One of the reasons why I lean towards inerrancy is because of my upbringing. I grew up where that was dogma #1. My second reason for leaning towards that is that I'm UR. It was a foregone conclusion with me that I would not accept the doctrine if there were two or three verses that I couldn't account for in the entire Bible because "by the mouth of two or three witnesses let everything be established." Were the perfection of the Bible in jeapardy, my reasoning is that it would have been the absolute best goods that would have been compromised and I'd of been another person like C.S. Lewis and others who would have said "well, you can't ever genuinely really know until judgment day!"
I would expect the same variations between Kings, Chronicles, and Samuel's two books as I would expect of the 4 Gospels that if we're talking about different eye-witnesses to the events, then different people would emphasize different things. And if the stories were taken down too perfectly, then we'd of been more prone to figure that someone made it all up!
When people say that the Bible has errors, I've yet to find a single one of their "errors" to be something other than either translational issues, things in the Psalms, prophets, and Solomon's writings that they just honestly didn't understand what was being talked about, or the type of differences you'd expect between different witnesses to the same events that didn't compare notes before they told their stories. There's a question about whether a verse in 1John 5 is in the earliest manuscripts, along with the situation with the woman taken in the act of adultery, a portion of the Great Commission in Mark 16, and one or two other passages as to whether they're genuinely a part of the earliest manuscripts. There's the occasional question between different copies of manuscripts about the spelling of a name, and whether Revelation 13's prophecy should be read as 616 or 666. The variations are not doctrinally relevant questions from the standpoint that there's not a single doctrine that I can think of that any group in Christianity holds to that's in the least bit of jeapardy. BTW: the correct number for Revelation 13 is very likely 666 because of how 666 is used elsewhere in the Bible, but I won't get into that here 'cause I don't have a Concordance handy for looking up the passages in question and 'cause it's after 2am where I'm at.
When people say that the Bible is inerrant, 95% of the people that are saying that based upon what they've looked into are making that assessment regarding what you can dig out of the Bible doctrinally, historically, philosophically (as each context and situation is taken into consideration for it's parameters), scientifically (again, rightly translated), and regarding it's consistency with regards to it's description of the Creation event, the crucifixion and resurrection, and eschatological matters. It's usually not a claim to every single detail of every single ancient manuscript being essentially identical, but that all important matters are reconstructable by the translators who have the oldest and most reliable manuscripts with which to compare variant readings with their current understanding of what the Bible teaches for the finer points on a number, a name, or a symbol. Because we're all at different levels of light on the purposes of God, obviously the harmony of different portions of the Bible are going to be most important to us as opposed to what might be deemed essential by the Church down the street from the ancient manuscripts. All of us in Christianity have all of these wide ranging and sometimes opposite doctrines from one another, and yet each of us are able to still agree upon the 66 books of the Judeo-Christian Bible. That is a degree of harmony and veracity in the ancient manuscripts that I genuinely don't think that 90% of Universalists ever really think through and appreciate for just a minute.
The miracle isn't just in how few and far between minor variations are, but in the fact that throughout the last 20 centuries we've not had huge religious wars over the inclusion of the book of Enoch or the general Epistle of Barnabas, or Clement of Rome's 1st epistle, or the odes of Solomon, etc. Some have wanted to toss 2nd and 3rd John, Revelation, James, and one or two other epistles out, but although there have been brutal murders over every other area of faith and practice, I don't think that just tons and tons of blood shed occured over those particular questions about what's included in our New Testament. I could be totally wrong about that, but to my knowledge there's been a surprising degree of agreement on which books of the Bible, even if there have been very violent squabbles over what each of those books actually taught and whether or not the common masses had a right to a copy in their own language.
I don't buy these stories that ancient priests adulterated it as badly as some books have claimed 'cause remember: the Bible wasn't in the hands of the people and the Church at one point never intended for the masses to ever get their hands on it. It was considered TOP SECRET; CLASSIFIED, etc. And because the Church was sooo early divided between the Eastern and Western Orthodox, how would you have gotten those two earliest denominations to have agreed upon how to adulterate it? There's a lot of questions like that that I've never seen conspiracy theorists and historical revisionists successfully deal with.
