Contradictions are rife in the Christian bible. Here at The Skeptical Zone we have recently discussed those surrounding how Saul died. We’ve also noted the two conflicting accounts of Judas’ death and what he did with the thirty pieces of silver. There are dozens more.
The Skeptics’ Annotated Bible and The Thinking Atheist are two of several excellent resources on biblical contradictions and absurdities. The sheer volume of contradictions, though, is best demonstrated visually as is done at BibViz:
The creators of this site started with a cross-index of topics in the bible and pulled out those that contradict each other. You can click on the links to get more detail. As a bonus, the site includes references to the sections in the bible that contain Scientific Absurdities & Historical Inaccuracies, Cruelty & Violence, Misogyny, Violence & Discrimination Against Women, and Discrimination Against Homosexuals.
Obviously most Christians aren’t foolish enough to claim their bible is inerrant. Those that do, in the words of Desi Arnaz, have “got some ‘splainin’ to do.”
Samuel Butler details a bunch of doozies from the various New Testament Gospels involving “the resurrection” in his wonderful satire The Fair Haven.
Believe it or not, Christian apologists have constructed an explanation for the conflicting accounts of the death of Saul, as well as a harmonization between Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of the death of Judas. J. P. Holding offers a somewhat more plausible explanation for the discrepancy, in my opinion.
Pointing to alleged discrepancies in the Bible won’t do much damage to the faith of traditional Christians. Unbelievers would do better to focus their attacks on two key areas: the historicity of key salvation events narrated in the Bible (such as the Exodus) and the moral code of the Old Testament. Even a Catholic philosopher such as Dr. Edward Feser finds it disquieting that the Bible appears to support torture and slavery, for instance.
On the other hand, Catholic apologist Bishop Robert Barron says we’re all reading the Bible the wrong way: here, here and here (Violence in the Bible). Thoughts?
Vincent,
It ought to do plenty of damage to the notion of Biblical inerrancy, but sadly it doesn’t. Religion can make people believe very stupid things, and it tends to immunize them against disconfirming evidence.
To a sensible person, the contradictions just confirm what was already apparent. Like other sacred scriptures, the Bible is a collection of imperfect books written by imperfect people.
Hi keiths,
There are dozens of Christian Websites dealing with alleged Bible contradictions. Here are just a few:
Alleged Bible “Contradictions” & “Difficulties” (Resources)
Solutions to Bible “Errors” (listed book by book)
Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions by Jim W. Wallace (a former homicide detective and ex-atheist turned pastor)
I guess the larger question is: when presented when a difficulty relating to a passage in the Bible and an alleged resolution of that difficulty, under what circumstances should one reject the alleged resolution as being too strained and unworthy of credence? It’s very hard to know, when one is dealing with a supernatural Being (the Creator of the cosmos), Who is able to work miracles. However, I’d say that one should reject the alleged resolution if it invokes lots of further miracles which are nowhere recorded in the Bible (e.g. Where did all the latent heat of vaporization go after the flood waters receded? Answer: God took it all away), or if accepting it is cognitively self-defeating, insofar as it would imply that reliable knowledge of the world is impossible (e.g. What about the light we see from stars millions of light years away? Answer: God could have made the light without making the stars.)
Does anyone else have any other conditions?
Well you could treat it like any other religious text.
You know, to be fair and unbiased.
Glen Davidson
vjtorley,
Hi VJ. I’d be interested on your thoughts on this: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/questions-for-christians-and-other-theists-part-4-divine-communication/
Hi RichardHughes,
I had a look at your post. Just a few quick thoughts:
1. As I explained in a recent post, I reject conventional Christian views on God’s omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, so that means I’d have to question premise 2 of your scenario. I also hold that God does not know “before making us” what we will choose to do, and how we will interpret (or misinterpret) His instructions. His knowledge is (at least logically, if not temporally) retrospective.
2. Premise 4 is also problematic, as it assumes that our cognitive faculties are unimpaired by sin. Rules and revelations from God that might have been as clear as the noon-day Sun to an unfallen race of human beings might only serve to generate confusion in a fallen human race. What’s worse, they might be radically misunderstood and/or misapplied.
3. Revelation is not the same as dictation from On High. God’s utterances are always filtered through our preconceptions, which tend to color them.
That’s all for now.
The biible has no contradictions. Its from Gods inspiration and is perfect. this left group is just pretending it contradicts itself but really they don’t like ideas from god on women, homosexuality etc etc.
Its thier ideas that are wrong or evil.
If the bible was written by people, not God, all those years ago, by so many, it would be crammed full of errors and these constantly proclaimed. in fact the great silence or poverty of complaints is a raw smack down of how it is gods word and perfect.
cuves of error/truth are in play here.
Byers:
Um, Robert? It is.
Vincent, in response to Rich’s OP:
But he knows what we’re thinking now, which means he knows how the Bible has been misinterpreted. Why doesn’t he correct the misinterpretations, some of which involve issues that are fundamental to the faith?
(Obvious answer: he’s not there. He doesn’t exist.)
Second, why use a book at all if you’re God? Why not beam your message, without error, into people’s minds? God doesn’t seem to care very much if his word is misinterpreted.
(Obvious answer: There is no God to beam messages into our minds. Humans write books, so the Bible is a book.)
God knows we are fallen. Why doesn’t he adjust the message accordingly? Do you think he’s too weak to get his message across to us, or not bright enough?
(Obvious answer: There is no God available to adjust the message. We’re stuck with the Bible as it is, anachronisms, warts, contradictions, moral monstrosities and all.)
Why? Why is the wise, powerful and benevolent creator of the universe so bad at communicating and unable to adjust his message when it isn’t getting through as planned?
I have found that when it comes to discussing the subject of contradictions in the bible, christians will often state there are no contradictions because they have an explanation for how the contradiction got there.
That seems to me quite incorrect. It doesn’t matter how there came to be a contradiction in the bible (like, a scribe made a copying error), the fact is that due to that copyist error the bible now does contain a contradiction.
This throws a pretty significant monkey wrench in the works if you’re of the view that the bible is the infallible, divinely inspired word of God having passed down unaltered (under some sort of divine protection against “decay”) from it’s originaly sources.
None of that is surprising. Catholics have always been notoriously anti-Bible-thumping. That’s a “low church” thing. The Catholic doctrine doesn’t involve its sheep reading the Bible for themselves. The Pope will tell you what’s up.
Edward R. Smith
It comes down to the skill of the translator to use modern language to retain the meaning of ancient texts. But the modern ear can never fully experience the feelings of the ancient listeners to whom the Bible stories were related. Unlike us, the masses in those times could not read these texts for themselves, they had to rely on their elders to relay the stories. And the elders who passed on these stories were high initiates who put down what they had experienced in a form that conveyed to their people at least some of the meaning. You can be sure that they did not pass on all of their experiences, but only those which they deemed suitable to be given out.
But today our egos have matured to the point where all of us who have been suitably educated have the opportunity with good faith to take these teachings, to understand the messages they are telling us, to use them for further study and to benefit from them.
Galatians 3:
All of the explanations are ad hoc and based on the assumption that the bible is inerrant. The apologists are unable to question their commitment to that position so they’re willing to accept literally anything that allows them to keep their faith, no matter how ridiculous or irrational.
A plain reading of the text clearly shows dozens if not hundreds of contradictions.
I would add: When the putative explanation adds material not in the text and ignores the material actually in the text. Those that address Judas’ death, what Judas did with the thirty pieces of silver, Saul’s death, and the different order of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 all fall into this category, as do many others.
The contradictions in the bible are obvious to anyone who reads it objectively. It is only fundamentalists who insist on its inerrancy who are psychologically unable to see them. It always comes down to special pleading that the bible should be treated differently from any other book.
Well, aside from the dozens documented in the resources above, sure.
Hi Patrick,
The problem I have with your proposal is that it assumes the Bible was written for a low-context society, where everything is spelt out clearly. In a high-context society, where most of what is understood is left unsaid, there is no “plain meaning,” and it will always be necessary to add material which is not explicitly stated in the text, in order to fully explicate its meaning. What’s more, such additions will necessarily sound ad hoc to people living outside that society.
Semitic culture was high-context, and the New Testament was also written in a high-context society: http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/papers/ets/2001/Thompson/Thompson.pdf
The context only matters if the text is vague. The contradictions I’ve pointed out so far are not. There are clearly two stories of how Judas died. The verses describing Saul’s death are equally at odds with each other. The order of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 is simply not the same. What Judas did with the thirty pieces of silver is not consistent from one verse to the other. There are dozens more just as clearly contradictory.
Only faith can blind people to the clear meaning of the words.
Vincent,
That raises an obvious question: Why doesn’t God provide a Bible for low-context societies? It appears that he doesn’t care whether his message gets across to people in those societies. If God doesn’t care about his message, why should we?
(Obvious answer: God doesn’t exist. The Bible was written by people in “high-context societies” for other people in those same societies. God had nothing to do with it, and he is unavailable to do any editing for the benefit of “low-context societies”.)
The larger question for Christians:
Why, other than wishful thinking, do you credit the Bible as God’s word? It doesn’t fit the bill.
Do you have any empirical support for this claim?
I take it you’ve considered all other possible causes of such blindness before making this (empirical) generalization? Would you mind indicating what psych studies you’ve consulted?
I assume many believers will take this to be a contradiction in terms. For them, God just is whoever is “responsible” for the Bible (whatever that means, exactly). They don’t take “God” to have some other meaning that would allow this connection to be synthetic/contingent.
walto,
It’s true that for many fundagelicals, the issue of divine authorship never arises. Take FMM, for example. In the pseudo-profound bullshit thread, his reasoning went something like this:
The following exchange highlights the problem with that reasoning:
fifth:
keiths:
Vincent,
As Glen suggests, why not treat the Bible as you would any other purported sacred scriptures?
Your approach is backward. You begin by assuming that the Bible is the word of God. Then you ask, at what point do the rationalizations become too strained to maintain that assumption?
But why assume a divine origin in the first place? Far more sensible to treat the Bible like every other book on earth. Assume that they all have a purely human origin, and then you can ask yourself, regarding each book: Does this book have the qualities we’d expect if its authorship were divine, not human? Does it deserve to be elevated to the status of “God’s word”?
The Bible doesn’t qualify.
I don’t think the Bible needs to be inerrant to be reliable. Or even the “word of God.” In some ways, the fact that it was written by different people with differing perspectives, makes it more powerful than ascribing “magical powers” to the text. As Gary Habermas notes, when one looks the essence of the narrative, say regarding the death and resurrection of Jesus, the amazing thing is that they are so similar. Witnesses and stories always have minor points of disagreement. If all the accounts and theologies were identical, that is when I would get suspicious of “tampering” with the witnesses.
Name your top three!!
Robert,
I don’t have a “top three”, any more than I have a set of “top three reasons why Green Eggs and Ham isn’t the word of God.”
The Seuss book doesn’t fit the bill, and neither does the Bible.
Jackson Knepp:
No, but it does need to be reliable in order to be reliable.
The Bible isn’t reliable. See the OP.
Vincent,
Even if those far-fetched explanations were actually plausible, they would leave a crucial question unanswered: Why didn’t God do a better job of communicating?
Imagine you’re the powerful and wise Creator of the universe. You’re divinely inspiring the authors of Matthew and Acts to write their accounts. Would it strike you as a good idea to have one of your authors describe the death of Judas this way…
…and to have your other author describe it this way?
Even the dimmest human editor would know that this would create the appearance of a contradiction. Do you really think that God was too stupid to realize that?
And if he did realize it, then why didn’t he do better? He could have easily added a few words to harmonize the two accounts. Why did he refuse? Does he want us to think that the Bible isn’t his word?
(Obvious answer: God doesn’t exist. The two accounts were written by two humans without divine assistance, and so it’s no surprise that they’re contradictory.)
The synoptic gospels are not independent accounts. Matthew and Luke build on Mark. The tales grow in the telling, as with any myth.
if you don’t have top three then it suggests you have none which is the point I made there was none. Its up to you to provide evidence there is some to deny my claim there is none.
Considering it was made by mere humans long ago, dealing with so much of human affairs,. THERE must be chunks of error!!
Otherwise it would be uniquely error free and better then anything written today.
Geography, history, language, customs, consistency , SOMETHING must of been messed up!!
Jesus, Robert.
Didn’t you read the OP?
Hi keiths,
The illicit assumption underlying all these questions is that Christians have nothing but the Bible to guide them. This assumption would strike Catholics, Orthodox Christians and a good many Anglicans (i.e. about 70% of the world’s Christians) as absurd, since it ignores the role of the Church and of its living tradition. If there is a Church that can interpret the Bible and harmonize its obvious apparent discrepancies, what’s the problem? That being the case, what a person judging between different religions should do is not to compare their sacred books, but to compare their adherents’ expositions of these books, and assess their relative plausibility.
Vincent,
Invoking the church doesn’t help. It just means that the contradictions are a problem for the church as well as for the hoi polloi.
My objection still stands:
Another reason your rationalization doesn’t make sense: people don’t have equal access to the resources of the church. What does God have against Mongolians? Doesn’t he care whether they get the message?
Hi keiths,
The point of my invoking the Church was that an outsider has someone whom he/she can ask: “What does this passage in your holy book mean?” Christians who believe in an apostolic Church also believe it is guided by God in its binding decisions, so it would be possible for such a Church to make a ruling on the meaning of a Scriptural passage. What the outsider then needs to assess is the plausibility of the Church’s claims to be (a) apostolic and (b) divinely guided.
Contradictory accounts are not the sort of thing one would expect God to include in His holy book, but before one can deem two accounts to be contradictory, one needs to be sure that both accounts are intended to be taken literally – which is something only the Church (which has inherited this book down through the ages) can decide.
As for Mongolians: the problem is the same as for Stone Age human beings. I’m sure God has His own way of saving them, if they sought the truth with a sincere heart and lived accordingly.
Contradictions in the Christian Bible
This is such a powerful point…isn’t it?
Is this the most powerful and definite point against Christianity? Is it some kind of revenge?
Is your expectation that Christians would fire back?
Or, should they possibly list the long list of contradictions in the theory of evolution, materialist’s lack of thinking or your lack of…your decide..
I’m going to ask you this: What if the book that you think or were brained washed to believe is wrong, would contain information thousands years ahead scientists have discovered to be true…
What would you do?
Off topic;
How long does it take to approve this post since March 27?
Well, should scientists be legally liable for deceiving the public and manipulating the evidence to support their OWN brliefs based on untrue claims and unsupported by scientific evidence?
“Well, should scientists be legally liable for deceiving the public and manipulating the evidence to support their OWN brliefs based on untrue claims and unsupported by scientific evidence”?
You wanted the freedom, you defend it… and I’m just getting warmed up.. you will have to ban me eventually because your posted philosophy will not be able to handle what I would like to present…in the future..
Vincent,
You’re missing my point.
Let’s assume arguendo that there are no contradictions in the Bible. Any contradictions are stipulated to be only apparent, not genuine. Even then, you still have a problem.
Why would a wise and powerful God, the creator of the universe, create the appearance of a contradiction when it could easily be avoided? Is he too stupid to recognize the problem? Too stupid to fix it?
You are invoking a special-needs God, too dim to see what is completely obvious to a human: If you want your word to be trusted, don’t create contradictions in it, whether real or apparent.
J-Mac,
You mentioned at one point that you are a “mental health worker”.
Are you sure “worker” is the word you were looking for?
Vincent,
If it’s good enough for Stone Age people and the Mongolians, it should be good enough for everyone. Why bother with the Bible and Christian beliefs at all? God could just save everyone Mongolian-style.
The idea that the Bible is the word of God runs into problem after problem.
The idea that the Bible isn’t the word of God, and that the Christian God doesn’t exist, avoids these problems and fits the evidence perfectly.
Why settle for a strained, implausible, and clunky explanation when a much better one is available?
Hint: Religion makes people believe dumb things for bad reasons.
I applaud his work on his mental health, if indeed that is what he is doing.
The need is there.
Glen Davidson
keiths,
You ask:
You’re making an assumption here: namely, that God wrote (or dictated, or created) the Bible, word for word. Some Christians believe that. Most don’t. Inspiration is not the same as verbal dictation. God may not have intended the apparent discrepancies in Scripture. God works through human beings, but He does not make them write what He wants them to write. As far as the letter of the text goes, He guides rather than steers.
Your argument against Biblical inspiration would be fatal, I think, to the Quran, because Muslims really do believe that their book came from On High.
Look, I’m well aware of the difficulties you’re raising. I can fully sympathize with your argument that no Deity worthy of the name would author (directly or indirectly) a book so full of holes and potential misunderstandings as the Bible. Don’t think I don’t have my doubts, too. All I’ll say is this.
First, if you had a good reason for believing in the central miracles of Judaism and/or Christianity, then that alone would be a good enough reason for becoming a Jew or Christian, regardless of whether you believed the Bible was inspired and/or inerrant in its entirety. C.S. Lewis didn’t believe in Biblical inerrancy, but he believed in the Resurrection – which is why he could call himself a Christian.
Second, while the “minimal Christian” option is an attractive one, there is a steady chain of creditworthy miraculous claims within those strands of Christianity which endorse Biblical inspiration & inerrancy. (Please refer to my writings on St. Joseph of Cupertino.) For some people, that kind of evidence, combined with the positive transformations in the world wrought by the strands of Christianity I’ve described, might serve to counterbalance the evidence against inspiration from the apparent discrepancies within the text. (And yes, I can well imagine that other people might weigh the evidence differently.)
Third, the question of whether the Bible is in fact inspired is quite distinct from whether God would expect an open-minded seeker after truth to believe that it is. It’s perfectly possible that the answer to the first question is “yes,” while the answer to the second is “no.” Faith is a gift, not a demand.
Vincent,
No, not at all.
I’m just pointing out that if God could prevent errors in the scriptures without dictating them word for word, then he could also prevent the appearance of contradictions in the same way.
Why didn’t he?
(Obvious answer: He doesn’t exist.)
Vincent,
I would just encourage you to fully consider those doubts. They’re well-founded.
I can see that the truth matters to you and that you want your beliefs to be plausible, rational and consistent with the evidence. That’s why you rejected Douglas Axe’s argument after previously accepting it. It’s also why you rejected the conventional understanding of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
I can only encourage you to keep it up and apply the same standards to all of your beliefs, religious and otherwise. Don’t settle for Bishop-Barron-style rationalizations. These questions are too important for that.
As you were told the last time you wanted a post published, you need to simply ask in Moderation Issues. The admins monitor that thread closely and respond as soon as we can.
I published your post just now.
I have no idea what you’re on about here. The very small list of bannable offense is listed on the Rules page. Only two people have been banned from this site, one for posting a NSFW image and the other for refusing to abide by the rule against doxxing. No one gets banned for content not listed explicitly in the rules.
ETA: I’m off to my niece’s wedding and won’t be available to approve new posts for a couple of days.
Vincent,
I think many Christians cling to the notion of Biblical inerrancy because they anticipate the can of worms that will open up once they abandon it. When you abandon inerrancy, the old “God said it; I believe it; that settles it” attitude won’t fly any more. You become responsible for deciding which verses are true or false — or for deciding whose judgment to trust, if not your own. And since some of the most important Christian doctrines are also the most outlandish, it becomes very hard to justify them.
Why do you suppose that God never performs that sort of miracle any more? I’ll spare you my answer; I’m sure you already know what it is.
But if salvation requires faith, then we’d expect a benevolent God to grant that gift to open-minded seekers. Otherwise he’s effectively punishing them for being open-minded and discerning.
I was happy as a Christian and had no intention to apostasize. It was my open-mindedness and my desire for truth that led me (reluctantly) away from the faith, not any rebelliousness.
I prayed for guidance. I asked God to help me see the truth of the Christian faith, if it really was in fact true. But I made it clear that if I were to remain a Christian. I needed to be able to do so honestly and because the evidence was persuasive, not because I feared for my soul and wanted to err on the side of safety.
The evidence was not forthcoming. Like so many prayers, that one went unanswered. God let me down. (Nonexistent Gods have an unfortunate tendency to do that.) He seems to be letting you down, too.
Some of my favorite Bible not so long ago thought to be contradictions before science confirmed them to be true are:
Izaiah 40:22
“22 It is He (God) who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.”
This one Bible verse alone thought to be a contradiction to scientific knowledge for many millenniums turned out to be true;
1. It makes powerful predictions; that the earth is circular or spherical as the ancient word used can describe both.
2. It also states that the universe is expanding; … God is stretching (continues motions) the heavens like a curtain…”
How did the Bible writer know so many thousands years in advance what scientists have recently discovered to be true?
Could it be because 2 Timothy 3:16 says:
16“All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.”
That’s a shame that science ignored so many bible predictions that turned out to be true…and there are many, many more…
Please, J-Mac, give us some of your other beauts!