A number of years ago, an evangelical teaching at an evangelical seminary wrote a book on the synoptic problem in which he asserted that Mark's Gospel contained numerous "errors" that were later "corrected" by both Matthew and Luke in their respective Gospels. Such assertions are a common line of reasoning used to support the so-called Markan Priority Hypothesis, which is the consensus view among the great majority of New Testament scholars today. However, merely asserting that Mark contains errors is not sufficient. Such an assertion needs to be tested against the actual linguistic data in the Gospels themselves. And in point of fact, not a single one of these so-called errors in Mark can be shown to be actual errors by the existing linguistic evidence, as we attempted to show
elsewhere. Even one error in the Bible would mean it's not the word of God because God cannot err in even one thing he affirms. To even assert such a thing is a serious breach of biblical inerrancy. This assertion, in my opinion, is purely a straw man even though it claims to be supported by the linguistic evidence.
"But," someone may say, "an error (or two) in Mark would be a mere peccadillo or a minor scratch at worst." The problem is that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy (to use an analogy from Sproul) suffers from hemophilia. You merely scratch it and it bleeds to death. It is not enough to affirm inerrancy in principle only. The Bible is not "generally" inerrant. It is either inerrant or not. If it's not, then we're wasting our time reading it, studying it, teaching it, and preaching it. Moreover, to admit even a single"error" in Mark's grammar is handing the enemies of biblical inerrancy a powerful weapon. We must all hope that such assertions will be repeated no more. As much as I believe in linguistics, we don't need a "neo" linguistic approach to the synoptic problem. The old grammatical-historical approach is sufficient, as it has been through the centuries.
In every generation, biblical inerrancy will continue to be a "litmus test" of evangelical orthodoxy.