| Frankly, you can't really even prove to me that they considered those texts inerrant until much later. |
Bingo! The very heart of the matter! Our modern notion of 'inerrancy' seems to date no earlier than the religious revivals of the nineteenth century, when traditional beliefs appeared to come under fire from new discoveries of science. The rational scientific worldview that occupies centre stage today is a fairly new way of looking at the world - even though it may have spent millenia in gestation. Before that people were happy enough to try to 'understand' the world through myths, symbols and stories.
So powerful however, has been the pull of scientific rationalism that some Christians, primarily in the US, have tried to understand their faith in a 'scientific' fashion also, counterposing science's claims to literal truths with their equally 'literal' reading of the Bible. It seems clear that earlier christians were happy to read it as a mixture of scholarship, myth, symbol, analogy, wisdom, exhortation and inspiration.
Most mainstream European Christian denominations, after an initial scepticism and resistance, have largely taken the new science on board and simply moved on (cf. Pope John Paul II on evolution, for example). In the US, in particular, Fundamentalists have set their faces against the modern world, for the first time putting christian thinking at odds with rationality and contemporary scholarship. (Of course one could also mention Galileo as an earlier example of this, but that was, amongst other things, a genuine dispute about science (as well as theology) that the Church got wrong and eventually conceded that it had, when the
evidence made this unavoidable.)
Fundamentalists claim to be returning to the spirit of Christianity's foundation, but they've actually created something brand new and essentially (anti)modern. Actually, I think they simply came to an important fork in the road in the evolution of religious thought and took the wrong turning.
