I wasn't addressing any overview of the Bible's message, but rather the claims that the Bible is infallible, inerrant, and necessarily the exact word of god, plus perhaps a consideration of god's reason for allowing errors to exist in the Bible at all. Elements that Christians use to fool themselves.
What I was pointing out by my post was that a Christian doesn't need to believe in scribal perfection to believe the Bible is a reliable document concerning theology, history, and the future. Your understanding of these topics from the Bible will not be fundamentally altered by scribal errors that alter a single random number that itself has no bearing on the meaning or message of the text.
In acknowledging that the Bible is not error free there's always the possibility that some of the more important elements in its narrative are in error.
You missed the point I was making: Random scribal error alone cannot alter the message or meaning of the whole Bible. Even if, by chance, a single sentence was altered in a meaningful way, there is nothing in the Bible of foundational importance that rests on the witness of a single verse. Any truth you want to draw from the Bible about theology, history, or prophecy has multiple witnesses that run as a common themes and ideas from start to finish.
Perhaps 2 Timothy 3;16, which says "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness," was meant to say "Some Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,"
You misunderstand the implications of what I said. A scribal error does not make the whole book uninspired. The original writer didn't make the error, a later scribe did. And no scribal error is going to alter the message of an entire book. The inspired message is still there.
Example of this: I just happened to be watching a debate today between Bart Erhman and James White. White challenges Erhman to name any textual variant that altered the meaning of a book. He never gave one. He mentioned specific sentences where significant variant words existed that altered the meaning of that particular sentence, but in no case could any of those sentences alter the conclusions one would draw from the whole book, let alone the whole BIble, about foundational issues of theology, history, or prophecy.
1 John 1:9
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
1 John 1:9
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and may forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
OR
Philippians 4:13
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:13
I can do all things through the Father who strengthens me.
OR
Matthew 28:19-20
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
Matthew 28:19-20
Therefore go and make disciples of your nation, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
Of course I'm not saying these alterations are true, but that such mistakes
are possible. Mistakes that could possibly make a difference in one's theology.
You're dealing with hypotheticals where you assume several things that are not actually true:
1. The assumption that changing this one verse would change foundational understandings of theology.
2. The assumption that this one scribal change would be replicated in every single manuscript, so that the original reading was lost.
Neither of those assumptions is true.
Firstly, in the hypothetical example you offered of Matthew 28:19-20, we have three other Gospels and the book of Acts which all have Jesus telling the the disciples to go into all the world and preach the Gospel. This is an example of how important information is almost never contained in a single verse within the Bible, but you can find common themes and ideas sown like a thread throughout it from beginning to end. In fact, you can even draw upon Joel and Genesis (with God's promise to Abraham) to support the idea that Israel was meant to be blessed to be a blessing to the nations. So it's not like this idea pops up out of nowhere on it's own, or doesn't have mutual support from other books. In fact, most of the NT deals with the Gospel being taken to the nations.
This one sentence breakdown is a good example of how most of your hypothetical examples would play out if one examined the Bible as a whole.
Second, is the near impossibility of one scribal mistake like that being replicated across all manuscripts. The reality is that we have multiple independent lines of transmission for the NT texts from all over the western world. There was no central text in the first few centuries that copies were made from. Because of this, if any scribal variant got stuck in a regional manuscript, we can see evidence today of that by comparing it with other manuscripts from different transmission lines.
Because of this, the original readings are preserved, because the odds of everyone making the same exact random scribal error is virtually impossible.
That is why we can have textual criticism, which seeks to analyze all the variants and determine which were most likely the original readings.
Among the variants where there is any uncertainty about what the original word might of been, it never actually changes our understanding of the content of the Bible in a way that would change important theological/historical/prophetic conclusions.