Very few Scripture readers, however, are thus qualified to understand
Greek and Hebrew. Very few ministers of the gospel are so trained as to
be able to pass upon shades of meaning of Greek or Hebrew words against
the judgment of those who teach these languages in the schools. With
graduation from theological school most ministers put Hebrew to one
side; and many pay no further attention to Greek. Even a trained
biblical student is very careful not to question the authority of the
professional linguistic experts. Apart from sidelights upon the meaning
of this or that passage, there is very little that the biblical student
can get from Greek or Hebrew which is not available in important
translations. We cannot solve the greater difficulties in biblical study
by carrying our investigations back to the study of the original
languages as such. The fact is that emphasis upon the importance of
mastery of Greek and Hebrew for an insight into scriptural meanings
rests largely upon a theory of literal inspiration of the biblical
narratives. It requires only a cursory reading to see that the
narratives in English cannot claim to be strictly inerrant, so that the
upholder of inerrancy is driven to the position that the inerrancy is in
the documents as originally written. No doctrine of inerrancy, however,
can explain away the puzzles which confront us, for example, in the
accounts of the creation as given us in the early chapters of Genesis,
or throw light upon the possibility of a soul's passing from moral death
to life.

Great help is promised us by those who maintain that the modern methods
of critical biblical study give us the key to scriptural meanings. There
is no doubt that many doors have been opened by critical methods. Now
that the flurries of misunderstanding which attended the first
application of such methods to biblical study have passed on, we see
that some solid results have been gained. In so far as our difficulties