Bible Quote by William B. Riley

Riley’s line is a surgical jab at a certain kind of religious confidence: the impulse to smuggle absolute authority into a human product, then pretend it arrived untouched from heaven. The key move is his “therefore,” a lawyerly pivot that frames inerrancy not as a devotional posture but as a logical claim with consequences. If you insist the King James Version (or even the more modern Revised Version) is flawless, you’re not just elevating Scripture; you’re canonizing translators, editors, and committees. Riley’s genius is that he makes the target squirm: few believers want to say out loud that 17th-century Anglican scholars were immune to error.

The subtext is defensive and reformist at once. Riley, writing from a Protestant world increasingly anxious about modern biblical criticism and shifting authority, tries to preserve reverence for the Bible by refusing to confuse revelation with its packaging. He doesn’t need to denounce the KJV’s literary power; he simply relocates authority away from a specific English rendering and back toward the more complicated reality of transmission, language, and interpretation.

There’s also a quiet rhetorical trap in “men who never professed it for themselves.” Riley appeals to humility and historical honesty: even the translators didn’t claim perfection. So the modern inerrantist ends up more extreme than his supposed heroes, asserting an absolutism they would have rejected. It’s a rebuke of certainty masquerading as faith - and a reminder that tradition becomes most dangerous when it forgets it was made by people.