Protests of its simplicity and perspecuity aside, the Bible is a very complex collection of sacred writings gathered into a single volume whose contents and structure have been debated, rearranged, and revised for centuries. The Bible is, in Peter Enns’s words, “ancient, ambiguous, and diverse.” That may be unsettling to many Christians at first blush, but an honest evaluation of the Scriptures will bear that out, as will be discussed below. It is Evangelicalism’s insistence on the simplicity and perspicuity of the Bible that has made it hard for many people to receive the Bible as a divine gift filled with beautiful, sometimes maddening, complexity and contradiction. Even the concept of contradiction is abhorrent to Biblical inerrantists, but as Peter Enns notes:
When we come to the Bible expecting it to be an instructional manual intended by God to give us unwavering, cement-hard certainty about our faith, we are actually creating problems for ourselves, because—as I’ve come to see—the Bible wasn’t designed to meet that expectation. In other words, the “problems” we encounter when reading the Bible are really problems we create for ourselves when we harbor the misguided expectation that the Bible is designed primarily to provide clear answers.
Probing deeper into the complexity of the Bible, the versions of the Bible—themselves very diverse in approach and style—that we know and love today are derivatives of a winding, byzantine (sometimes Byzantine) history of their texts. There are now several hundred English versions of the Bible, not to mention similar versioning in hundreds of other languages. That makes for a lot of diversity, and even subjectivism as it is generally understood that translation involves interpretation.
Granolativity 