Did the Holy Spirit make a mistake?

[BartholomewB]

Leo XIII himself addresses that question in paragraph 23 of Providentissimus Deus:

If, then, apparent contradiction be met with, every effort should be made to remove it. Judicious theologians and commentators should be consulted as to what is the true or most probable meaning of the passage in discussion, and the hostile arguments should be carefully weighed. Even if the difficulty is after all not cleared up and the discrepancy seems to remain, the contest must not be abandoned; truth cannot contradict truth, and we may be sure that some mistake has been made either in the interpretation of the sacred words, or in the polemical discussion itself; and if no such mistake can be detected, we must then suspend judgment for the time being.

https://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-x...-xiii_enc_18111893_providentissimus-deus.html

 

[bob4]

If the Catholic position is that the Bible is free from error because the Holy Spirit dictated to the authors what to write [1], how will we reconcile the inerrancy of the Scriptures if there are clear contradictions/differences on some of the accounts in the Gospel?

There are a few articles relating to this at Catholic.com Q & A

 

[JimG]

The Scriptures are inerrant but not infallible. Only a person can be infallible. A book can not reply to your questions or clarify disagreements.

 

[pablope]

When you say “error”…error in what sense? This may be where you’re having trouble in understanding you. As TWF said, there is no error in its message.

 

[Dan_Defender]

‘Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate.’ - St John Henry Newman

 

[Frankenfurter]

The physical text, the print, even the words and translation are not perfect. I mean you can have a bad copy of the text. This is why a sort of bible-only, the text dropped out of thin air, approach seems wrong to me.

But the important messages that are in there I accept as being a message that the holy spirit wants us to get. They were revealed to people. Those revelations came through the holy spirit, and Jesus tells us to trust the holy spirit. So all the big stuff, the stuff that we could not have figured out our selves. I accept all that stuff from the Holy Spirit. If you want a list of those, basically just go to mass, and they will recite them! Interpreting it is not always easy, so I look to church experts to help with that since that is their specialty. But I also assume that the holy spirit wants me to understand, so it is not made to be too hard or tricky. That is why I don’t go for stuff where some random expert thinks he has decoded some secret buried in there.

BTW some atheists think that we have to recite these key revelations over and over in order to believe them because they are so hard to believe that only by reciting them can we come to believe them.

But I see that in a much different way. Because these revelations are things that we cannot figure out ourselves, and because the holy spirit wants us to know them, and because they are so important, we have to almost daily remind ourselves of them.

Hope that all makes sense.

I think you ask good questions.

 

[bob4]

@Senyorico:
One of the things we have to keep in mind is that the Gospels, for example, were written to a specific audience. You seemingly expressed concern over the differences in St. Matthew’s and St. Luke’s accounts of the centurion’s servant. The following excerpt from A New Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture may be helpful:

“For Mt the point of this incident is the contrast between the faith of the gentile centurion and the disbelief of Israel, as can be seen by comparison with the account preserved by Lk. It already shows that entry into the kingdom is to be won by all those who believe in Christ. Mt omits all details which do not serve to point the lesson of the faith and submission of the centurion. The centurion approaches Jesus personally instead of through intermediaries, so that there is no room for the (characteristically Lukan) recommendation of the gentile to Christ.” Section 719f

As I see it, the same event is recorded, the servant is healed because the centurion believed but St. Matthew, at least, has adapted it to stress a point to his intended audience. Someone once commented to the effect that we don’t read Scripture the way we read a newspaper.