BE:
-Even if you do believe every word in the Bible and accept it as
-the word of God, you should nonetheless know the difference
-between its strong points and its weak points.  The way you find
>As a philosophical point, why would a "divinely inspired" work
>have "weak points"?
I'm not sure what you mean by a "philosophical point".
However, there are at least two reasons why a work assumed to be
divinely inspired should also be judged by the person making
the assumption to be weaker in some of its parts than others:
(1) Some passages are found only in one place, whereas others are
    repeated.  The act of repetition must be assumed by the
person in question to be an indication from God that the passage
repeated was meant by God to be more important and stronger than
passages which occur only once.
This consideration bears even more weight when one considers that
the divinely inspired work in question--the New Testament--was
written by several persons, and these repeated passages are found
spread over their writings (e.g.  the Gospels).  God must have
inspired them all to write those same passages.  But His
inspiration must have been weak, where a passage occurred only
once and in only one Gospel.  If God reached Mark, but not Matthew
and Luke, His failure must have been deliberate.  He must have
intended that Matthew and Luke not write the passage in question,
notwithstanding that all three authors were writing about the same
things.
The content of Mark 16.18 occurs only once in the Bible.  In
contrast, the main content of Mark 12.30-31 is found also at
Matthew 22.37-39 and Luke 10.27.   There are several dozen
passages of this kind.
Obviously, the passage at Mark 12.30-31 was MORE divinely inspired
than the one at Mark 16.18.  Mark 16.18 is therefore less divinely
inspired, and hence a weaker point.  Indeed, the very fact that
the divinely inspired Matthew and Luke did not repeat it is pretty
good evidence that God had second thoughts about Mark 16.18.
(2) Some passages are in fact less believed by critics than
    others.  Even if all were divinely inspired and believed by
the person to be true, God's work would better be done if the
person relied on the more credible passages when addressing others
while ignoring those which are widely suspected of error.
Of course, none of this implies that God exists.  What we're
addressing here are the rational grounds on which the
Fundamentalist SHOULD believe that some passages of the Bible are
more reliable than others, notwithstanding that all of them are
assumed by him to be divinely inspired.
The argument here can be extended indefinitely into the entire
body of Biblical critical scholarship ranging from Saint Augustine
to today's Jesus Seminar.  Every argument about the reliability of
different parts of the Bible can be treated AS AN INTERNAL
QUESTION about God's inspiration--i.e.  as making a point about
what God thought was important, etc.  The fact that the Jesus
Seminar have found that only very few passages are well attested
in the Bible (with the implication that practically all of it
consists of forgeries, interpolations, inventions by authors, etc)
is therefore evidence that God had second thoughts about most of
it.
In fact, we know perfectly well that the Fundamentalist will not
buy into these considerations at all.
How, therefore, should WE interpret such a fact?  My answer is
that the Fundamentalist position is in fact INTERNALLY incoherent,
i.e., where his assumptions about God and God's inspiration are
fully granted.  The fundamentalist wants to regard the Bible as
divinely inspired; at the same time, however, he ignores clear
signs in the Bible that God's inspiration was not all the same
through its texts.  That is to say, he ignores and rejects God's
inspiration.
His position is therefore apostasy in its own terms.
Bob
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