> You might want to look at some of the more modern / postmodern branches of Christianity

> Some people who practice it sincerely don't think of the Bible as a literally true document that has no mistakes or inaccuracies,

That's not “modern and postmodern” Christianity, that's just OG Christianity. The view that, as doctrine, the Bible is entirely literal and without error in any sense (rather than often nonliteral and only without error in the doctrine it intends to teach) is a relatively novel view within Christianity predominantly held within a subset of Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestantism.

A very good and relevant point.

I was raised in conservative American evangelicalism, and sometimes forget how oddly small this culture is in the global and historical scope.

Name and cite a single Christian source from before 1600 which believes the Bible is a flawed text which contains errors.

> Name and cite a single Christian source from before 1600 which believes the Bible is a flawed text which contains errors.

As I said before, the traditional view is that the Bible is free of error, but that this refers to its intended moral message, not historical or scientific truth or any other alternative purpose one might apply to it.

Given that, you must be asking for not someone who sees it as containing error but instead factual inaccuracy, and for that, well, a good place to start is Origen of Alexandria (c. AD 184 – c. AD 253), who succinctly lays out both the traditional view of the purpose of scripture and the manner in which it encompasses and is unshaken by (and is even be served by) the presence of factual error in the Commentary on the Gospel of John, Book 10, Chapter 4, which opens:

“In the case I have supposed where the historians desire to teach us by an image what they have seen in their mind, their meaning would be found, if the four were wise, to exhibit no disagreement; and we must understand that with the four Evangelists it is not otherwise. They made full use for their purpose of things done by Jesus in the exercise of His wonderful and extraordinary power; they use in the same way His sayings, and in some places they tack on to their writing, with language apparently implying things of sense, things made manifest to them in a purely intellectual way. I do not condemn them if they even sometimes dealt freely with things which to the eye of history happened differently, and changed them so as to subserve the mystical aims they had in view; so as to speak of a thing which happened in a certain place, as if it had happened in another, or of what took place at a certain time, as if it had taken place at another time, and to introduce into what was spoken in a certain way some changes of their own. They proposed to speak the truth where it was possible both materially and spiritually, and where this was not possible it was their intention to prefer the spiritual to the material. The spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might say, in the material falsehood.”

Is “before the First Nicene Council” enough “before 1600” for you?

That's a great source, thank you so much.

And yes, it is, lol.

You can find a reasonably extensive set of passages from the pre-400AD famous Christians about how the genesis story is supposed to be interpreted allegorically and not literally on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegorical_interpretations_of...

Of course, they would not consider the allegory an "error" in the same way that modern fundamentalists would.

It is not a fringe belief/conspiracy theory that biblical literalism is a relatively new Christian tradition, but rather well accepted fact among religious historians.

My catholic school system taught the Bible was inspired by God and not to be taken necessarily literally. More of a series of parables to understand life better.