁹ An inerrantist will look for a harmonization, for example that the phrase refers loosely to the period of Abiathar's prominence; Augustine's method would do the same, or would ask whether the difficulty lies in the copying of the text. Hopko's general allowance for "incidental inaccuracies" does not discuss this verse, and it should not be used to attribute a lapse of memory to Christ. Either way, the Orthodox instinct is to ask, with Chrysostom, whether the difference touches "the chief heads." Our article Does the Bible Contradict Itself? applies a similar method to specific cases.

The strongest objections

The evangelical objection: "Jesus believed in inerrancy"

An evangelical will point out that Jesus said "the Scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35), argued from single words of the Old Testament, and treated its history as real. If God cannot lie, and Scripture is God's word, it follows that Scripture cannot err in anything it affirms. Allowing "incidental inaccuracies," the argument runs, puts the reader in charge of deciding which parts are essential, and history shows that this road leads to a Bible with little left in it. The Chicago Statement exists because of that history.³⁰

This is a serious argument, and Orthodox Christians share its concern. Our answer is that the Orthodox safeguard against a shrinking Bible is the Church itself: the Creed, the councils, the liturgy and the Fathers, not the individual reader, decide what Scripture teaches. John 10:35 concerns the binding authority of what Scripture says, which Orthodoxy fully affirms. And the Chicago Statement's own list of allowable phenomena (round numbers, free citations, varied parallel accounts) shows that inerrantists, too, must decide what a text claims before judging its accuracy. For background on how evangelicals came to these positions, see Evangelicalism vs. Fundamentalism; for the wider Protestant and Orthodox difference on Scripture and Tradition, see What Protestants and Orthodox Christians Believe About Scripture.

The Catholic objection: "Orthodoxy has no clear teaching"

A Catholic may say that the Orthodox Church's silence is a weakness. Rome has a magisterium that can say, as Leo XIII did, that it is "absolutely wrong and forbidden" to admit error in the sacred writer, and Vatican II reaffirmed that Scripture teaches "without error." Without such an authority, Orthodox teachers can only offer opinions.

The Orthodox reply is that the Church has not been silent about Scripture, only about this formula, and that it has never tried to define every question in advance. Catholics themselves also debate how to read Dei Verbum's phrase "for the sake of salvation," so a formal definition has not ended the discussion there either.

The skeptical objection: "This is special pleading"

A skeptic may say that talk of "condescension" and "incidental inaccuracies" keeps faith safe from evidence: whenever an error is found, it is declared non-essential. Orthodox faith makes claims that evidence could in principle count against, above all that Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead. Those are among the "chief heads" Chrysostom named, and the Church never treats them as non-essential. What Orthodoxy declines to do is stake the faith on whether Mark named the right priest, a judgment about where the Gospel's truth lies that the Fathers made long before modern criticism.

What we can say confidently

• The Orthodox Church confesses that Scripture is inspired by God and reads it as the Word of God within the life of the Church.
• No ecumenical council or pan-Orthodox synod has defined a doctrine of "inerrancy." The Synod of Jerusalem (1672), a respected local council, affirms that the Scriptures are God-taught, without addressing errors of detail. The detailed definitions come from Catholic documents (1893, 1965) and the evangelical Chicago Statement (1978), which the Orthodox Church has never adopted as its own standard.
• Major Fathers, East and West, held Scripture to be perfect and true. Augustine explicitly believed its authors were "completely free from error."
• The same Fathers discussed discrepancies openly. Chrysostom held that differences of time and place do not injure the Gospels' truth; Augustine discussed Matthew's "Jeremiah" and the Septuagint's chronology.
• The Church has always used the Septuagint as its Old Testament while knowing that it differs from the Hebrew.
• Modern Orthodox teachers reject verbal dictation and describe Scripture as the Word of God in human words, centered on Christ.

What remains disputed

• Whether Scripture contains any errors of detail at all. Hopko allows "incidental inaccuracies"; an Orthodox reader may instead follow Augustine in attributing every apparent error to copyists, translators or readers.
• How far Origen's "stumbling-blocks" approach is compatible with the later tradition. The Church has used his exegesis selectively.
• Whether "body" in Hebrews 10:5 reflects the original Septuagint or the author's adaptation, and what that means for claims about the Septuagint's inspiration.
• How Catholics should read the scope of Dei Verbum 11, and whether Orthodox and Catholic positions are as different as they sound.

Conclusion

So, do Orthodox Christians believe in biblical inerrancy? If the question means "Do you believe the Bible is God's true word, which never misleads us about God, Christ and salvation?" the answer is yes, without hesitation. If it means "Do you subscribe to the Chicago Statement and its account of the autographs?" the answer is no, not because the Orthodox think less of Scripture but because they receive it differently: as the book of the Church, read aloud in worship, interpreted by the Fathers, and opened by the risen Lord.

That answer also asks something of Orthodox Christians. The Fathers did not treat apparent errors lightly; Augustine assumed the fault was his before it was the text's. Orthodox readers who appeal to "condescension" should do so with the same seriousness. On the road to Emmaus, Christ did not give his disciples a theory of inspiration. He opened the Scriptures to them, and their hearts burned within them. That remains the Church's way of reading.

Notes

1. "The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 21, no. 4 (December 1978): 289 and following; the introduction gives the meeting at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare, October 26 to 28, 1978. Back
2. Chicago Statement, Article XII, text as published by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ICBI archive). Back
3. Chicago Statement, Articles XIII and X. Back
4. Chicago Statement, Preface. Back
5. Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus (November 18, 1893), section 20, English text at vatican.va. Back
6. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum (November 18, 1965), sections 11 and 12, English text at vatican.va. Back
7. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.28.2, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, ANF 1. Back
8. Augustine, Letter 82.3 (to Jerome), trans. J. G. Cunningham, NPNF1 1. Back
9. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4.17, trans. E. W. Watson and L. Pullan, NPNF2 9. Back
10. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 1.6, trans. George Prevost, rev. M. B. Riddle, NPNF1 10. Back
11. Mary W. Tse, "Synkatabasis and Akribeia: The Warp and Woof of Chrysostom's Hermeneutics," Jian Dao 15 (2001): 1-17, citing Robert C. Hill, "On Looking Again at Sunkatabasis," Prudentia 13 (1981): 4. Back
12. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 1-17, trans. Robert C. Hill, Fathers of the Church 74 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 34 and 199, as quoted by Tse (note 11); the FOC 74 volume itself was not consulted. Back
13. Basil, Hexaemeron 9.1, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 8. Back
14. Basil, Hexaemeron 9.1. Back
15. Origen, De Principiis 4.1.15-16 (ANF numbering; the translation of the Greek text), trans. Frederick Crombie, ANF 4. Back
16. Origen, De Principiis 4.1.19 (Greek text), ANF 4. Back
17. Matthew 27:9, NKJV; compare Zechariah 11:12-13. Back
18. Augustine, The Harmony of the Gospels 3.7.30-31, trans. S. D. F. Salmond, NPNF1 6. Back
19. Hebrews 10:5 and Psalm 40:6, NKJV; Psalm 39 (Septuagint numbering), trans. L. C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (1844), eBible.org edition. Back
20. Ronald H. van der Bergh, "A Textual Comparison of Hebrews 10:5b-7 and LXX Psalm 39:7-9," Neotestamentica 42, no. 2 (2008): 353-382, especially 355-358 (on the Göttingen reading, 357 n. 4). Back
21. Augustine, City of God 15.11 and 15.13, trans. Marcus Dods, NPNF1 2. Back
22. Augustine, City of God 18.43, NPNF1 2. Back
23. Thomas Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 1, Doctrine and Scripture, "The Bible: Word of God," online edition at oca.org. Back
24. Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 1, "The Bible: Interpretation," oca.org. Back
25. Georges Florovsky, "Revelation and Interpretation," in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works 1 (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972), ch. 2. Back
26. Florovsky, "Revelation and Interpretation," ch. 2. Back
27. John Behr, "Orthodoxy," a talk given at the University of North Carolina, March 23, 1998, formerly published on the St Vladimir's Seminary website (archived copy). Back
28. Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 1, "The Bible: Word of God," oca.org. Back
29. Mark 2:26 and 1 Samuel 21:1, NKJV. Back
30. John 10:35, NKJV; Chicago Statement, Preface and Articles XII to XIV. Back

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982 (Bible Gateway).
• Brenton, Lancelot C. L., trans. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament. London, 1844 (eBible.org edition).
• Irenaeus. Against Heresies. Trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. Ante-Nicene Fathers 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885.
• Origen. De Principiis. Trans. Frederick Crombie. Ante-Nicene Fathers 4. Buffalo, 1885.
• Basil of Caesarea. Hexaemeron. Trans. Blomfield Jackson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, 8. Buffalo, 1895.
• John Chrysostom. Homilies on Matthew. Trans. George Prevost, rev. M. B. Riddle. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, 10. Buffalo, 1888.
• John Chrysostom. Homilies on Genesis 1-17. Trans. Robert C. Hill. Fathers of the Church 74. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1986 (quoted via Tse).
• Augustine. Letter 82. Trans. J. G. Cunningham. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, 1. Buffalo, 1887.
• Augustine. The City of God. Trans. Marcus Dods. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, 2. Buffalo, 1887.
• Augustine. The Harmony of the Gospels. Trans. S. D. F. Salmond. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, 6. Buffalo, 1888.
• John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Trans. E. W. Watson and L. Pullan. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, 9. Buffalo, 1899.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Behr, John. "Orthodoxy." Talk at the University of North Carolina, March 23, 1998. St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary website (archived 2010).
• Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
• Hopko, Thomas. The Orthodox Faith. Vol. 1, Doctrine and Scripture. Orthodox Church in America, online edition at oca.org; print edition, St Vladimir's Seminary Press.

Other scholarship and church documents

• International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. "The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy." Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 21, no. 4 (1978): 289 and following.
• Leo XIII. Providentissimus Deus. Encyclical, November 18, 1893.
• Second Vatican Council. Dei Verbum. Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, November 18, 1965.
• Tse, Mary W. "Synkatabasis and Akribeia: The Warp and Woof of Chrysostom's Hermeneutics." Jian Dao 15 (2001): 1-17.
• Van der Bergh, Ronald H. "A Textual Comparison of Hebrews 10:5b-7 and LXX Psalm 39:7-9." Neotestamentica 42, no. 2 (2008): 353-382.