A Miracle of Biblical (and Logical) Proportions

I gave it the ol' college try (actually more like the ol' middle school try) but Pulitzer prize winner Frances Fitgerald's book The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America is just too comprehensive and detailed for a dilettante like me-- she really gets into the weeds about the fundamentalist-modern conflict in religion . . . I made it about 100 pages in and I certainly learned a lot; the main lesson, which always astounds me, is that people seem to wholeheartedly and sincerely believe in God and the Bible and Jesus, not in an abstract "this is a good way to live and prosper" kind of way, but as a serious discipline, to be debated and and delineated, point-by-point, in a logical matter, which strikes me as absolutely insane . . . the best example of this in the book (from the pages I read) is a piece of impenetrably brilliant specious logic conceived by the Princeton scholars in the late 1800s: they determined that "the doctrine of inerrancy" in the Bible refers only to the original autograph-- the "manuscripts that came from the hands of the prophets were infallible" but since those original documents don't exist, there may be errors in translation . . . so while this hypothetical primary source Bible is the Word of God, since it has been translated, there are certainly errors . . . this is a genius strategic move because then you get to have your Eucharist and eat it too, as you can claim the Bible might be fundamental and infallible but if someone does point out a contradiction or logical conundrum, then you can blame the human translators for that particular bit.