Achtemeier is a veteran NT scholar, who in this book works hard to preserve the authority of the Bible for the church while dismissing claims of it's inerrancy. Good discussion on how the Bible was actually shaped and formed.

A brave book by a conservative evangelical OT scholar who argues that, in deed, the OT builds on an ancient Near-Eastern world view. Though not denying an infallible Bible, Enns hopes to educate us that understanding Biblical revelation only makes sense in admitting it's incarnational nature, divine truth revealed through the prism of real human stuff.

An older work by a world class OT scholar who attempts to debunk the fundamentalist position while validating the modern critical approach that has given us many insights that disprove inerrancy. Probably will need to find this used. Also see his "Beyond Fundamentalism". I am surprised these are out of print.

A brief, moderate, gracious and very readable introduction to the issues. Barton writes: "Over the years a suspicion has grown in me that much of the fundamentalists' case is not simply a bad thing, but a good thing gone wrong: they point us towards important truth, but veer away from them themselves at the last moment because a doctrinaire conservatism blinds their eyes."

For a moderate conservative approach that doesn't simply rehash older traditional approaches, there is none better than Wright. A valuable perspective in weighing out options.

This does not deal with the issue of inspiration per se but is Borg's effort to retrieve the valid contribution of the Bible for contemporary times. I think he is very poor in grappling with the problematic portions of the Bible, but he does fashion a popularized interpretation of the Bible that will appeal to non-literalists. How he gets from there to here needs to be better articulated.

An excellent collection of essays that elucidate the historical approaches to the issues by influential Christian theologians throughout the ages. From Origen, Aquinas, Luther to Barth, Frei and other more contemporary thinkers. Great for perspective.

Part II "There are "600 hundred passages of explicit violence in the Hebrew Bible, 1,000 verses where God's own violent actions of punishment are described. 100 passages where Yahweh expressly commands others to kill people, and several stories where God irrationally kills or tries to kill for no apparent reason." Pallmeyer candidly asks does the Bible always get it right?!

Part 2 of Spong's contribution to the discussion. Here we have more ethically problematic Biblical passages.

Perhaps a part II to Misquoting Jesus. Ehrman writes well and distills modern scholarship understandably enough for the general reader. See how modern scholarship has challenged many of the conservative assumptions of the infallibility of the gospel writers.

Thought the NT was essentially consistent and unified throughout the various books and authors without any essential contradictions? Read this seminal work to challenge that position. But Dunn as an evangelical also sees overriding unity.

Fitzmeyer, a world class NT scholar, concludes that the many "messianic" OT passages the NT writers used as pointing to Christ could not in any plain sense of meaning be seen as legitimating that claim.

I end with a few works by debunking enthusiasts who feel the Bible is great target practice for demonstrating absurdity and hypocrisy. These are definitely a mixed bag but worth a perusal. After all, who is going to point out the Bible's inconsistencies? Josh McDowell or Gleason Archer?

Again, a very mixed bag and some of it just plain overblown. Yet this has some validity to consider in the bigger picture. There remains to be produced a work in this genre that is fully abreast with current biblical scholarship and still offers a nuanced and constrained subversive critique.