Inerrancy is the doctrine that Holy Scripture, in the original autographs, is entirely without error in all that it affirms, whether in matters of doctrine and salvation or in matters of history, geography, and the created order. It follows necessarily from the inspiration and the character of God: because all Scripture is breathed out by the God who cannot lie, and because His Word is truth, the Scripture He has given cannot deceive or be deceived. Inerrancy does not claim that the Bible speaks with the technical precision of a modern textbook, that it never uses round numbers, phenomenal language (“the sun rose”), figures of speech, or ordinary approximations; nor that copyists never introduced transmission errors into later manuscripts. It claims that whatever the biblical authors actually affirm, rightly interpreted according to the intention and conventions of each text, is true and trustworthy. The doctrine is properly confessed of the autographs—the original God-breathed text—while the providential preservation of that text in the manuscripts gives the church confidence that she possesses the Word of God substantially intact. Inerrancy is not a peripheral refinement but the guardian of biblical authority: a Bible that errs in what it teaches cannot finally bind the conscience, for the reader must then sit in judgment over it, sorting the true from the false by some standard above the text itself.