Don’t many statements of faith qualify an assertion of ‘the inerrancy of the scriptures’ by adding ‘as originally given’? Since nobody possesses the ‘originally given scriptures’ (assuming there ever was such a thing), the qualification and belief seem less than useful - though a strong case is to be made for the trustworthiness through transmission of biblical texts.

You make a good point. This is something Bart Ehrman mentions in Misquoting Jesus: if God inspired the original manuscripts of the New Testament, what good does that do us 2000 years later, because we don’t have those manuscripts? Additionally, if God didn’t go to the trouble to preserve those original, inspired manuscripts, why not assume he didn’t go to the trouble of inspiring them in the first place? On the other hand, I think we perhaps need to reevaluate what exactly “inspired” should mean.

Perhaps infallibility is a nice alternative. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure the doctrine of infallibility states that the Bible is inerrant on teachings of faith and so on, but I’m willing to go a step further and say that the New Testament sometimes contradicts on doctrine, though not always significantly.

As for the reliability of Scripture, thousands of students study Plato never taking the time to think, “Did he really say this? Does this contradict what he said before?” and thousands trust the surviving works identified to be authored by Plato as reliable. Why can’t it be the same with the New Testament?

N.T.Wright argues a good case for the authority of the bible as residing not within the text itself (ie inerrant, inspired, infallible or whatever), but in the God whom it describes in history, and in the people whom he chose to be his own which it describes, as opposed to any other God or people.

I think that is a better route to travel down. I think of the Bible as the history of God’s interaction with mankind. Some people make the Bible into an idol and forget about the God it describes.