“Contradictions” in the Bible

The inerrancy of Scripture is a powerful doctrine. What could be more reassuring than knowing that you have a 100% reliable guide to attaining a blissfully happy eternity? It is also one of the most attacked doctrines of Christianity. This seems odd when you think about it, given how much time we devote to securing our own happiness and the amount of ink and money we spend on other books telling us how to achieve it. Of course, the Bible also says that the means of attaining that happiness are impossible for you to achieve on your own and that if you don’t, you will inherit an eternity of misery. Naturally, that’s the part people don’t want to be true.

One of the most common methods of attack is to find some sort of contradiction in the Bible. Often this involves a contradiction between the Bible and other nations’ histories of the time. Evidently, the critics believe the boastings of egotistical conqueror-kings are more reliable than the chronicles of historians willing to admit when their heroes commit incest, adultery, and murder. From the materialistic standpoint of the critics, any author who believes that God intervenes in history is automatically less reliable. (Or perhaps I should say, “anyone who believes that the Christian God intervenes in history,” since the historians they rank as more reliable also believed their gods intervened in their histories.)

I should like to devote this post to equipping you for wading through the sea of supposed contradictions within the Bible itself. This is one of the most popular means of criticizing it. That makes sense because, if one Biblical writer says the opposite of another, they can’t both be right and the Bible is ipso facto in error on a point. Q.E.D.! Certainly, the Bible contains enough material to keep them very busy with its variations.

First, let’s specify our terminology. As Dr. R. C. Sproul said, drawing on his philosophy background, “The Law of Noncontradiction maintains that something cannot be A and not A at the same time and in the same way.” So I’ll give you an example of a genuine contradiction. An early historian of the Battle of Minden wrote that General Kingsley fell from his horse when his brigade was for the moment pushed back by fresh troops. Kingsley himself read a copy of this work and wrote in the margin, “Kingsley did not fall from his horse.” So, here are two authors saying something happened and did not happen at the same time in the same way. Unless you can find Scripture doing that, you don’t have it contradicting itself.

Most people find the contradictions in the implication rather than the explication. Here’s an example of what they do. If I tell one friend, “I heard from James that the party will be at 6:00” and another friend that, “I heard from John that the party will be at 6:00,” a Biblical critic will say that I contradicted myself. The implication they read into it is that the second time I said, “I heard from John (and not James).” Makes sense, right? But, in actuality, there’s no logical necessity that one of those statements is false. Who’s to say I didn’t hear it first from James and then later from John?

Josephus tells a story that illustrates the danger of disbelieving the Bible based off of implication and assumption. He says that Zedekiah refused to repent and surrender to Nebuchadnezzar because he rejected the true prophets because he thought they had contradicted themselves. Jeremiah had told him that Nebuchadnezzar would take him into exile in Babylon, but Ezekiel had said he would never see Babylon. Contradictory, right? Well, actually, Nebuchadnezzar captured Zedekiah, had him blinded, and then took him prisoner to Babylon. Both prophets were right. I expect that will be the experience on Judgment Day of everyone who eased their conscience with a “contradiction” in the Bible.

In addition, it really makes no sense to go after the Bible’s “contradictions” with the viciousness its critics use. We’re talking about the most powerful religion in history. It has withstood millennia of persecution from the various superpowers of the day, rising to reshape global culture. Slavery was for millennia the socio-economic basis of Western civilization, but thanks to Christianity, it is now illegal throughout the West. The Bible turns fierce enemies into sincere friends and brings troubled people to peace. Yet, the critics say, the people who made up this religion were so stupid that they couldn’t keep their story straight for two pages!

So here are some ways of interpreting why one part of Scripture says one thing and another part says the “opposite”:

First of all, the Bible is rich in paradox. This happens when two seemingly opposite things are true, but in different ways. This results from the Bible contrasting our natural earthly perspective with our new heavenly perspective. For example, the Bible teaches that we are not saved by works but that we are not saved without works. The simple truth reconciling this is that God justifies us by faith without reference to our works, but on a human level those who have faith must have a new nature that will by necessity delight in doing good works.

You must also allow for everyday things like approximations, exaggerations, figurative language, etc. Sometimes one Bible writer is being more precise than another or emphasizing something more than another because he has a different objective or audience in mind. I Kings gives the circumference of Solomon’s “Sea” in the Temple as 30 cubits when, at 10 cubits in diameter, it would have been 31.4159 cubits. Only a pedant would find such rounding objectionable. We do that sort of thing all the time, and nobody calls us liars for it, so I don’t see why we should refuse the Biblical writers that same latitude.

You must also consider the summary nature of the Bible. Its history covers, starting with dates we can establish with reasonable certainty, as many as 2,200 years between Abraham’s birth and Paul’s captivity in Rome. Naturally some things are going to be telescoped. Therefore, when Kings says a King of Judah was bad and did not remove the high places of idol worship and Chronicles says the opposite, maybe they’re referring to different phases of the king’s reign. Maybe he started doing one thing and later changed his mind. That is not without precedent. Joseph II of Austria is remembered as an emperor who tried to enact sweeping reforms in keeping with the Enlightenment, but, towards the end of his life, when he was a broken, disillusioned man, he repudiated many of his reforms.

Sometimes Matthew and Luke disagree on how many people Jesus healed in a particular story- Luke might say there was one and Matthew that there were two. Neither says, “There was one, and only one.” Instead, one evangelist chooses to be more exact (Matthew was, after all, as my pastor pointed out, an accountant) whereas the other focuses on the one who interacted with Jesus the most.

Summary, I think, is the source of most of the really conspicuous “contradictions” in the Bible. The Passion and Resurrection narratives differ in details from one Gospel to the other, so some think they’re garbled accounts of what actually happened. But, really, why would John have bothered to write his Gospel if he was just going to copy what Mark had written? They all have their different emphases and therefore include different details. What you don’t have is John saying, “Mary Magdalene was the first to see Christ,” and Matthew saying, “Mary Magdalene was not the first to see Christ.” If every Biblical author included all the details that everyone else wrote about his particular story- well, in the first place you’d have a pretty boring, unmanageable tome to sift through, and in the second, you’d have one that didn’t focus well and tell its story in artistically crafted themes.

Critics don’t extend to the Bible the same understanding they grant every other book. Biblical critic Bart Ehrman lost his faith by thinking Jesus said in Mark 2:26 that David ate the showbread during the term of Abiathar as High Priest, which isn’t true since his father Ahimelech was High Priest at the time. Either the “epi” should be translated, “in the story of Abiathar the High Priest,” or Jesus was referring to the fact that this happened during the life of Abiathar, who became High Priest, which is also true. It’s like the book Napoleon in Egypt, where the author, Paul Strathern, referred to his subject as “Napoleon” after admitting that in 1798, when he invaded Egypt, he was still known as General Bonaparte. He only became Emperor “Napoleon” in 1804. Looking back, though, we refer to him as Napoleon, and only a pedant is going to insist on a book entitled General Bonaparte in Egypt.

Lastly, the fall-back position is that there was an error in the scribal transmission. With all the textual variations in the Bible, they can’t all go back to the original reading. Sometimes these are downright obvious. Yes, II Samuel 21 says in the Hebrew manuscripts that Jaare-Oregim slew Goliath the Gittite after I Samuel 17 made a whole chapter out of David slaying him, but who really thinks a historian capable of writing an epic story on the level of the Book of Samuel would forget that his hero David played the pivotal part in what is the best-known part of the work? Homer nodded, yes, but never on anything that big. Of course the author of Samuel originally wrote, “slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite,” like Chronicles! Some scribe just messed up and was copied by others. Inerrancy doesn’t claim that every manuscript we possess is 100% accurate. It claims that the originals are completely trustworthy, so when you have the original wording, you have the words of God.

The Bible nowhere says (in the most likely original readings) something along the lines of, “Joab fell from his chariot at the Battle of Rabbah,” and then elsewhere, “Joab did not fall from his chariot at the Battle of Rabbah.” If we think it is contradicting itself, we’re not considering the subtle nuances one would expect in a work written by dozens of authors over the course of at least thirteen centuries. A measure of variation is the mark of one author following his own style and emphases, not an indication that one of two authors is necessarily mistaken. Don’t be like Zedekiah.