Henry Edward
Manning, an Anglican who would later convert and become a Catholic cardinal
(similar to his friend, John Henry Cardinal Newman) wrote a number of works on
Catholic theology. In one such work, The
Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost (1885), he defended the doctrine of the
inerrancy of the Bible. Here is one such example:
It may be from ‘intellectual obtuseness,’ or
‘want of the critical faculty,’ or ‘obstinate adherence to preconceived
belief,’ but it makes little impression on me to be told that S. Stephen, in
Acts vii. 16, fell into an historical error in saying that Jacob was buried in
Sichem. I confess that I cannot explain the difficulty, and that the
explanations usually given, though possible and even probable, are hardly
sufficient. Nevertheless, I am not shaken in the least as to the divine axiom,
that Holy Scripture is exempt from all error. Whether it be a fault in the
manuscript, or in the translator, or only a want of our understanding, I cannot
tell; but an error in Scripture most assuredly it is not, and our inability to
solve it, is no proof that it is. There it stands, an undoubted difficulty in
the existing text—and not the only one; and yet all together will not shake our
faith in the immunity from error which was granted to the sacred writers. (Henry
Edward Manning, The Temporal Mission of
the Holy Ghost: Or Reason and Revelation [New York: D. & J Sadler &
Co., 1885], 173)
I quote this
as many Catholics I encounter, both in person and online, deny that it is a
Catholic doctrine that the Bible (at least the original autographs) were
inerrant, notwithstanding the papal and conciliar evidence to the contrary (to be fair, most Catholic apologists [e.g., Mitchell Pacwa; Scot Hahn; Tim Staples; Robert Sungenis; John Salza] affirm this doctrine). A
very useful book on this issue would be:
