Restoring Apostolic Faith

I disagree with him on plenty, but Dan McClellan wasn’t wrong about this one:

there really is no such thing as “the Bible.”

There are editions. Traditions. Variations. Families.

But no single, pristine, universal copy everything descends from—no more than there is the dictionary or the laptop.

In the ancient world, it was even more fluid. Scripture lived as oral tradition first—told, memorized, sung—long before ink ever touched scroll.

And once scrolls existed? Every synagogue had its preferred texts. Local customs shaped the reading list long before any council did.

So if you want to know what the apostles actually considered “Scripture,” you have to start here:

The Bible of the First Christians Wasn’t Your Bible

Most modern Protestant Christians read 66 books in a Reformation-shaped English edition.

The early church didn’t.

Their Bible was the Septuagint—the Greek Scriptures—usually around 79 books, depending on the manuscript.

And here’s the part people don’t like hearing:

When Paul or the writer of Hebrews quotes “Scripture,”

they’re almost always quoting the Septuagint,

not the later Masoretic Hebrew tradition.

Why?

Because the Septuagint is the Bible that translated Israel’s God into the world’s language.

It’s where monotheism learned to speak Greek.

Restrict yourself to a Hebrew-only Old Testament and you’re choosing a narrower window than the one Jesus and the apostles used.

Not Greek Philosophy Sneaking In—A Covenant Breaking Out

The Septuagint wasn’t some Hellenistic conspiracy.

It was Jewish survival.

Diaspora Jews translated their Scriptures so their kids wouldn’t lose the story.

And in doing so, they captured new shades of meaning:

• God no longer tied to one land

• holiness no longer locked in one building

• hope stretching toward history’s horizon

Those Greek turns of phrase became the soil of the New Testament.

The apostles wrote inside a world already shaped—and prepared—by the Septuagint’s vocabulary.

Why It Still Matters

If you care about how Jesus and the apostles read their Bible,

you can’t treat the Septuagint like an optional bonus pack.

It isn’t novelty.

It isn’t “extra.”

It’s the lens through which the earliest believers understood Scripture.

Recovering that lens isn’t about adding books for flair—it’s about letting the text be as wide and ancient as it actually was.

And once you do that, you collide with a very uncomfortable truth…

The Modern “Perfect, Inerrant, Infallible Bible” Is Not Ancient Christianity

Here’s the straight, unvarnished truth:

The idea that “my Bible is perfect, inerrant, and infallible” is not apostolic, not patristic, not Jewish, and not historical.

It is a very late invention.

Let’s walk through it.

1. The Early Church Never Taught Modern Inerrancy

Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Athanasius—none of them taught anything close to the modern doctrine of inerrancy.

They believed Scripture was:

• true

• authoritative

• God-breathed

• the rule of faith

…but they also openly acknowledged:

• scribal mistakes

• variant readings

• the need for trained interpretation

Nobody in the first few centuries said,

“Every word in every manuscript is perfectly preserved without error.”

They couldn’t. They’d seen the manuscripts.

2. Ancient Judaism Didn’t Believe This Either

Judaism was text-pluralistic:

• proto-Masoretic

• Samaritan Pentateuch

• Dead Sea Scroll varieties

• Septuagint

• Targums

The rabbis argued over variants constantly.

A single flawless master copy?

That wasn’t even a category.

3. The Fathers Challenged Bad Copies Regularly

For them, the message was inerrant, not the paper.

They cared about:

• the revelation of Christ

• apostolic doctrine

• the theological unity of Scripture

But they freely admitted textual flaws.

Even Jerome complained nonstop about corrupt manuscripts.

If anyone believed in absolute textual perfection, it wasn’t the early church.

4. Modern Inerrancy Is a 19th-Century American Reaction

This is the uncomfortable part:

The doctrine of “biblical inerrancy” comes from fear, not tradition.

Specifically fear of:

• Darwin

• German higher criticism

• rising liberal theology

• archaeological discoveries

When the ground started shaking, American Protestantism (late 1800s–early 1900s) tried to create an unbreakable foundation.

They invented a new doctrine:

“If the Bible has any complexity, our faith dies.”

That’s not theology.

That’s panic dressed up as doctrine.

5. The KJV-Only Movement Poured Gasoline on It

In the 20th century, some Christians treated the King James Version like it fell from heaven on a gold chain.

Suddenly:

• one English translation = perfect

• all others = corrupted

• manuscripts the apostles never saw = “the real ones”

It’s modern superstition wearing scholarly cosplay.

6. The Bible Never Claims What Modern Inerrancy Claims

Scripture calls itself:

• God-breathed

• trustworthy

• profitable

• revealing

• life-giving

It never claims:

• that one perfect manuscript exists

• that scribes never made mistakes

• that translations are infallible

• that the 66-book canon is eternal

• that every word choice is inspired

Those are modern additions, not biblical truths.

7. Why People Believe It Today

Because:

• it’s comforting

• it’s simple

• it avoids wrestling

• it protects tradition

• it shuts down questions

• it makes people feel “right”

And let’s be honest:

it saves pastors from learning textual criticism.

So Where Did the Belief Come From?

Not from Jesus.

Not from the apostles.

Not from Judaism.

Not from the early church.

It comes from:

19th–20th century American Protestantism trying desperately to protect itself from modernity.

That’s it.

And that’s why I read the Bible the way the apostles did—

not the way modern fear taught us to.